Berliner Philharmonie

Hans Scharoun’s concert hall in West Berlin put the music at the centre. The orchestra plays on a stage near the middle of the hall, and the audience sits all around on terraces that slope like vineyards. Outside, the building is a tent-like landscape of yellow, folded roofs.

The Berlin Philharmonic’s old concert hall was destroyed in the war. Scharoun won the competition in 1956 with the idea of “putting the music at the centre”: instead of a shoebox, where the audience sits in front of the orchestra as in a theatre, he placed the stage near the middle and let the audience surround it on asymmetrical terraces. No one sits far from the musicians. The building went up in 1960–1963 at what was to become the Kulturforum, right next to the Berlin Wall.

The form was a manifesto for organic modernism, which sought to build from the inside out, according to how a space would be used, rather than starting from a pure geometric volume. The vineyard hall became the model for concert halls all over the world, from Suntory Hall in Tokyo to the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg. The golden façade of anodised aluminium was added only in the 1980s, in line with Scharoun’s original idea.

• Post-war modernism
• Hans Scharoun