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Photo: Alexander Paul Brandes. Video courtesy Berlin Philharmoniker.
Symphony in Concrete
Hans Scharoun’s Philharmonie
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Hans Scharoun (1893-1972) was born in Bremen, Germany and studied at Berlin’s Technical University (TU). His studies were interrupted in 1914, when he volunteered to fight in World War One. After the war he worked for Paul Kruchen in Breslau and designed the first exhibition of the expressionist group Die Brücke in East Prussia.
From 1925-32 he was a Professor for Architecture at the Breslau Academy for Arts and Crafts. He was also a member of Bruno Taut’s expressionist architects group the Glass Chain and later the Der Ring architectural collective. In the late 1920s, Scharoun was responsible for the development of the Siemensstadt housing estate in Berlin. Inspired by Hugo Haring’s theory of new building, he departed from rationalism and began to focus on the organisation of social living space and the flexible allocation of space and function.
He remained in Germany during the Nazi era and took up a professorship at the TU where he had studied in 1946. After the war he completed numerous buildings, the most notable of which was the Berlin Philharmonie. The German embassy in Brasilia was his only building outside Germany. His partner Edgar Wiesnewski took over the practice after his death and oversaw the completion of his later buildings, including the Deutsche Schiffartsmuseum (Maritime Museum), the theatre in Wolfsburg and the Staatsbibliothek (State Library) in Berlin.
Berlin’s Philharmonie, built between 1960 and 1963, is one of the most renowned concert halls in the world. Designed by Hans Scharoun, it is part of the Kulturforum, a complex of buildings which also includes his Staatsbibliothek (State Library) and Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie. While considered a masterpiece of expressionist modernism, it is as free from power play, pomp and ostentation as a building of this size can get. The architect, a product of the Bauhaus generation, believed passionately in a democratic architecture for the community, developing the concept of a city landscape, which should grow from the bottom up, arising from the needs of the community. This principle of “organic building” as Scharoun called it, found favour in the period of reappraisal post-war, and the resulting commissions mean Scharoun is now considered one of the defining German architects of the twentieth century.
His design for the Berlin Philharmonie was based upon a simple but revolutionary premise: that the music should be at the centre. The rest of the building grew around it, from the inside out. The 2,442 seats of the main hall are arranged in a complex pattern of raked terraces all around the podium in what has become known as a “vineyard” formation. The combination of these terraces and the prominent diffusion reflector surfaces in wood, stone and fibreglass aid the acoustics, giving the impression of being inside some vast, earth-toned, 3D Cézanne landscape. The foyer wraps around the hall like a mould or negative of the space it encompasses. It is a maze of multilevel decks, bridges, steps, and parapets with round porthole-shapes in Scharoun’s trademark nautical style. Not what one would call a beautiful building to look at, it is visually too complex – the apparent jumble of planes and angles are hard work on the eye. But sit inside during a concert and the architecture springs into vibrant life as it fulfils its purpose: the unification of space, music and people. In this respect, the Philharmonie has to be one of the most absolute public buildings ever built. I (sl)
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