The Elbphilharmonie’s Auditorium Was Designed By An Algorithm

January 24, 2017

The World’s First ‘Acoustically Perfect’ Music Venue

What happens when you hand a team of pioneering Engineers, Architects, and Acousticians an $843 Million budget and ask them to design a concert hall for your City? Well if you’re Hamburg, Germany, then you get the Elbphilharmonie – better appreciated as The World’s First ‘Acoustically Perfect’ Music Venue.

The Architect Firm that designed this modern marvel, Herzog and De Meuron (HdM), is known for their impressively grand designs such as the Allianz Arena in Munich, Germany. The Swiss Firm was also recently granted permission to revamp Chelsea FC’s London Stadium. Seriously check these guys out if you haven’t heard about them before, their designs are nothing short of mind blowing.

And yet, the most impressive feature of this new concert hall isn’t its magnificent and imposing architectural design, or its capability to perform visual show that rival that of even the most impressive EDM festival stages. Rather, it’s the main Auditorium, which was planned through the use of parametric design – a process in which designers use computer models and algorithms to create an object’s form.

The alienesque and gleaming ivory cave that is the main auditorium features a total of 2,150 seats, 1,000 hand-blown glass light bulbs, and 10,000 gypsum fiber acoustic panels that line all of the walls. Each panel was designed and fabricated by Benjamin Koren’s Studio, One to One, to give the hall its perfect acoustics.

“The 10,000 panels feature one million ‘cells’—little divots that look like someone used a seashell to carve out a chunk of material. These cells, which range anywhere from four to 16 centimeters across, are designed to shape sound within the auditorium…No two panels absorb or scatter sound waves alike, but together they create a balanced reverberation across the entire auditorium.” – Liz Stinson, Wired.com