Luxembourg Philharmonic
Luxembourg City, Luxembourg
Atelier Christian De Portzamparc

Christian de Portzamparc animates a monumental plaza with a spatial dynamism that takes its sophisticated urbanism inside

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	Click here for slide show. Photo © Christian Richters

By Joseph Giovannini

French architect Christian de Portzamparc won the competition for the the Luxembourg Philharmonie—officially, the Grande-Duchesse Josephine-Charlotte Concert Hall—by recognizing the monumentalism of the setting he was given while imbuing this concert hall with a spatial dynamism. As the capital of a founding member of the European Union, Luxembourg City has become host to many of its institutions, including the European Court of Justice. Over the past 20 years, a modern bureaucratic acropolis has risen on the Kirchberg Plateau, across the valley from the old, walled city. With political and economic success, however, the country has turned to developing a cultural infrastructure commensurate with its new status.

A 1997 competition sought an urban centerpiece for the triangular Place de l’Europe, bounded by monumental glass governmental structures. The brief called for a 1,500-seat concert auditorium, a 300-seat chamber-music hall, and a black-box theater seating 120. Along with acoustic excellence for concerts ranging from symphonic music to amplified jazz, the tacit expectation was that the structure rise to its ceremonial function as a crowning symbol of the new, sophisticated Luxembourg City. The concert hall also had to address the plateau’s main thoroughfare and ceremonial boulevard, Avenue John F. Kennedy.

De Portzamparc conceived a densely colonnaded monument, elliptical in plan, with 823 tall, closely spaced steel columns at the perimeter supporting a thin, radius-edged roof. At the front prow of the ellipse, de Portzamparc widens the spacing between columns to accommodate the entrance that runs parallel to Avenue Kennedy. Two shells clad in metal panels rise on either side of the main structure. The tangential curve of one appears to launch visitors arriving from underground parking into the peristyle. The other arcs up as the carapace of the chamber-music hall.

Inside, a soaring peristyle hall circles the main auditorium, which reads as a building within the building. Tall, prismatic masses form the hall’s “facade,” reflecting the angular arrangement of seating towers within. The architect, working with acoustician Albert Yaying Xu of the Paris firm Xu-Acoustique, configured the main auditorium as the tried-and-true shoe box (think Boston’s Symphony Hall). Above orchestra seats fitted into this rectangle, eight freestanding, four-level seating towers rise, angled forward from the auditorium box and out of plane with each other. Architecturally, the towers evoke town houses overlooking the orchestra-level’s village square, creating an intimacy unusual in shoe-box halls, because the performers feel wrapped by the audience.

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Formal name of Project:
Luxembourg Philharmonic

Location:
Luxembourg City, Luxembourg

Gross square footage:
215,278 sq. ft.

Owner:
Grand Duchy of Luxembourg

Architect:
Atelier Christian De Portzamparc
1 Rue De L'Aude
75014 Paris
FRANCE
Phone 331/40 648-000
fax 331/43 27 74 79
www.chdeportzamparc.com

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