Yule Heibel’s Post Studio © 2003-2008

Cultural marks

January 12, 2007 at 1:28 am | In architecture, fashionable_life, scenes_victoria | 4 Comments

On Jan.8, J.C. Scott, a local designer who has “an upcoming role promoting arts and culture through Tourism Victoria,” mused in the local paper about how Victoria might go about being “in search of our cultural mark” (that was the title of the article). He used the article to think out loud about how we don’t have any signature cultural landmarks in town, buildings that testify to the fact that Victoria is more than just “olde England” heritage or overpowering nature, and that it has a thriving art scene. He referenced several other cities, and asked his readers to stretch their imaginations: land in Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum, visit Santiago Calatrava’s building in Valencia, think about what an I.M. Pei structure could add to our tourist centre, or a Tadao Ando museum further north, perhaps.

Well, I have another addition to this mental wish-list.

This is the new Philharmonic Hall on the Elbe (**)in Hamburg. It’s like a pirate ship sailing into the city, isn’t it? And why not? It’s a concert hall in what used to be a warehouse (capitalist storage space to you, comrade!), with the sails of capital (i.e., luxury condo & hotel development) powering the whole thing from above, in the guise of a post-modern signature structure that reminds one of a galleon unfurled. Culture and capital, in unabashed union. [(**)= Note: The link takes you to an over-engineered start page for a flash site, but it's actually worth the visit: best flash animations I've seen, very smooth, absolutely excellent.]

This project is part of a larger urban revitalisation known as HafenCity Hamburg. The pages accessible from this link are positively crowing over this achievement, and admittedly, the project looks unrelentingly ambitious. It’s especially intriguing to notice how the planners are triumphantly crowing over the private-public partnerships they managed to engender, which got some of these developments off the ground. The concert hall, for example, is possible because that airy structure resembling a pirate ship’s sails plunked on the dour solidity of a hull (in this case, ex-warehouse) is a private condo & hotel development, strictly luxury, of course. The dour bits at the bottom, meanwhile, have been alchemically transformed (by all that money, including the profits from the condos) into an orchestral hall of culture.

Hummel, hummel!

Mors, mors…!

translation (sort of)

n.b.: if you land on the German-language versions of the architecture/ Hamburg sites, no fear: there’s a link for the English-language version, too.