An Architectural Ode to Joy in Hamburg

There is little that that the Second Avenue subway line in New York and the new concert hall Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg have in common. Except that both projects were recently completed after decades of haggling and delay, both are more expensive than anything comparable has ever been before and in both cases it is a miracle that they got done at all.

The philharmonic hall sits in Hafen City, a large scale
Hamburg urban renewal area converting industrial port areas
into a new mixed use district of Hamburg.
The lights spell: "Fertig"- Finished 

Both appear to be vestiges of a time when the thought of a really large project was still possible. So much courage, so much aspiration and so much civic pride and optimism; today it is a sacrilege.  Of course, the concert hall sits high up far above ground, perched slightly frivolously on an utilitarian blocky tobacco warehouse, and the subway is only utilitarian, stretching, well, below ground, mostly in the dark.

In their completion year both seem implausible, like mirages from a long gone past, whether from the American or the German perspective. Too fractured the society in both countries, too little agreement on how society should express itself, making a repeat of something similar unlikely in either place. That is not to say that the two projects themselves were not products of strife, quarrel and and incompetence, just as the Sidney Opera and many other world famous projects that struggled through extended gestation periods and a terrible labor, to then become a prodigy of their genre.

In fact, the concert hall in Hamburg had brought an entire country to the edge of despair. It was the straw that was close to breaking the camel's back, the camel being the pride of an engineering nation that can make things run with precision and on time. "Are we finally incapable of designing, constructing and completing any large project at all?" writers all over the country were grousing in editorials. They put the concert hall in line with other construction debacles such as the almost completed airport in Berlin that has been sitting for years empty without passengers, waiting for the green light from fire and safety officials that appears elusive to this day, or the reconfigured Stuttgart train station, that divided an entire city into friends and foes of the undertaking, even before the first old tree had to be felled for it, and that has since been riddled by delays, cost overruns and technical difficulties casting doubt on its basic functionality.

shiny and slightly frivolous, the hidden concert hall wrapped by a hotel
and apartments sitting on a 90' plinth of warehouse

On both sides of the Atlantic, and for different reasons, a general consensus emerged that the time of gigantic gestures is over, that we can be glad if we can manage and maintain what we have. Especially in the US, large, expensive and symbolic expressions of architecture are considered inappropriate, a waste of money and elitist. The architect Calatrava reaped much more scorn than praise with his $4.5 billion World Trade Center transit station extravaganza, even though its symbolic phoenix from the ashes certainly has merit.

But then the concert hall in Hamburg actually got completed and opened this week in the middle of winter in grey Hamburg, and a magic transformation took place. Filled with light, people and music (yes the opening concert lasting over more than three hours included also Beethovens Symphony #9, commonly known as "the Ode to Joy"), the structure is no longer a symbol of failure but one of beauty, surprise elegance and courage. The project became proof that a grand gesture can work, that complicated details can be executed and that architecture can change the image not only of a city but possibly a whole country.

The eyes and ears of the world focused for a few days on this German port city, not previously known for high culture. The opening concert, simulcast via Google 360 around the world, lifted the mood in a spectacular way, which is especially surprising in a city that is probably more pragmatic and English than anything else in Germany. This makes it pretty ironic when the Guardian's Martin Kettle writes under the headline "Why Germany is proud of the Elbphilharmonie – and why Britain should care about that":

The concert hall floating inside of the cocoon 

I’m not saying that I wish we in the UK could be like Germany, though I certainly think we would be better off, in all sorts of ways, if we were a bit more like Europe’s most thriving nation. But it is indisputable that Britain remains far more uncomfortable with investing in the arts than most other developed nations. This reflects many different things — social class divisions most of all, education, politics and our attitude to public goods, too. More than anything, though, it reflects the lack of a shared culture, a confidence that we can celebrate, as a people and as a nation, a great building, great music or even, more generally, a cultural patrimony that makes us proud to be who we are without having to apologise for it.

Wow! He assumes a lot for the good people of Hamburg who, like the British, come from a merchant culture that cares more about  transactions and trade than statements of art and culture, and prefers understatement over showiness. But it isn't impossible that the concert hall can change the entire century-old brand of Hamburg as the home of the Hanse (Hanseatic League).

Architect Jacques Herzog (Photo: DER SPIEGEL)

The opening of the concert hall made people forget that construction started back in 2007, that it was originally supposed to be finished in 2010,and that the cost was originally given as 77 million Euros but by the time the hall finally opened in 2017 the  cost was 789 million Euros ($835 million). It is now only a footnote of history that the City of Hamburg jumped headlong into the project before construction documents were completed and pushed a private investor foolishly aside, and that there was incredible program creep (in hanseatic prudence the project includes an enclosed public plaza for the people but also money generating  luxury apartments and a hotel for the financial aristocracy). Forgotten now is that the the project delivery mechanism had to be completely restructured, that it may have cost one mayor his job (he resigned) and that the whole project looked for some time as if it would end as a construction ruin.

Through all of this the Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron kept their design promise alive, even when it looked like the firm would be sued and possibly killed by the mammoth project and its many delivery flaws and dead ends. A design that is as daring as costly in its many previously untried details and innovations, such as gigantic curved glass panels that need to keep out the sound of passing ship-horns and withstand gale force winds at the waters that lead to the stormy North Sea (some are shaped like tuning forks, weigh two metric tons and are unique worldwide). Or the dimpled white ceiling designed by the acoustics expert Yasuhisa Toyota which consists of 10,000 different panels. Or the convex escalator. Or the fact that the entire main concert hall (there are also two smaller ones) is invisibly embedded in those other uses and separated from the rest of the structure as an internal shell resting on giant dampers. The idea of new construction atop adaptive re-use creating tension between the brick block of the warehouse and the curvy lightness above was a strike of architectural creativity that reaches up to 330 feet high. The execution required precision of the the kind small companies like Joseph Gartner, located in the backwaters of rural Germany, are famous for.

330' high: Like the biggest ship in the harbor (Photo Maxim Schulz, DIE ZEIT)

Jacques Herzog told the Guardian saying:

“The whole thing is really so unlikely. It almost happened by chance, from this individual, whose idea then gained a kind of bottom-up momentum. You could not win with such a thing in a design competition. And perhaps we are the last generation of ‘author’ style architects to have such a chance.”

Second Avenue subway: Open after nearly 100 years in the making

Once in a while that kind of architecture can do the impossible and make an entire country smile in January, a country reeling from a violent attack on one of its cherished Christmas markets just a month earlier, and mired in heated arguments about the right answer to the big human refugee crisis. For a day or two all those heaping derision on architects and their "monuments", and on politicians who can't anything done and help inflate cost beyond the pale by their alleged incompetence, were silent, along with all the cynics who think the best times are in the past, and all the social critics who think subsidized official art and culture is just for the elites, the finger-pointers and the naysayers, by the ultimate success on the Elbe: The project was completed, worked well and found applause around the world.

The Guardian's envy is even more curious if one considers that the same architects had achieved a quite comparable miracle once before, in no other place than London. The project: The Tate Modern.

Meanwhile in New York the Second Avenue Subway, which broke ground for the first time in 1972 and then for real in 2007, opened up with a party this New Year's Eve.  Cost: $4.6 billion for three stations. But the big party still took place on Times Square as usual, and no US President was at hand to cut the ribbon for the subway. New York is used to big projects, and has currently its hands full with managing the annoyances around Trump Tower.

Compared to the scale of New York's projects, the Philharmonie in Hamburg is an outright bargain. That's the way the people of Hamburg like it.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA

The Guardian, architectural review
When Algorithms Design a Concert Hall. Wired Magazine
Picture Gallery in ArchDaily
NYT Architectural Review
Facade description (German)

NYT, The Second Avenue Subway

A note about Gartner, the manufacturer of the glass facades: I worked extensively with Gartner during my time as an architect in Germany. The company was still family owned at the time and was known to provide excellent technical consulting to architects even long before they could know that they would get the job. The Suebian pride of doing things right was what drove the company then. Their products were expensive but then and now, their engineers were eager to solve just about any problem that was presented to them. Working with them and similar like-minded consultants and manufacturers was essential for my understanding what architecture can do. It took some time to find out who had done the facade for the Philharmonie in Hamburg, when I finally did, I wasn't surprised at all, it was Gartner. That the company was sold to a worldwide conglomerate in 2001 is kind of disappointing.

But even today Gartner with its 1,300 employees in Germany and in the UK, Switzerland, USA, Russian Federation and Hong Kong. as a part of Permasteelisa Group, the largest international curtain wall manufacturer worldwide, Gartner itself is still kind of small and with its headquarter in Gundelfingen its key people are probably still of the type I remember from 35 years ago.
KP

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