PARTISANS’ proposal for the National Concert Hall in Vilnius plays on the concept of a grand staircase as an entrance and primary socializing space. The grand entrance fuses the park and its pathways with the concert hall. The Concert Hall sits at the top of Tauras Hill. One of the highest points in Vilnius, Tauras Hill operates as a theatre at the urban scale. At the top of the hill, residents and visitors enjoy uninterrupted views of the city and from the city streets, are able to visibly see the Concert Hall, effectively situation the Hall as a beacon for culture.
The design for the Concert Hall envisions the entry hall as a continuation of the hill. The dematerialized and lightweight structure is a direct response the heavy Soviet-era Union Building that previously occupied the site. The three main programs of the Hall are distributed vertically. The entry hall is a level continuation of the hill situated between the grand and small concert halls. The grand hall communicates its presence with a copper-clad underbelly, and the small hall pushes upward from below, lifting the ground through graded seating and a staircase.
Precedents like the Vienna Musikverein and the Boston Symphony Hall were studied to exploit the relationship between acoustic performance and architectural composition. Our design reformulates traditional acoustic principles through algorithmic software that produced computationally derived surfaces that mimic the traditional ornamentation irregularities that create rich acoustic reverberation. The concert halls are equipped to host a variety of events that require different spatial and acoustic configurations through telescopic seating systems and an adaptable stage that can lift and lower.
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