“HIDDEN” ORCHESTRA HALL TO MELD FORM, FUNCTION IN WARSAW

The new home for the Sinfonia Varsovia Orchestra will prioritize sound and sight lines to create a dramatic space that is tucked adjacent to a hidden garden within the city.

Stories—be they told through sound, print, or images—are transcendent experiences. Good versus evil, light versus dark, playful versus deeply evocative, are all commonly explored themes. And these themes are also embodied in the design of the new home for the Sinfonia Varsovia Orchestra in Warsaw, Poland. The complex plays with illusion to create an orchestra hall with seating that unfurls, ribbonlike, around its edges. Its exterior wall appears to float, beginning 3 m above the ground and surrounding the complex. And its ornamental garden is partially hidden yet accessible.

The design for the 20,000 m² concert hall complex was recently selected as the winner of an international design competition. Within its walls, the complex contains an 1,800-seat concert hall, a café and dining facilities, and accommodations for visiting musicians, in addition to the garden. There will also be buildings accessible from inside the park that will be located outside the wall, including hospitality and cloakroom spaces, administrative offices, and art-related workshop and retails areas.

"The Sinfonia Varsovia is designed as a piece of music, like a symphony," said Erich Ranegger, an architect with the Graz, Austria-based architecture firm Atelier Thomas Pucher, who wrote in response to questions posed by Civil Engineering online.

"The architecture is a sequence of scenarios," Ranegger noted. "We carefully thought about the choreography of a concertgoer's visit." Visitors will approach the expansive wall as they near the complex, passing beneath to enter either the foyer of the concert hall, or—if approaching the complex from one of the other three directions—the park. If entering via the park, visitors will then pass by the Villa, a pre-World War II-era building, before entering the concert hall's foyer. In the foyer, visitors will be "stepping in an impressive space from [which] floating balconies lead you into the "heart"—the concert hall," Ranegger said.

Massing will be important to the concert hall's acoustics, so it will be formed from a combination of a steel structure and large concrete elements, according to Ranegger. In addition, however, the interior of the concert hall will be a "fusion of 'shoebox hall' and 'arena' performance hall types," Ranegger explains. The so-called shoebox hall style is the traditional style for concert halls and offers ideal acoustics but poor visibility conditions for the audience, according to Ranegger. The arena style, on the other hand, gives primacy to sight lines to create "ideal views and dramatic public atmosphere," he explained. By fusing these two styles within the new concert hall, the design team believes it has created a "special place of sound, intimacy, and drama, tailor-suited [to] the orchestra and the audience," he said.

"Architecturally, this fusion is created by choosing the main shape of a rectangular hall with ideal acoustic dimensions and inserting seemingly free-form bands of balconies with perfect angles for visitors into this volume," Ranegger explained. In renderings, the various levels of the balconies undulate around the edges of the concert hall. "The three-dimensional flow of the balconies and their specific relationship to the rectangular volume allows the acoustic properties to be developed on a world-class level," Ranegger said.

Melding the two styles within one concert hall provides the benefit of compact design, short distances, and a volume that is better suited to smaller symphony orchestras and chamber orchestras, such as the Sinfonia Varsovia, according to Ranegger. "For the audience this means that each listener is situated as near to the orchestra as possible, thus creating an immense impression of being 'inside the music,'" he said.

The design of the exterior of the complex displays a similarly thoughtful fusion of form and function. The "floating" wall will likely comprise a light steel structure with a solid-looking skin, possibly concrete, according to Ranegger. It will appear to begin 3 m above the ground, and extend upward to a height of 20 m, stretching around three sides of the park, according to material on the orchestra's website. (The concert hall will form the forth side, and its exterior will be similar in appearance to the wall). 

The wall, which in parts is deep enough to house its own rooms, will envelop the site's open space, "delimiting a new park at its center, and creating a distinctive place of silence—the basic principle for an orchestra to perform—full of atmosphere and drama," Ranegger said. "At the same time, the park becomes a beautiful place for the public and the wall becomes the building to serve it." 

The floating wall will be more than just a barrier. It will also house a smaller, symphonic hall and all ofthe rehearsal areas, and provide access into the concert hall's foyer. It can therefore be "seen as a seamless extension of the park into the building," Ranegger said. It will also contain "several mysteries and miracles: hidden rooms and stairs, a narrow surveillance path at its top, large and tiny places with extraordinary view and atmosphere—scenery where fairy tales can come true," Ranegger said. 

For passersby and visitors still outside the complex, a strip of bright green parkland will be visible beneath the floating wall, offering a counterpoint from nature.

The Villa, located at at the center of the garden, was formerly a veterinarian institute and "one of the few historic buildings in Warsaw that survived World War II," Ranegger noted. "After renovation, this building will host the administration, a boarding house for artists in residence, as well as a restaurant and cafeteria." The exterior of the villa will be painted a powder white, according to information on the orchestra's website, while each of the interior rooms will be filled with riotous color. 

"Originally there was already a park around this building, which became abandoned [in] the last decades," Ranegger said. "That is why we call the site a 'sleeping beauty' that we kiss awake."

The development of the orchestra's new home is expected to revitalize this portion of the city, which is located to the east of the River Wisla in a postwar residential area that also contains a few industrial buildings, according to Ranegger.

Currently the three-dimensional model that will become the basis for the future design process is being built using building information modeling, and the next step is to hire subconsultants, according to Ranegger. Construction is anticipated to begin in 2018, with completion currently expected in 2020.