The event was marked by a ceremony that included a site visit (4,000 tickets sold for the event sold out in just a few hours; the total number of visitors to the facility was 5,000); in fact, the completion of construction is scheduled for 2012.
The Elbphilharmonie rests on a promontory in the middle of the Elbe, like a huge ship; its base is the brick volume of a warehouse for cocoa beans, tea and tobacco built in the 1960s, which has been empty since the 1990s. Now its space (all floors and internal partitions are being re-created there) will house a multi-storey parking lot for 500 cars, music training studios, meeting rooms and the Kaistudio concert hall, the smallest of the three planned (170 seats), intended for the performance of experimental music.
A new volume with glass facades was erected on it: to support it, an additional 620 had to be driven into the muddy bottom of the river next to the existing 1,111 piles of the warehouse (the total weight of the new building will be 200,000 tons). There will be a small gap between the old and the new parts - a "plaza" open from all sides at a height of 37 m, from where a panoramic view of the city will open. There will be a restaurant, a bar, a hotel entrance (250 rooms on 10 levels) and a residential area (45 apartments), as well as stairs to the foyer of two large concert halls. Visitors will get to the "plaza" with the help of an 82-meter escalator that runs along a curve through the entire interior of the former warehouse.
The main hall with 2,150 seats is almost independent from the rest of the building for optimal soundproofing. It is supported at a height of 50 m by 362 huge springs (the weight of the hall is 12,500 tons). Ideal acoustics will be promoted by a "white skin" shell of gypsum fiber panels, each with a different profile based on computer calculations. The stage there will be located in the center of the hall, and the seats for spectators will be on the “terraces” around it. The second hall, for 550 spectators, will be arranged according to the classical scheme.
The concave and convex glass panels of the facades of the new part of the building have already been partially placed in their place. Their "vibrating" outlines, as well as the openings asymmetrically located in them, give the upper volume of the building an ethereal, almost ghostly outline. Its “scalloped” end varies in height from 110 m at the end of the cape to 80 m in the opposite part of the roof.
