My encounter with Casa da Música, Porto, Portugal
In Porto I stayed at the Hotel da Música. The hotel is located 3 blocks from, and is named after the Casa da Música, a 12-floor concert hall and top floor restaurant, remarkably one of Porto’s icons. Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas designed the project, completed in 2005. An island in the midst of the Porto urban fabric, the architectural composition consists of an enormous sculpted concrete mass, placed in the center of a vast empty space. The surrounding exterior space is integral part of the architecture: continuous surfaces of yellow-hued travertine slab, a total absence of vegetation or other objects. I perceived the complex as a gargantuan perforated boulder, standing in the midst of an expansive plateau suggestive of desert and dunes. The complex contrasts with and dominates its immediate urban context of buildings, streets and park.
In spite of the emptiness and the scale of the open space, people do not stay away, and it attracts constant skateboard activity. The scale of the Casa da Música complex dwarfs the visitors, as they make their way across the open space towards the seemingly distant building entrances.
The complex is clean of visual noise, of banal or technical objects or components. The visual presence of both the interior and the exterior is pure and precise. Form, texture, color, light; all that the eye perceives is intentional and carefully designed by the architects. This purity seems obvious but is not be taken for granted, and in my opinion is prerequisite for a project to be qualified as Architecture. Even the signage in the building is part of the architecture, and was incorporated as an integral part of the frame-work for the concrete internal partitions.
I entered the building ascending the slender staircase that resembles a retractable companionway (ship ladder) protruding from the building. The trivial aspect of these stairs to the building’s main entrance seems dissonant in the context of this grand place. Passing the threshold, I reached the landing of an oblique and swirling space: a grandiose, magic negative sculpture. The ethereal space is an artistic object, carved out of the mass and made of light and texture that dances and flows aloft towards the upper floors. Exploring it, I felt a powerful blend of awe and delight.
In a tourist map, the site shows both as the Porto concert hall, and as a skateboard venue. Another example of what I perceive as a uniquely Portuguese harmonious, symbiotic, unexpected coexistence of dissimilar worlds: Classical music cohabits with urban street scene.
The building in its urban context. old – new. design – vernacular. monumental – banal. giant – small. brutal – kind.
Intriguing geometries.
Main entrance lobby.
Notice the intrusive mandatory exit sign that slightly tarnishes the visual purity
Paper model of the building. From the architect's website https://www.oma.com/projects/casa-da-musica
Take a look at this video by Tom Koolhaas:
