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Visitors arriving by train will find the immediate context of the concert hall strange and uninhabited, aside from the giant blue box. At first glance, there seems to be little more to this neighborhood than a train platform. Seemingly marooned in a vast dusty wasteland — Nouvel has said he imagined the building as an asteroid crash-landed on the site — the building's simple form comes alive at night as a massive projection screen for video and images, a glowing lantern surrounded by canals.

A Rich, Theatrical Space

The main entry to the Copenhagen Concert Hall is at the front of the building, signified by an area of cladding that is scrunched up and folded back, revealing glazed doors. Another entry is from the side via a bridge, where visitors cross a moat to enter.

The lobby is a complex open-plan space. Arranged over seven levels, it encompasses tall spaces, small corners, seating areas, a restaurant, a bar area, coat checks and other facilities.

The decor is dynamic: walls and ceilings show multiple and layered projections of videos and still images. Lighting features include twinkling "sky" lighting in one area and glossy geometric wall lights that look like super-sized hard candy in others. Even the escalators are backlit with vibrant blue lights, a detail Nouvel has used successfully in other projects.

Areas of the concrete have a wrinkled elephant-skin appearance, an engaging texture inspired by Schindler's 1920s Kings Road House in Los Angeles, according to contractor MT Højgaard.

Every aspect of the lobby is colorful, detailed, and designed, creating in this vast and spatially complex lobby an impression of fullness. It is full of material, texture, light, and sound, giving it a youthful buzz.

In one or two areas, the complexity seems to have resulted in details being overlooked. For example, looking down into the lobby space from one of the many walkways above — as nearly every patron does — the overlapping ceiling panels reveal untidy wiring to the projectors and other services. Perhaps these could be concealed at a later date.

Visitors can also look out through the blue exterior veil to the flat Danish landscape beyond.

The Main Attraction

The Copenhagen Concert Hall has four different auditoria to cater to different kinds of music. Each studio has adaptable acoustics and uses color and texture to create a unique visual statement. Nouvel explains: "The idea was to create a kind of small world belonging to the concert hall with a lot of specific singular details, materials and spaces, so when you open a door from one studio to another it is always a new feeling, a new ambiance."

The largest and most impressive of these spaces is the main concert hall, with its undulating walls, cantilevered balconies, and golden colors supposedly inspired by Edvard Munch's painting The Scream. The space seats 1,800 people and is used primarily for symphonic music. Every surface seems to be dynamic and shifting, with floor, wall, and roof composed of overlapping panels and planes.

The seating layout, known as a vineyard arrangement, is based on that of the Berlin Philharmonie. Instead of arranging the seats in neat, equal rows in an uninterrupted space, here the seating is clustered and the audience area is divided into small blocks on slightly different floor levels separated by small side walls. These walls provide sound reflection and allow for a more even sound throughout the audience.

The 28,000-cubic-meter (990,000-cubic-foot) auditorium is asymmetrical in both plan and section, and is topped by an irregularly faceted concrete dome. "In a word, it's complicated," says acoustician Yasuhisa Toyota of Nagata Acoustics, "whereas a traditional shoebox design is not complicated. But here the architect gets a more flexible design. Like the Frank Gehry concert hall, the room shape here is beautiful, and has complexity."

Nagata has designed more than 50 concert halls in Japan and dozens worldwide, including Gehry's 2003 Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Projects currently under construction include the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts in Kansas City, Missouri, by Moshe Safdie and Associates, and the Elbe Philharmonic Hall in Hamburg, Germany, by Herzog and de Meuron.   >>>

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Terri Peters is a writer and designer based in Copenhagen and London.   More by Terri Peters

SUBSCRIPTION SAMPLE The irregular form of the Copenhagen Concert Hall's main auditorium is masked behind an orthogonal framework covered in blue mesh. Photo: Seier + Seier Extra Large Image A bridge leads to an entry vestibule at the joint between the Concert Hall and an adjacent building in the DR Byen complex. Photo: Terri Peters Extra Large Image In the undulating main auditorium of the Copenhagen Concert Hall, the seating follows a vineyard arrangement. Photo: Bjarne Bergius Hermansen/ Courtesy DR Extra Large Image Copenhagen Concert Hall fifth-floor plan drawing. Image: Ateliers Jean Nouvel Extra Large Image Copenhagen Concert Hall section drawing. Image: Ateliers Jean Nouvel Extra Large Image Wood-clad balconies project irregularly into the main auditorium. Photo: Agnete Schlictkrull/ Courtesy DR Extra Large Image Escalators serve the glazed multistory lobby. Photo: Terri Peters Extra Large Image The blue mesh paneling is folded up at one corner of the Concert Hall, forming the building's main entry. Photo: Terri Peters Extra Large Image   Click on thumbnail images to view full-size pictures.