Joan Collins meets Dr Caligari.

With an inaugural gig by Lou Reed, Porto's new concert hall, the Casa da Musica, is finally up and running (above, bottom picture). Designed by OMA, it manifests a characteristically challenging approach to historic notions of music theatres, updating and reinterpreting conventions for the twenty-first century and beyond. Though the main 1300 seat auditorium is an orthodox shoebox lined with timber panels, the shoebox has both ends removed to introduce vast vistas out over the city, and the timber is humble plywood, dignified with gold leaf applied in a rippling pattern that recalls a trashy animal print (very Joan Collins boudoir). Wrapped round the main hall and its smaller 400 seat sibling is a German Expressionist labyrinth of staircases and promenade spaces, all angles, concrete and gloom (very cabinet of Dr Caligari). Porto sees the long awaited Casa as its Guggenheim, capable of attracting cultural tourists and architectural groupies, and in terms of the city's existing rather sober architectural scene, dominated by Siza and Souto de Moura, it represents an exhilarating, if slightly disarming, fast forward. We aim to cover it in more detail later in the year.

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Coincidentally, Souto de Moura's Braga Stadium (AR July 2004) was on the final shortlist of two for the Mies van der Rohe Award for Contemporary Architecture, made by the European Union. Yet this seems to be Rem's year, as the prize went instead to OMA's Netherlands Embassy in Berlin (AR May 2004) (above, top picture). The jury, chaired by Zaha Hadid and including Aaron Betsky, Mohsen Mostafavi, Suha Ozkan and Kazuyo Sejima, praised the 'quality of the urban reflection.... and the unprecedented concept of the "trajectory".' Another gong for the Rotterdam trophy cabinet. C.S. www.casadamusica.com