Creating the Pierre Boulez Saal The Pierre Boulez Saal is one of Frank Gehry’s smallest recent works, but one of his most emotionally resonant. It speaks not only to his deep love of music, but also to his relationship with Daniel Barenboim, one of the many musicians—Pierre Boulez, for whom the hall is named, was another—with whom Gehry has forged a close friendship based on shared values and beliefs as well as admiration for their artistic accomplishments. In the case of Daniel Barenboim, that friendship was sparked by the esteem Gehry has long felt for Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which Gehry has seen as a musical counterpart to his own longstanding efforts to use art and architecture as a vehicle for breaking down social and political barriers. In 2012, Barenboim called his architect friend and asked if he would be willing to design a small chamber music hall in Berlin to honor their mutual friend Pierre Boulez and to serve as the centerpiece of the Barenboim-Said Akademie, which Barenboim had founded that year to extend the Divan’s mission of transcultural dialogue. The budget was tight, and so was the space: the 680-seat hall was not to be housed in a new building but in a former warehouse of the Berlin State Opera. Barenboim made it clear that because of the financial limitations and the necessity of creating the hall within an existing structure this could not be another Walt Disney Concert Hall, the extraordinary building in Los Angeles whose exterior is as
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powerful as its interior. Like most musicians, Barenboim shared the admiration of architecture critics for Gehry’s accomplishment at Disney Hall, but here he was setting the architect a different challenge: to see if he could provoke as potent an emotional response in a simple and relatively small interior, set into an existing building and constructed on a limited budget. Far from being bothered by these constraints, Gehry was excited and saw the commission as an opportunity to employ a different set of tools and to explore how a quiet work of architecture can enhance the experience of listening to music. Having built Disney Hall, the New World Symphony in Miami Beach, and the Fisher Center at Bard College in upstate New York, he knew that he could design large rooms that worked well for orchestral music. Could he do the same on the scale of a chamber music hall? Gehry’s original thought for Berlin was to inscribe an oval within the rectangular space of the warehouse interior, which he sketched out for Barenboim when they first met to discuss the hall. (This very first sketch can be seen on the cover of this program.) Gehry is nothing if not self-critical, and not long after these initial sketches were made he began to question whether the idea of the oval was not too ambitious and whether it would not be more appropriate here to restrain his instincts toward bold forms. So instead he began to explore a traditional shoebox design, which fit easily into the existing space.
When he showed his new sketches to his friend, Barenboim missed the oval and encouraged Gehry to return to it, urging him not to trim his sails for the sake of modesty and simplicity. It was a sign of these two artists’ mutual respect that Barenboim felt comfortable rejecting Gehry’s more conventional scheme as soon as he saw it, sensing that it lacked both emotion and ambition— two qualities Gehry has rarely been accused of having in short supply. Gehry, relieved, not to say pleased, at his friend’s response, returned to his initial concept and, by positioning the performers in the middle of the oval, blurred the distinction between stage and audience. A second oval served as a balcony, placed slightly off axis both to improve sightlines and to set the whole composition moving. Orthogonal lines, to Gehry, were not the natural lines of music. The two ovals, with their off-axis relationship, evoked both lyricism and the complexities of harmonic balance. And so the design developed. It was refined over many months, with the assistance of Yasuhisa Toyota and his firm, Nagata Acoustics, which helped Gehry set the height of the balcony and the position of scalloped glass fins, gradually fine-tuning the balance between the gentle intimacy of a small chamber and
the gravitas of a grand hall. Gehry fussed over the models in his office in Los Angeles with as much care as he was accustomed to giving to 50-story apartment towers and large museum structures; his passion for this small hall was visible to anyone who walked through his studio as he worked to create a room that would possess both the dignity suitable to the music to be played within it and the informality of a hall in which no member of the audience would be more than 50 feet away from the performers, and some would be as close as three feet from them. The Pierre Boulez Saal was the project in which Frank Gehry felt he was making himself think again about how architecture could have a positive effect on the perception of music, but in a new way: here, closeness would be the goal, in a room that would be as perfect on a small scale as Disney Hall was on a large scale. The result is a space that does not show itself at all on the exterior, that seems modest and understated when you first enter it, but that is capable of heightening emotions just as music does, with subtlety and power—a space that reveals its magic only when the music begins, when architecture and sound become one. —Paul Goldberger
The author, formerly the architecture critic for both The New York Times and The New Yorker, has written numerous books on the subject including Why Architecture Matters and Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry, published in 2019.
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