Art: Halls of Music

Almost lost to sight in the worldwide building boom of new factories, apartment houses and skyscrapers are the new concert halls and opera houses going up to keep pace with the ever-growing music audience. In the U.S., Architects Wallace Harrison and Max Abramovitz are at work on plans for a new home for the Metropolitan Opera Co. in Manhattan's Lincoln Square development. A $2,000,000 opera house has been projected for Colorado Springs by Architect Jan Ruhtenberg which features sculptural shell concrete forms with adjustable walls that can be thrown wide open to empty a full house (3,000) in 1½ minutes. Abroad the boom resounds even louder, with new structures rising and war-damaged buildings getting a thorough refurbishing.

Faced with this new demand, architects find themselves confronted with an age-old problem. The oldest solution to building an ideal structure for listening still seems the best; the ancient Greek and Roman amphitheaters were often acoustically so good that a sigh on stage carried to the farthest row. How to get the same characteristics under a roof and still make room for 100-piece orchestras, huge choral groups and whole opera companies with their oversize sets, ballet corps and costume designers is testing anew the ingenuity of the present generation of architects. Among their solutions:

¶Berlin's $1,750,000 Concert Hall, authorized this month after seven years of debate, will give Berlin's famed Philharmonic Orchestra a new home in an irregularly shaped, eight-sided structure that will place the musicians in the center, group listeners around them in a full circle. To spread the music equally in all directions, a concave sound reflector will be hung over the orchestra. Architect Hans Scharoun, 63, took his cue from watching music lovers clustering around improvising musicians, concluded: "The natural location of music, spatially and optically, is in the center of a music hall."

¶ Stuttgart has completed its attempt to provide an acoustically perfect shape with its $2,600,000 Liederhalle. The result is a windowless, concrete, ear-shaped main auditorium (capacity: 2,000) with as many curves as a Stradivarius. On the right wall hangs a cluster of boxes, below a buttonhook-shaped balcony that begins at orchestra level, becomes a raised balcony on the back wall. Says Co-Architect Adolf Abel: "The layout not only makes more sense acoustically but it helps to relax the audience."

¶ Cologne's Architect Wilhelm Riphahn, 67, solved the problem of cramped space in a bombed-out lot close to Cologne's twin-spired cathedral by erecting a structure shaped approximately like an Aztec pyramid. The massive, $3,800,000 Cologne Opera House, due to open this May, devotes two-thirds of its interior space to the stage and storage areas (five stage settings can be erected at one time), seats 1,386 in the horseshoe orchestra floor and ring of bobsled-shaped boxes.