Jean Nouvel’s Copenhagen Concert Hall opens

20 January, 2009

The 5,000sq m venue features four separate musical spaces designed for differing numbers of guests and musicians.

A bright blue exterior of translucent fabric covers the building, and at night a montage of video images is projected onto the surface.

The long awaited concert hall, which began construction in 2002 and ran substantially over budget, has been well received so far by critics, with the New York Times calling it a “beautifully resilient emotional sanctuary… a little corner of utopia in a world where walls are collapsing.”

Credit: Jorgen Hans Maltesen

Commenting on the building, Nouvel said: “Building in a new neighbourhood is a risk. In an uncertain future, our only choice is to respond using the positive force of uncertainty: mystery… mystery that is never far from seduction and thus attraction.”

He added that it “will be a volume leaving you guessing at [about] its interiority, a mysterious parallelepiped changing [at] night and [in] daylight.

“At night, the volume becomes a place of images, of colours, of lights, expressions of an intense interior life.”