Casa da Música, Porto

Interesting facts

The design began as Y2K, an unbuilt private house of about 200 square metres for a Rotterdam family, which Koolhaas scaled up into the competition entry.

Grown from that small house, the finished building contains almost 38,000 square metres of floor space.

The main hall is one of very few concert auditoriums anywhere whose two end walls are made entirely of glass.

The acoustics were designed by the Dutch acoustician Renz van Luxemburg, with adjustable devices that let the hall be tuned for different music.

Casa da Música received the RIBA European Award from the Royal Institute of British Architects in 2007.

The OMA team was led by Rem Koolhaas together with the Dutch architect Ellen van Loon.

The smaller Sala 2 holds about 270 seated listeners or roughly 650 standing, and its walls are perforated plywood painted red.

Five resident ensembles are based in the house, ranging from a symphony orchestra and a baroque orchestra to a children's choir.

The project was announced in September 1998, and its site at the Rotunda da Boavista was only fixed in March 1999.

In 2007 the house launched Digitópia, a platform for digital music-making that develops open-source software and experimental instruments.

Why it is worth it

In the middle of a broad plaza of pale stone on Porto's Avenida da Boavista sits a white, faceted block that looks as if it has been chipped from a single crystal, or, as many have put it, like the hull of a ship left stranded at low tide. Casa da Música, the city's concert house by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and his Office for Metropolitan Architecture, opened in 2005 and has been counted ever since among the most remarkable concert halls of its era.

The building was commissioned for Porto's year as European Capital of Culture in 2001 and was the first in Portugal conceived from the start purely for music. Koolhaas won the international competition in 1999 and the hall rose on the site of an old tram depot at the Rotunda da Boavista, the city's circular ceremonial square. Construction ran well past the festival year and cost about 100 million euros; the doors opened on 14 April 2005 with concerts by the Portuguese band Clã and Lou Reed, followed the next day by the official inauguration with the national orchestra. Arup engineered the structure, an asymmetrical nine-storey polyhedron in white concrete, while the designer Petra Blaisse of Inside Outside created the interior textiles and surfaces.

Inside, the main auditorium, Sala Suggia, named after the Porto-born cellist Guilhermina Suggia, is a classic shoebox seating about 1,300, but its two ends are walls of corrugated glass, so concerts are played in daylight with views out over the city. Its plywood walls carry a huge gold-leaf woodgrain pattern. The smaller Sala 2 has a flat floor and gilded chairs, and the VIP room is lined with azulejo tiles, a nod to Portugal's tradition of glazed tilework. The house is home to the Porto Symphony Orchestra Casa da Música along with resident baroque, contemporary and choral ensembles. Porto itself, Portugal's second city, spreads across granite hills above the mouth of the Douro.

Getting there

Casa da Música stands on the Rotunda da Boavista in Porto, about 1.8 km from Lordelo do Ouro, next to Casa da Música station on the Porto Metro. Francisco de Sá Carneiro Airport (OPO) is about 11 km away.

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Casa da Música, Porto

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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