After the Bilbao effect, cities all over the world launched cultural landmark projects to put their cities on the map. Stavanger in south-western Norway issued an architectural competition for a new Concert Hall at the site of an abandoned ferry terminal on the city’s waterfront.

Knowing that the new concert house would  play a fundamental role in the long-term
strategy for positioning Stavanger as an
economical and cultural node in Europe, BIG chose to mobilize the architecture to intensify the relationship between the concert house and the city around it rather than considering the new concert house as an isolated architectural object.

The competition brief consisted of two auditoria, a performance hall and a classical
concert hall both of which were defined by the
client as rational box-shaped volumes.

Rather than creating a composition of interconnected boxes, BIG imagined separating the boxes at each end of the site with a generous gap between them and melting them together with natural topography.

The design envisions the concert
house as an extension and enhancement
of the movements and activities that
already flow through the site. The concert
house as the music park’s extension
to the water, the destination of the blue
promenade and the Bjergsted’s smooth
transformation from the top of the rock to
the edge of the water.

Knowing that few experience the inside of a concert hall and most will only sense and experience the exterior, BIG’s design seeks to be as accessible and exciting on the outside as on the inside.

The spanning between the two peaks of the
valley constitutes a public arena under the open sky with the sea as a setting. Realized one to one, BIG proposed a stepped landscape of a thousand plateaus. Rather than being an iconic object for the postcard, or an elitist institution for the few, the Stavanger concert house would be a public landscape: part topography, part architecture – as active, accommodating and accessible on the outside as on the inside.