June 14, 2009
Architect: Rem Koolhaas/OMA
Date: 2004
Location: Porto, Portugal
The Casa da Musica was built as part of Porto’s European Culture Capital year in 2001.
Casa da Musica
The Casa da Musica started as a house but when that project fell through and Koolhaas had only two weeks to finish the competition for the concert hall in Porto. Koolhaas then submitted the design which exposes the public spaces including the theaters.
Stair in Window
The theaters have windows that go into it and can be left open during shows to provide natural light.
Window into Theater
The building was designed to be like an asteroid landing in the city and there are two waves of the paving to either side caused by the crash.
Wave from Casa da Musica Landing
After walking around outside we went in for a tour of the building. The building was designed to be open and allow access to the public even when shows aren’t happening. For that purpose the main spaces are left open to wander about.
Main Lobby
Main Staircase
We headed across the lobby and headed up the back staircase.
Rear Staircase
Up at the top the the staircase was the room that acts as an sound barrier between the city and the exterior city. This space is used as a backstage staging area during shows but during the day is open to talk through.
Air buffer between theater and exterior
One of the most interesting parts was on the blackout curtain they had a drawing of the sound blocking curtain and it even was to scale.
Scale on Blackout Curtain
From there we headed up into some of the colored rooms. The first we started with was the green room where they sometimes perform smaller performances.
Green Room
The next room was the Cyber Space which had a really interesting escalator that went into it. This room also served as a space for a computer installation that allowed everyone in the room to create a musical composition together.
Cyber Space Escalator
From their we headed in to see the actual main performance hall.
Main Performance Hall
The main entry to the main performance hall was at the top of the main staircase.
Top of Main Staircase
We then wound our way up to the VIP Room. The room is tiled in order to look similar to the Sao Bento Train Station.
VIP Room
We then continued up in the building to the Second major performance space which is a black box theater. This theater also has windows that open to the outsided and even allows light in to the Main theater.
Black Box Theater
The Black Box Theater is served during intermission by the Hanging Bar. This sits in the acoustical barrier space between the theater and exterior.
Hanging Bar
From there we headed through to some more of the smaller public rooms. The first one was the very dark Purple room.
Purple Room
The last small public room was the Orange room which is about the opposite of the Purple room which is very calm and quiet. All these rooms have views into the main performance hall.
Orange Room
This was the end of our tour and then we spent some time wandering around the building before heading off to see the rest of the city. At night we returned to go to a concert. It was a pianist by the name Pedro Gomes who ended up being really great. This was really cool to see someone perform in this space.
We returned briefly the next day to see the restaurant which had not been open the day before.
Kool Resturant
The most interesting part is the terrace of the restaurant which overlooks the circle. This terrace is cut out from the roof of the building.
Rooftop Terrace
Looking out from Rooftop Terrace
This was one of the buildings that I knew before going and had anticipated seeing. Rem Koolhaas had designed the MTCC and after having experienced that building and many of its problems I was interested to see if this was the same. This building seemed to work much better than MTCC and I think it was just better looking. Casa da Musica changed my view of Rom Koolhaas to be much better than it had been from the MTCC.
Tags: Porto, Rem Koolhaas, theater