The Acoustics of the Concert Hall in Brno will be taken care of by Nagata

1 December 2017, 15:30
The Acoustics of the Concert Hall in Brno will be taken care of by Nagata

Nagata Acoustics America, Konior Studio and Architekti Hrůša & spol., Atelier Brno. This team looks like it will be the supplier of project documentation for a building permit and project documentation for the above-ground parts of the Janáček Cultural Centre. This is a new concert hall that will be a base for the Brno Philharmonic. The expert commission today recommended the contracting authorities that they choose this team.

“I am truly glad that at last we know the name of the winner and that we can now continue with preparing the project. The tender proceedings were very demanding and complicated,” stated Brno’s deputy mayor Matěj Hollan. “I am very satisfied with the winning team. Nagata is after all among the most renowned acoustics companies in the world,” added Hollan.

Two teams qualified for the competitive round, and the commission evaluated the bids they submitted. According to the law on public procurement they had to choose the bid with the lowest prize. The commission excluded the second team for not fulfilling the conditions of the law on public procurement. Currently we are in the fifteen-day period for the submission of appeals, after which the city can close a contract with the winning team. “The first task of the designers will be aligning the underground and above-ground parts of the building. Workers are now completing the first stage, that is the underground parking, which is to be handed over in January of next year,” said Hollan. 

Since 1971 Nagata Acoustic under Yasuhisa Toyota has designed almost sixty concert halls around the world. In the qualification round they showed their latest projects in Paris, Shanghai and Poland’s Katowice. They are also well-known thanks to the recent opening of the building of the Elbe Philharmonic in Hamburg. The second member of the team is the architect Tomasz Konior, who with Nagata designed the previously mentioned hall in Katowice. The trio is completed by the Brno architect Petr Hrůša with his studio as being responsible for obtaining authorisations and qualifications that are required under Czech regulations.

The city announced the competition for the project team last year in August. And from the beginning they made no secret of the fact that they had set very strict conditions. “A similarly specific space was created in the Czech Republic more than a hundred years ago – it was the Smetana Hall in Prague’s Obecní dům. There are not many experts who have experience of such a project,” explained the director of the Brno Philharmonic, Marie Kučerová. For this reason in the competition conditions the city required that each team as a whole demonstrated the realisation of three halls for symphonic music with the required capacity and natural acoustics, length of experience or work on buildings of a similar volume in heritage zones. “The team designs the form of the concert hall – its shape, soundproofing, placing of the organ, materials and similar. Thus the heart of the whole concert house,” added Kučerová.

The new concert hall is supposed to open for the 2020-2021 season. It will have a capacity of over 1200 and world class acoustic parameters. The total cost will be 1.276 billion crowns. According to a memorandum from 1 October 2016 the state is to contribute 600 million crowns, the city of Brno Brno 562 million and the South Moravian Region 100 million crowns.

About Hall for Brno

The name Hall for Brno (Janáček Cultural Centre) covers a project for building a new concert hall on the corners of Besední and Veselá streets. It will be home to the Brno Philharmonic, a more than one-hundred-member body on a European level that currently rehearses and plays in unsuitable conditions. The full orchestra is unable to fit on the stage in Besední dům, the philharmonic’s home. And in the Janáček Theatre, where they often give concerts, they have unsatisfactory acoustic conditions. Audiences do not really know what Philharmonic sounds like. “Thanks to the new concert hall we will see the true quality of the orchestra and I believe we will also be able to attract top international artists to Brno, where at the moment we have nowhere to invite them to,” stated the director of the Brno Philharmonic Marie Kučerová.

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