Extension of Youth Music School

The first phase of the Music school in Hamburg was finished in 2000. When designing this building there was already the intension for a second phase of the building: a new auditorium, the project for the classrooms, the public spaces and the administration was organized along an internal ramp-corridor spine that is visible to the outside as a cantilever.
This spine became the connection and the principal organization for the extension. The new auditorium for about 400 people fills almost completely the plot between the L-shaped school buildings that defined northern and western edges of the site and the first part of the music school. Placing the Project in between the existing building generates a series of complex spaces and relationships.
The auditorium is located on the first floor to offer a larger open space on the ground floor and to connect directly to the classrooms. The extension is a dialog between the existing music school and the surrounding tree landscape. It is almost like planting a tree.
The roof of the entrance lobby relates the scale of the auditorium to the scale of the visitors and signs the entrance. The chosen materials develop the given material of the surrounding. The brick colours of the church and the first phase of the music school is extended to 5 colours and generate pattern on the curved walls around the auditorium. The folded entrance foyer roof has the same zinc like the connecting ramp structure.
The internal colour scene is more festive: red, white and different tones of grey (concrete) and a tree like structure that holds the roof.
The auditorium with its own gallery is designed for performances of different sizes and in different locations in the centre on a stage with a movable platform. The geometry of the walls is fragmented and folded in order to improve the acoustics of the space. After several acoustic experts listen to performances it is considered to have excellent acoustics.