How you react to the Copenhagen Concert Hall, which opened last January, depends on when you see it — and what you are expecting. Because of Ateliers Jean Nouvel’s design approach, both the container and the auditoriums and spaces within assume a vastly different character depending on the time of day you visit. The building, which belongs to Danish Radio and is the home of the Danish National Symphony Orchestra, sits on the outskirts of historic Copenhagen. From the outside in bright light, it looks like nothing more than a large rectangular box that for some reason is swathed in electric-blue scaffolding net and plopped down in an industrial landscape. When the sun goes down, it is transformed into an ethereal, dematerialized object with images of musicians eerily flitting across the screens of glass fiber with a PVC coating. The multilevel interior foyer also changes personality by day and by night. In broad daylight, the main lobby looks like an airport from a 1940s war movie, where sun streams through large window walls and illuminates the dark concrete floor and military-style furnishings designed to resemble flight crates for musical instruments. At night, the tough-glam lobby takes on the iridescence of a multimedia nightclub, with projections splashing polychromatic patterns and videos across various surfaces.
Neither its day- nor nighttime persona gets you ready for the large concert hall. Seating 1,809 and raised above the lobby, it looks in section like some giant clam caught among pilings within a huge (190 by 315 feet) blue cage, 148 feet high. Yet when you enter the auditorium, you discover an expansive and warmly resplendent interior.
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