Casa da Música (portuguese for House of Music) is a major concert hall space in Porto designed by the Dutch arquitect Rem Koolhaas. It was built as part of Porto's project for European Culture Capital in 2001 but was only finished in the first half of 2005 and immediately became a icon in the city.

Construction

Casa da Música was built just across one the the main traffic centers of the city, Rotunda da Boavista . The place where the building now sits used to be a holding place for the electric cars that ran in Porto. Although construction ran over schedule 4 years and cost roughly 100M€ the building process brought new engineering challenges in order to build the odd shape that it has.

Reviews

The building's design has been highly acclaimed worlwide. Nicolai Ouroussoff, architecture critic from the New York Times, classified it as the "most atractive project the architect Rem Koolhaas has ever built" and saying it's "a building whose intellectual ardor is matched by its sensual beauty". He also compares it to the "exuberant design" in Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. "Only looking into the original aspect of the building, this is one of the most important concert halls built in the last 100 years", comparing it to the Walt Disney Concert Hall, in Los Angeles, and the Berlin Philharmonic auditorium.

Opening day

Altough the opening day concert took place on the 14th with Clã and Lou Reed the space was inaugurated on April 15, 2005 by the Portuguese president. The Prime-minister and many other notable politicians and Porto society were present at that moment for the concert by the Orquestra Nacional do Porto .

Capacity

The building has an auditorium with 1238 capacity and a smaller room with 300 capacity. The acoustics of the auditorium have been measured as one of the best in the world.

The building also has a restaurant that can serve up to 250 people, a garage with 660 car capacity,

Website

Casa da Música (http://www.casadamusica.com/)