Philharmonie Berlin
The musical heart of Berlin
The Philharmonie Berlin has been the musical heart of Berlin since 1963. Still at the periphery of West Berlin when it opened, it became part of the new urban centre after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Its unusual tent-like shape and distinctive bright yellow colour makes it one of the city’s landmarks.
Its unusual architecture and innovative concert hall design initially ignited controversy, but it now serves as a model for concert halls all over the world. “One person opposite another, arranged in circles in sweeping, suspended arcs around soaring crystal pyramids.” In 1920 the architect Hans Scharoun wrote these words as a vision for the ideal theatre space. Thirty-five years later, he developed the main concert hall of the Philharmonie from this idea, with the concert platform and the musicians forming the central focal point.
Space – Music – People
About the architecture of Hans Scharoun’s Philharmonie
When you picture buildings that embody global culture, such as the Guggenheim Museum by the American architect Frank O. Gehry in Bilbao, Spain (1997) and the Elbe Philharmonic Hall in Hamburg by Herzog & de Meuron, you can hardly imagine the problems Hans Scharoun encountered in the mid-1950s with his design for the Berlin Philharmonic Hall. And that was not among politicians, who were initially astonished, or enthusiastic architecture experts, but rather most particularly with the engineering and building-site offices. These days, highly sophisticated design computers can effortlessly master the most complicated geometry. Consequently, the digitalisation and computerisation of the construction process has infused the present-day world of architectural images with a design engineering and technical normality that just 20 or 30 years ago would have been laughed off as a crazy fiction that could not be built. That must have happened to Hans Scharoun as well when, somewhat more than 50 years ago, he went public in Berlin with his spatial vision of a concert hall that places the music at its architectural centre.
Ahead of its time
In those days he was de facto still confronted with brigades of draughtsmen who had to render the sketches and drawings he’d dashed off with a thick 3b pencil into measurements and proportions, with cohorts of builders who had to work by hand and set up falsework for forming the concrete, and with engineers who grew up and were trained in the mental space of Euclidean geometry. All expressed reservations and concerns – and not without good reason – about whether the fractal shape composed of hanging and protruding elements that they saw on Scharoun’s drawings and sketches could be transferred into a stable reality of steel, iron, concrete and wood at all. Those who looked more closely saw bends and slopes everywhere, broken lines and edges at flat or wide angles. That this design by Scharoun was literally unfamiliar – who could blame any of the appraisers, master builders and construction workers of the time? None had Smartphones nor tablets that visualise a drawing in 3D using an app. Instead they had only a T-square with ruler and sharpened pencil, a compass and measuring tape with which to approach the great architectural author’s fantasy.
The question of location
At first, the Philharmonie was not designed for its current site at Kemperplatz, but rather as an expansion of the Joachimsthal Gymnasium (secondary school) in Wilmersdorf, a building that is now the University of the Arts on Bundesallee. Scharoun won the competition in 1957. Ten architectural firms took part. After intense debates about both the architecture of the Philharmonie itself as well as of course the costs of the new building, the Berlin Senate took the decision in 1959 to establish a new centre of cultural buildings on the southern edge of the Tiergarten. Even based on the criteria of the day, but most definitely according to today’s criteria, the construction cost – first calculated at DM 7 million, finally after redesign and relocation increased to DM 13.5 and ultimately 17.5 million, was low, perhaps even scandalously cheap.
But the actual reason for relocation to the edge of the Tiergarten was not only, as often rumoured, to come closer to the city centre of Berlin, but was much more prosaic. It was connected with Hans Scharoun’s urbanistic vision, developed as the head of the municipal planning office of the Berlin Magistrate from 1945-47, that has gone down in history ingloriously as the “Berlin Collective Plan”. According to this, when reconstructing Berlin, Scharoun wanted with very few exceptions to tear down all the houses and buildings still standing after the aerial bombardment in order to completely rebuild the city within a huge grid of highways separated according to living, working, administration and culture functions – a nightmare scenario from today’s perspective, though with this vision Scharoun in no way stood alone.
Scharoun did not need to substantially revise his design for the Philharmonie when redesigning for the new location. It was intended to build it as a free-standing building that could be seen from all sides. Nonetheless, it was possible to keep the master pattern of the body of the hall with the orchestra in the centre and a for the most part L-shaped, horizontal shell structure for musicians, administration, instruments and other offices. Scharoun thought radically from within a building, not from its exterior, particularly when it came to the Philharmonie. This attitude towards thinking and design characterises him as a representative of the organic modern era of New Architecture in the 20th century.
Staged space
Only the entrance needed to be roofed and formulated anew, as in Wilmersdorf it would have been through the Joachimsthal Gymnasium. In just this context Scharoun achieved something great in terms of staging and impact. Indubitably, the dramaturgical succession from the entryway covered by a canopy through the softly illuminated ticket office to the darker narrowing for ticket collection, behind which the foyer opens up, bright and festive of an evening, lively in an urbane and vitalizing way, is a tour de force in terms of the psychology of space. It generates an excited anticipation to which one can ascribe almost erotic qualities. Strolling or hurrying through the foyer and up and down various stairways, galleries, balconies and bridges, a climax is prepared in several stages that culminates upon entering the auditorium. Wherever one enters the large hall, be it in the blocks situated higher along the sides or in the lower ones, walking through the relatively inconspicuous covered accessways releases in a liberating way the tension which has been building and is retained when moving through the architectural space. That too, and not just the formal polymorphism of shapes and forms and the bold height of the hall, make it one of the most impressive and significant spatial creations of the 20th century in the whole world.
Attempts have frequently been made, particularly after the Philharmonie was opened, to describe and capture in pictures the crystallized nature of the gallery and audience “slopes”, the tent form of the ceiling, the slopes and suspensions of the heavyweight and lightweight parts of the hall that are difficult to understand. Scharoun’s own imagery of a “valley at the base of which can be found the orchestra, surrounded by ascending vineyards” of the audience blocks has retained its poetic character, though its landscape pathos has become alien to us in an architectural context. The threefold interlacing of the pentagons Space – Music – People that has become the sign of the Philharmonie is also believable and beautiful as the architect’s intention and as an intangible reference, but has no evident nature in terms of the visual use of space.
Transparent, harmonious, festive
What may instead have been decisive is that this room composed of so many facets, with a unique inner porousness and complete permeability of all the audience blocks among each other, intuitively forms a harmonic space for the beholder – without overwhelming. “Remember the impression of good architecture,” the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein noted, “namely, that it expresses a thought. You would like to follow it with a gesture.”
In the Philharmonic Hall, this gesture has the character of a harbouring festiveness. It is without dispute that the Berlin Philharmonie has stood the litmus test of time, both outside and in. Yes, it can be cited as an example of the paradox of temporality in architecture. Just because Hans Scharoun, experienced in architecture and in his own life, rigorously decided – without casting an eye towards how long it would last or whether it would be eternal – in favour of its own contemporaneity, it became possible for his work to acquire the timelessness we still enjoy and admire today.
„Unique!“ The construction oft he chamber music hall
What quarrels and fights there were, what journalistic wrangling before finally, on 28 October 1987, the opening fanfare was sounded. And how, later, the controversy was kept alive by Edgar Wisniewski, the architect of the Chamber Music Hall.
And he did so aggressively, like a man who has been wronged, you might say. Edgar Wisniewski (1930-2007) criticized the supposed cultural hostility of the politicians in Berlin as well as his own fellow architects with as much vehemence as he advocated his own ideas and goals which he constantly put forward in the name of his architectural mentor and later partner Hans Scharoun. The fact that the Chamber Music Hall was not built within a short time of the Philharmonie being completed in the 1960s was something Wisniewski regarded as an affront by the Berliners to musical culture. In any case, during the 1970s he tirelessly organised benefit concerts and, with significant support from the “Society of Friends of the Philharmonie”, collected a considerable amount of donations for the building; but to no avail. Only in 1983/84 did the mayor of Berlin, Richard von Weizsäcker, finally give the green light for the chamber music extension to the Philharmonie as part of the plans for the 750th anniversary of the city in 1987.
Grand opening after long planning and construction period
At the opening of the Chamber Music Hall, a chamber music festival was held on a scale the likes of which has not been seen since. The formal inauguration celebrations are of course well documented in sound and images, with the then-Chancellor Helmut Kohl as the most prominent political guest, the already seriously ill Herbert von Karajan, who nevertheless was not prepared to miss the inauguration of the hall and who, in honour of the chamber music atmosphere, conducted from the harpsichord, and Anne-Sophie Mutter as star violinist of the evening. Shortly afterwards, music critic Gerhard R. Koch reported on the spectacular evening in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (30 October 1987). His review is memorable as he alone took up the theme of movement in the space. Due to security concerns for the celebrity guests, there were stringent entry controls as well as allocated seating, but only for the official opening concert with Karajan and Anne-Sophie von Mutter. Thereafter, the concert opened up and became an opulent demonstration of the variety of possibilities the orchestra had at their disposal in the fluid, interlocking architecture of the Kemperplatz buildings.
Interconnected, fluid spatial concept
The Chamber Music Festival was intended to show not only the acoustics of the newly-constructed hall, but also to demonstrate the flexibility, porosity and internal connectedness of the spatial structure of the Philharmonie, the Musical Instrument Museum and the Chamber Music Hall. So the audience moved from the new hall through the foyer to the Philharmonie, then on to the Musical Instrument Museum and back, constantly attracted and seduced by the numerous chamber music ensembles and groups from within and outwith the orchestra. Among the more unusual aspects of the day was that apparently, even during the musical performances in the Chamber Music Hall, people moved around, from Block A near the podium up to the three legendary music galleries in order to test the acoustics of each piece. The strictly symmetrical internal spatial structure of the Chamber Music Hall had developed from these galleries and central hexagonal podium; both elements were fundamental to Wisniewski’s design concept. Under normal concert conditions, such wandering and moving around to experience the music is hardly imaginable. And yet, it corresponds in a strangely exact way – in the rhetoric of Scharoun and Wisniewski, it must be added, – to the thinking behind the architecture of both the Chamber Music Hall and the Philharmonie.
Too large?
Even in an article celebrating the birthday of the Chamber Music Hall, two awkward – or let’s say sensitive issues have to be touched upon: Not the costs, which increased five-fold in typical Berlin fashion during the construction period; after all, the final cost of almost 123 million DM (!) was ultimately well and sustainably invested. Rather, it is the size of the hall and its location. To many people, it seems too large and not as intimate, despite its acoustic qualities, as is expected of a chamber music hall, where – as Wisniewski put it – “a few friends of Beethoven or Schubert could look on over his shoulder as he plays a new piece.” Experience has shown that in normal concert usage, usually between a quarter and third of the seats remain empty. This corresponds to an average annual capacity utilisation of well over 60 percent. Looking at the original documentation, it is noticeable throughout that the Chamber Music Hall is significantly smaller in proportion to the Philharmonie in all competition models and photographs. Only in 1969 does the figure of 950 seats suddenly appear; according to Wisniewski, a number decided on by the then culture senator Werner Stein. This figure never seems to have been checked as is normally the case in the planning process, especially in such a long planning period. But it was never discussed again by the architect with his aesthetic values or by the city, which was responsible for the finances. Only during the design work was the number of seats increased to 1250, ultimately reaching today’s figure of 1136; only 200 more than originally planned, all the same. Apart from its impact on the urban space, another consequence of this is the continuous “circle of light” in the make-up of the hall, separating the upper and lower seating areas. This in turn gently contradicts the commandment proclaimed by Wisniewski and Scharoun regarding the “democratic enjoyment of music” of instinctively egalitarian music lovers.
A construction still “in the shadow of the Berlin Wall”
The second issue is the location of the Chamber Music Hall. Although it stands on the edge of the Tiergarten, an inner-city parkland, it is equally indisputable that, as Berliners say, it is very far away. Unfortunately, most of the Kulturforum has that feeling. This has been the urban development problem with the Kulturforum from the beginning, and which has never been satisfactorily resolved since the concept was formulated in 1964. Today’s international musicians who perform in the Chamber Music Hall, and who are used to jetting around the world, react enthusiastically to the hall and describe it as “unique”. However, they also spontaneously add how the shadow of the Berlin Wall still hangs over the whole of the Kulturforum. This is a response to the introverted and almost autistic urban atmosphere of the area which in the time of “West Berlin” stood facing the line separating East and West. What was then the East has, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, once again become the cultural and historical centre of the city.
The Philharmonie Berlin is under historical monument protection thanks to their unique architecture by Hans Scharoun. This unfortunately means that barrier-free access can not be guaranteed to all areas. The most important information is summarized on this page.
Tickets for disabled concertgoers
Guests with disabilities receive a free concert ticket for their accompanying person on presentation of their disabled pass (with a "B" licence). All guests must be able to leave the concert hall independently or with the help of their accompanying person in the event of danger.
When purchasing tickets at the box office or by calling our ticket office, our team will be happy to help you find the right seat for your needs.
Information for disablend concertgoers
Disabled box for disablend concertgoers
There are 16 spaces available in the disabled box for wheelchair users and their assistant companions. There are no wheelchairs available on loan in the Philharmonie or Chamber Music Hall. You are welcome to come to the Philharmonie with your walkers or other walking aids. For safety reasons, please leave them with our event team at the hall entrances or at the checkroom, where they will be kept for you. You can then pick up your walking aids there during the intermission or after the concert.
Easily accessible seating
For physically disabled visitors there are a limited number of seats in the main auditorium of the Philharmonie and in the Chamber Music Hall which can be reached via just a few steps. Our ticket office team will be happy to advise you on booking these seats.
Information for visitors with hearing loss
The main auditorium of the Philharmonie and the Chamber Music Hall have an induction loop system. For this purpose, only a mobile additional receiver is required which connects the audio signal via a neck loop to the hearing aid. These additional receivers can be borrowed free of charge at the information counter. We ask our guests with hearing aids to adjust these so that feedback and thus annoying whistling noises are avoided.
Information for visually impaired concertgoers
Philharmonie Berlin, yellow markings on the stairs | Picture: Heribert Schindler
Apart from the usual markings for danger spots (black and yellow markings), no further assistance such as information in Braille is available.
Support from our service team
During visits to the Main auditorium and the Chamber Music Hall, the staff of the event service team of the EVENTTEAM company will gladly assist and advise you. They are available at all times and provide active assistance, as far as this is compatible with their defined tasks and functions. Individual support of individual guests for the entire concert visit cannot be provided.
Our volunteers
At Berliner Philharmoniker Foundation events only, EVENTTEAM is supported by our volunteers. These men and women are easily recognisable by their light blue shirts and blouses and yellow scarves. They help with orientation in the house and are happy to answer any further questions in order to make your concert visit as pleasant as possible.
If you have additional questions or requests, you can also use the contact form on our website.
Parking spaces and access to the Philharmonie
West side
The public parking areas on the west side of the Philharmonie/Herbert-von-Karajan-Straße have a limited number of designated disabled parking spaces.
Underground car park
The underground car park under the Chamber Music Hall (access via Scharoun-Straße) is unsuitable for disabled guests as there is no lift from there to the foyer. The underground car park is closed until further notice.
Taxis
After the events there are usually a number of taxis available. On request, the doormen will also call additional taxis with a short waiting time, depending on availability.
Further Information on the website of Philharmonie Berlin.