Guangzhou Opera House

Interesting facts

The main auditorium is deliberately asymmetric, an unusual choice for an opera house, and is lined with moulded panels of glass-fibre reinforced gypsum.

Acousticians from Marshall Day built and tested a 1:20 scale model of the auditorium to check their computer predictions before construction.

The hall's acoustics were tuned to suit both Western opera and traditional Chinese opera.

Thousands of tiny lights set into the auditorium ceiling are meant to evoke a starry night sky.

The exterior is clad in thousands of custom-cut triangular granite panels and glass panes fixed to an intricate steel space frame.

The opening production, Puccini’s Turandot, was an opera that had for years been controversial in China.

In 2011 the building was named best cultural building at the RIBA International Awards.

During design the acousticians also had to assess vibration from an adjacent railway line.

Why it is worth it

The Guangzhou Opera House rises on the bank of the Pearl River like two smooth boulders left behind by the water. Zaha Hadid conceived it as a "double pebble": a larger and a smaller rock-like volume, faced in granite and glass over a steel frame, sitting on a landscaped rise in the Zhujiang New Town business district. Inside, the main auditorium seats about 1,800 people.

The project began with an international competition in 2002 that drew detailed designs from Coop Himmelb(l)au, Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid. Hadid's scheme was declared the winner in November 2002, construction began in January 2005, and the house opened on 9 May 2010 with a production of Puccini's Turandot. It cost about 1.38 billion yuan. Shortly before opening its official Chinese name was changed from Guangzhou Opera House to Guangzhou Grand Theatre, to reflect a programme much broader than opera.

The larger "rock" stands some 43 metres high and holds the main theatre together with rehearsal rooms, recording studios and exhibition space; the smaller one contains a multi-purpose hall of about 400 seats. Altogether the building covers some 71,000 square metres of floor space. Its freestanding concrete auditorium, enclosed within the granite-and-glass shell, took more than five years to complete, and on opening the critic Jonathan Glancey praised the result in The Guardian as both highly theatrical and subtle. It became one of the three largest theatres in China, alongside the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing and the Shanghai Grand Theatre.

Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province, is one of China's oldest trading ports, and Zhujiang New Town, where the opera house stands, is its new central business district on the north bank of the Pearl River.

Getting there

The opera house is in Tianhe District, about 7 km from central Guangzhou, and Guangzhou Opera House station on the city's APM metro line is next to it. The nearest airport by distance is Foshan Shadi Airport (FUO), about 25 km away; Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport (CAN), the city's main airport, is about 31 km away.

Guangzhou Opera House

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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