Blaibach community centre and concert house, Bavaria

The concert hall is the main feature among the urban development measures that are designed to revitalise the centre of the village of Blaibach. It is situated next to the new community centre and completes the construction project, which has been made possible with urban development funding, by creating a new village square.
The concert hall is a solitary construction made of concrete which follows the existing topography at the village centre with its inclination over the edge of a slope, and it takes up the masonry tradition of Blaibach with its granite façade.

The monolithic, tilted building opens up for concert visitors towards the new village square and from there it takes them via a stairway into the foyer, which is located below street level. This not only provides access to functional spaces like the cloakroom, the sanitary facilities, and the bar area, but also leads around the audience space and into the interior of the concert hall. The acoustics unfold within the concrete corpus, and the room, which is illuminated by light shining in a precise manner through slits, conveys a sense of lightness.

The dominant, tilted surface of the concert hall is designed solely to fulfil acoustic requirements and behind the slits there are not only LED lamps, but also bass absorbers, which provide for optimum acoustics. The concrete in the interior of the concert hall is unfinished. Its vibrant surfaces serve to absorb the middle-high frequencies. The sloping surfaces of the building carry the audience gallery, whose transparent-looking stools made of steel and positioned above illuminate slits appear to float in mid-air.

This project was discussed as part of the 2015 Baukultur Workshops in Kassel.