5th place in an international competition
On November 18, the concepts submitted for the “Opera House of the Future” were presented to the public as part of the event series “Forum on the Opera House of the Future.” Jury Chairman, architect and urban planner Heiner Farwick; Alderwoman for Culture and Integration of the Capital City of Düsseldorf Miriam Koch; and Managing Director of the Deutschen Oper am Rhein Alexandra Stampler-Brown offered a look back at the competition and the decision-making process and also discussed the next steps going forward.
The submissions will be exhibited to the public at Oststrasse 34 – across the street from the future building site – until December 7.
For this competition, we once again collaborated with the Spanish firm GINA. The jury for the second phase of the competition convened on November 12 and 13. Out of a total of 29 firms in phase 1, 8 were asked to revise their submissions for phase 2, including our project team.
The building with approximately 38,5000 square meters of usable floor space will be erected on the site of an empty former department store on “Am Wehrhahn” – a new location in the city center. Our concept, which closes the block perimeter, embeds the cultural building into the surrounding urban fabric. However, it also retains the symbolic character appropriate for a cultural institution of this magnitude. The oval-shaped roof structure atop the opera hall lends the building a clear position in the city skyline. The building is enclosed in a veil-like facade whose structure becomes thinner and more transparent from top to bottom. This allows pedestrians to see into the public areas of the building and for those inside the opera house to see out. The “third place” required by the awarding authority – a forum that serves as a flexible performance space – is conceived as a barrier-free extension of the plaza into the interior of the building and reaches all the way to the publicly accessible roof terrace.