BIG WINS INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION TO DESIGN THE NEW HAMBURG STATE OPERA

BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group has been selected to design the new home of the Hamburg State Opera. Located on the Baakenhöft peninsula in HafenCity, the project will house the State Opera and the Hamburg Ballet, providing state-of-the-art production and performance facilities for the city, while opening new public spaces along the waterfront. Replacing the 1950s State Opera building on Dammtorstraße, the new 45,000-m2 venue responds to the city’s need for a modern house that meets contemporary acoustic, spatial, and technical standards. The new opera sits within Hamburg’s evolving waterfront – a city that has long intertwined culture and harbor life, from the Speicherstadt warehouses to the Elbphilharmonie – continuing the dialogue between civic architecture and the water’s edge. “The new Hamburg State Opera inhabits an island at the heart of HafenCity bookended by the vertical landmarks of Elbturm and Elbphilharmonie. The opera will appear like a landscape of concentric terraces – emanating like soundwaves from a central beating heart of music, expanding outward into the harbor like ripples on the surface of the sea. The result is a three-dimensional public park open and accessible from all sides, with expansive views in all directions – to the old city and the new, to Lohse Park and the Industrial Port. We are honored to have been chosen to imagine this key puzzle piece of the transformation of Hamburg’s HafenCity, and we are deeply grateful to Herr und Frau Kühne to be entrusted to turn their generosity into the city’s new epicenter for the performing arts.” – Bjarke Ingels, Founder & Creative Director, BIG