Berliner Philharmonie

The Berliner Philharmonie stands near the Tiergarten in Berlin, completed in 1963 to a design by the German architect Hans Scharoun, built as the home of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra after its earlier hall had been destroyed in the Second World War. Its irregular, tent-like roofline and asymmetrical golden aluminum-clad exterior were unconventional for a concert hall of its era, but the building's most influential innovation lies inside: rather than facing a single stage from fixed rows, the audience sits in a vineyard-style arrangement of terraced blocks surrounding the orchestra on nearly all sides, with the conductor and musicians placed at the center of the room instead of at one end. This in-the-round seating configuration, developed by Scharoun with the acoustician Lothar Cremer, was considered a radical departure from the traditional shoebox concert hall and has since been widely imitated in concert hall designs around the world. The building survived in continuous use through the Cold War as a cultural landmark of West Berlin, and it remains one of the defining examples of postwar organic Expressionist architecture in Germany.