DE_BACKGROUND CURTAIN

Komische Opera House, Berlin, Germany.

 

We want a modern, heterogeneous opera, for all audiences of any age and condition, that is accessible in all its parts and that generates links between users, operators and artists. For this we have made incisions in the building as if it were a surgical operation, in order to improve the building, not only internally, if not volumetrically to the outside, solving and improving existing problems in the current building.

On the other hand, we wanted to provide the original building with volumetric autonomy and unity, creating a courtyard that physically separates the two buildings and taking the connection as far back as possible, providing it with formal and visual independence.

The extension module is conceived as a homogeneous and functional box, which covers the entire length of the street, which is attached in a stable way to the new building. This box will have a material and visual connection on the inside of the building to which it will be covered with a double skin of glass. We want a very resounding and weighty volume as an extension, which invites everyone to come closer and interact with it, but which in turn has a total connection with the new building. It is a building that is inserted in the most urban area of ​​Berlin and that is why we endow it with symmetrical rhythms, but with a new architectural language, which is totally related in an aesthetic way with the old building.

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For that outer casing that we have named before, we referenced ourselves, to create it, on the opera backdrops themselves. We formally rely on the collection of the curtain and use its arches to create that new urban language. In such a way, that we create a glass curtains in the total height of the building that are twisting in their longitudinal direction. These individual curtains are subjected to a torsion stress in a different way so that the vision we get from the main roads to the building is of those folds that are obtained when picking up the curtain of the opera. However, we do not want to lose the material identification with the old building and we incorporate some stone elements into those curtains. These elements are shaped like arches, emulating that collection of curtains with ribbons. It can be said that the new building is a rhythmic succession of curtains, giving it a direct identity with the building that it supplies.