Elbphilharmonie

The Elbphilharmonie stands at the western tip of the Grasbrook peninsula in Hamburg's HafenCity, where the harbour basins meet the Elbe, and it is really two buildings stacked one on the other. The lower part is Kaispeicher A, a massive brick warehouse of the 1960s designed by Werner Kallmorgen, kept with its blunt dark walls almost intact. On top of it the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron set a glass superstructure whose roofline rises and dips in a series of peaks, reaching 108 metres at its western end; people have read it as a hoisted sail, a breaking wave, an iceberg or a quartz crystal. The concert hall opened on 11 January 2017, after years of delays and a final cost of about €866 million, many times the first estimate.

The glass is the building's great performance. Around a thousand of its panes are individually curved, some bulging outwards and some drawn in, so the facade never shows a single flat reflection: it breaks the sky, the river and the passing ships into flickering fragments that change with every shift of the weather. Between the old warehouse and the new crown, at a height of 37 metres, runs the Plaza, a public terrace that wraps around the whole building and looks down on the cranes of the container port, the Speicherstadt and the city's spires. Visitors reach it by the Tube, an 82-metre escalator that curves so that its top is invisible from the bottom, and the ride up feels like a slow passage from the street into light.

Inside, the Grand Hall seats 2,100 people in a vineyard arrangement, with terraces of seats climbing around a central stage so that no listener sits far from the musicians. The Japanese acoustician Yasuhisa Toyota had its walls and ceiling lined with some 10,000 gypsum panels, each milled with its own pattern of tiny hollows to scatter sound evenly; the result is a pale, rippling skin that looks almost organic. A second, recital hall seats 550, and the eastern part of the building holds a hotel and apartments. Hamburg, a city that grew rich on the Elbe and still lives by its port, gained a new landmark that faces the water rather than the old town.

Getting there

The Elbphilharmonie is in central Hamburg, about 1 km from the city centre, and Hamburg Airport (HAM) lies about 10 km to the north. The nearest underground stations are Baumwall (Elbphilharmonie) on line U3 and Überseequartier on line U4; buses 2 and 111 stop at Am Sandtorkai, and harbour ferry line 72 runs from the Landungsbrücken piers to the Elbphilharmonie landing stage. The building has its own car park.