Berliner Philharmonie

Berliner Philharmonie
Entrance to the concert hall
General information
Type	Concert Hall
Location	Tiergarten, Berlin, Germany
Address	Herbert-von-Karajan-Straße 1, 10785 Berlin
Coordinates	52°30′36″N 013°22′12″E / 52.51000°N 13.37000°E / 52.51000; 13.37000Coordinates: 52°30′36″N 013°22′12″E / 52.51000°N 13.37000°E / 52.51000; 13.37000
Construction started	1960
Completed	1963

The Berliner Philharmonie is a concert hall in Berlin, Germany. Home to the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the building is acclaimed for both its acoustics and its architecture.

The Philharmonie lies on the south edge of the city's Tiergarten and just west of the former Berlin Wall, an area that for decades suffered from isolation and drabness but that today offers ideal centrality, greenness, and accessibility. Its cross street and postal address is Herbert-von-Karajan-Straße, named for the orchestra's longest-serving principal conductor. The neighborhood, often dubbed the Kulturforum, can be reached on foot from the Potsdamer Platz station.

Actually a two-venue facility with connecting lobby, the Philharmonie comprises a Großer Saal of 2,440 seats for orchestral concerts and a chamber-music hall, the Kammermusiksaal, of 1,180 seats. Though conceived together, the smaller venue was added only in the 1980s.

Hans Scharoun designed the hall, which was constructed over the years 1960–1963 (open on October 15th, 1963 Concert Beethoven Symphony No.9 Herbert von Karajan cond. BPO). It was built to replace the old Philharmonie, destroyed by British bombers on 30 January 1944, the eleventh anniversary of Hitler becoming Chancellor. The hall is a singular building, asymmetrical and tentlike, with the main concert hall in the shape of a pentagon. The seating offers excellent positions from which to view the stage through the irregularly increasing height of the seat rows. The stage is at the center of the hall, with seats surrounding it on all sides. The Philharmonie is highly regarded for the quality of its acoustics. The so-called vineyard-style seating arrangement (with terraces rising around a central orchestral platform) was pioneered by this building, and became a model for other concert halls, including the Sydney Opera House (1973), Denver's Boettcher Concert Hall (1978), the Gewandhaus in Leipzig (1981), Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles (2003), and the Philharmonie de Paris (2014).