Harbour master.

This proposal for a concert hall on a waterfront site in Bristol is a very particular response to place and programme; sadly it seems destined to remain unbuilt.

Although architectural competitions are a frequent stimulus to architectural quality and new ideas, the competition process stops client having a dialogue with their architect. Hence the competitive interview with architects chosen not for a specific design but for their approach and past record. Even with this method, architects often produce designs and even elaborate models, but for this project for a concert hall in Bristol. Stefan Behnisch and his collaborators 'submitted relatively little material'.(1) Instead they talked about their approach, their attitude to collaboration, the qualities of the site as they saw it, and their way of doing buildings. Their very openness impressed the jury and made others' concepts look 'rather finite'.(2)

The Behnisch office in its various guises(3) has long believed in Situationsarchitektur, architecture derived from and inspired by a particular place and need. Not for them the one-liner, the simple and finite solution. Rather, they expect to develop their understanding of the situation allowing a design to evolve, reflecting in its complexity the intricate conditions which it serves.

The concert hall project was lottery-funded, and the idea passed easily through the first two hurdles of the lottery process. The site lay at the centre of old Bristol, close to the Cathedral on the southeast facing corner of the old harbour, a part of the Avon's course that was cut off by locks in the early nineteenth century to provide a tide-free dock. With dramatic views to and from many directions, it is twice a corner: on the river front because of the bend, and behind because of its diagonal relationship with New World square, the main approach. Particularly awkward are the unresolved geometrical alignments left by the huge and recent Lloyd's Bank headquarters (Arups, not at their best) which not only refused to complete New World square, but introduced its own rather selfish geometry of a series of broken circles.

Behnisch's early contextual study models are revealing both of method and attitude. While the treatment of the building as a sphere gives it an appropriately jewel-like status, it leaves all else unresolved. The version with two diagonally-placed auditoria works for the square and the harbour edge, but not for Lloyd's incomplete crescent. The more fragmented forms permit a greater wealth and ambiguity of reference, allowing a notional completion of Lloyd's crescent without submitting to its rules. The existence of various fragmented versions suggests an open-ended exploration of the effects, but also assumes a highly articulated building. As the design evolved, it was developed as much from the inside out as from the outside in.

The main spaces were a large concert hall seating around 2000, a more intimate hall for dance and ballet seating around 500, a rehearsal hall, the public foyers and restaurants, and the necessary offices and changing rooms. From the start, the main halls were f articulated as the shaping landmarks within the whole, but equally important was the spatial progression from New World square through the building to the harbour front and its views. Parts would even hang out dramatically over the water's edge, supported by a set columns in the water.

The plan was organized around three main axes. Two, marked on the plans with dotted lines, locate the two public auditoria. The Dance Theatre occupies the north end of the site, parked up against the neighbouring dock building, its axis perpendicular to the harbour wall. For the main hall, a new diagonal axis was introduced linking the harbour corner with New World square. Although none of the routes through the building actually follows this axis, it would be felt as an organizational device through the bulk and symmetry of the hall. The third axis, implied but undrawn, is that of the rectangular wing to north-west, which follows the alignment of New World square. The wing contains offices and rehearsal hall, with independent shops and the entrance for performers on the ground floor.

Between the two halls and their axes develops a complex and transparent foyer space. At ground floor level, this links the major entrance from New World square with the minor one off the harbourside walk. Laced with stairs placed as directional elements to lead you through, traversed by bridges and galleries and topped by a great sloping glass roof, this would be a suitably festive space for promenading crowds in the interval. Beyond the main hall, placed at the prow of the complex to take advantage of the best views over the water, is a series of cafes and restaurants, again open on the ground floor to the harbourside walk.

The concert hall proper was frankly modelled on Scharoun's Berlin Philharmonie, the twentieth-century model for a democratic concert hall (and the main alternative to the traditional shoe-box type) favoured by musicians and audience for its intimacy, coherence and good acoustics.(4) As there, the audience at Bristol was to have been divided into a series of irregular seating terraces, using the fronts as acoustic reflectors. Exploratory work with layouts led to a more vertical design than the Berlin original, and since it was to be used for many different kinds of concert including pop, also a much greater flexibility of stage and stalls seating. The smaller dance hall was planned as a rectangular volume, but again offered a high degree of flexibility of staging.

While earlier this century buildings of this kind routinely articulated their auditoria to create a 'functional' external form, such as Melnikov's Rusakov Club or the egg-in-a-box Royal Festival Hall, the mere presentation of these large 'dead' volumes is often not enough.(5) Utzon's Sydney Opera House or Gehry's more recent museum at Bilbao have taught us how major cultural buildings can have as crucial a role externally as landmarks as they have internally as institutions. Open to a wide angle of water, the Bristol building would have been visible not only from many directions but also from surrounding hills, and the architects saw it as a glowing jewel in the city, helped with a profusion of contrasting transparent and reflective surfaces. Working with models, they devised an external form that followed the interior only approximately, relying on a series of folded roof and wall plates, not differentiating between the two. This let the building respond chameleon-like to different directions changing in scale and transparency.

Through a succession of drawings and models, the Harbourside concert hall grew increasingly exciting, convincing and seductive. The clients were satisfied, the city enthusiastic, and the advising architect called the design 'a masterpiece',(6) but last July, after a year of hard work by the client, the architect's specially assembled project team, and leading technical specialists, the Arts Council panel turned down the [pounds]58 million lottery application. Reasons given related largely to the business plan, though it had been accepted apparently without a qualm at the earlier stages, and to the economic viability of the proposed institution. More specifically there was supposed to be a 'lack of senior level executive expertise', whatever that may mean.(7) The design was not criticized, though the brief was said to be 'incomplete'. If so, could it not be completed? After spending all that time and energy, let alone money, such a summary dismissal at the last hurdle without a chance to amend and readjust seems to say the least brusque. And to turn down the first major design in the United Kingdom by one of the foremost German architects while British architects build all over Germany will neither help European relations nor dispel the notion that the UK is provincial and protectionist. The kind of building was new to these shores and belonged to an architectural tradition from which much could be learned. That it was also an exceptional Behnisch work and pushing out the frontier of the building type makes its loss doubly unfortunate. It cannot be transposed elsewhere, for the whole point of Situationsarchitektur is that it be unique to the place.

1 From an official statement by Richard Burton of ABK dated September 1998. As architectural adviser to Harbourside. Burton was a leading organizer of the competition.

2 Ibid.

3 Gunter Behnisch, now 76, first set up an office in his name in 1952. It has had various partners at different times and a high turnover of relatively young staff. With a large workload in the 1980s. a second office was set up which is now run by Gunter's son. Stefan Behnisch, and called Behnisch, Behnisch & Partner. Gunter Behnisch maintains a significant advisory role, but his presence is sporadic.

4 No space here for the background theory. see Chapter 10 of my Hans Scharoun. Phaidon 1995.

5 Dead because a concert hall is necessarily an isolated container allowing no visual or aural connection between inside and out. Only the life in the foyer can be shown off.

6 Statement provided by Richard Burton. see note 1.

7 Arts Council statement dated 30 July 1998, supplied by Arts Council Press Office.

Architect Behnisch, Behnisch & Partner, Stuttgart, Germany

Project team Gunter Behnisch, Stefan Behnisch, Gunther Schaller, David Cook, Martin Arvidsson, Volker Biermann, Andreas Ditschuneit, Martin Gremmel, Jill Hauck-Spaeh, Malte Hofmeister, Diana Michael. Frank Ockert, Klaus Schwagerl, Ian Waters

Structural engineer Buro Happold

Environmental engineer Max Fordham & Partners

Acoustic consultants Muller BBM 

Theatre consultant Theatre Project Consultants

Model photographs Christian Kandzia