The building of the Ziggo Dome concert hall was built in 2009-2012 by the Dutch bureau Jan Bentem and Mels Crouwel, famous for their work on the central stations of Rotterdam and The Hague, as well as the snow-white trapezoid of the new wing of the Stedelejk Museum of Contemporary Art in Amsterdam. The concert hall, whose acoustics is considered the best in the Netherlands, was built in the southeast of Amsterdam next to the Arena, a large football stadium that is "home" for the Ajax club. The South East is a modern part of the Dutch capital with a complex history of development. In the 1970s, the modernist Belmer district, the Amsterdam "Cheryomushki", was built here: a district of multi-storey typical housing, which quickly degraded socially and was dismantled by two-thirds. Nowadays, the community center of the Belmer district is actively transforming into a city of shopping centers, office towers and parks. The appearance of a new concert hall here was quite natural.
During the creation process, the hall was called the Music Dome, then it was renamed the Ziggo Dome in honor of one of the main sponsors of the construction, the largest Dutch cable channel and Internet provider Ziggo. One of the goals of the construction was to enable the Netherlands to host a tour of world-famous stars who require a hall with perfect acoustics and a large capacity: from 12,000 to 20,000 people. Before the construction of the Ziggo Dome, which can accommodate 17,000 spectators, there was no such hall in the country - although the neighboring Arena accommodates three times as many people and concerts are also held in it, the acoustics there are not very good. After a train station was built nearby, designed by Nicholas Grimshaw in 2007
Bijlmer ArenA, getting to both the Arena and the Ziggo Dome has become very convenient: 600 meters on foot, five minutes walk.
The Ziggo Dome architecture is simple and functional. It, one might say, does not exist at all, it is so subordinated to effective design and engineering requirements. There is no dome, the presence of which could be assumed based on the name (Dome) - the name is conditional. The four-storey hall with two tiers of the amphitheater, and the surrounding vestibules, rehearsal rooms and cafes are placed in a simple box-parallelepiped with a square plan: 90 x 90 x 30 m. The basement is recessed, and the floor of the hall is about 5 meters below ground level. Even lower - 1 tier of underground parking for VIP-visitors. The uppermost tier is occupied by ceiling structures with a height of more than 7 m; up to 100 tons of stage equipment can be suspended from them.
The hall was built with the expectation of live performance and everything was possible for perfect acoustics: 20 acoustic panels in each segment of the auditorium and panels on the ceiling absorb excess reverberation, making the sound "dry" and clean. Visitors are provided with good visibility of the stage from any point, comfortable chairs, the upholstery of which is made according to the latest research in the automotive industry.
Careful distribution of flows allows you to get to the place by the shortest route; there are many cafes and even - this is specially emphasized by both architects and the administration on the Ziggo Dome website - toilets, and movable partitions allow you to change the number of male and female booths. Of course, everything is provided for the pop stars: dressing rooms, rehearsals, rooms for the touring team. In addition, the hall, although it was built as a concert hall, is easily transformed - it can be used to fill an ice rink, arrange an Olympic-class pool or tennis competitions.
Outside, the Ziggo Dome is the purest dark "box", the simplest form. If not for the LED screens with an area of 10,000 m22composed of 840,000 LEDs and covering all four facades of the building, turning it into a three-dimensional multimedia screen that can even broadcast video. During the day, during the rehearsal period, the Ziggo Dome is simple, only slightly gleams with diode bulbs. And in the dark, popular for concerts of modern music, it turns into a glowing cube capable of broadcasting any images - into a mega-poster, a showcase of itself. Passing by, it is impossible not to notice it.
Of course, a world-class concert hall required sophisticated electrical equipment. The company in charge of its installation, Beemster Electrical Solutions, hired ABB, which designed and installed an intelligent building management system based on the open KNX bus at the Ziggo Dome, for which ABB has been providing solutions for over 20 years.
The system developed by ABB for managing the energy systems of large and complex buildings like a world-class concert hall is called i-bus KNX. In fact, it is a “smart home” scaled to solve complex problems. Such a system controls everything: from the timers of the lights that surround the building on the street, fire safety, energy saving, air conditioning and heat - to programming the media facade, controlling the lighting of the stage and all rooms, including the entrance and hallways. But in this case, ABB engineers, according to company representatives,
focused on managing all kinds of lighting as it is an important part of any concert.
All electrical components of the Ziggo Dome are connected to the central core, from which four main nodes are routed, based in the basement floor and transferring tasks to 56 distribution lines on four main floors - which provides a margin of power and reliability sufficient for non-trivial tasks of a multifunctional concert hall designed for the best quality amplified sound and the most effective performances.
You can adjust, reconfigure and disable all functions using an interface that is available both stationary - on screens built into the walls of the main rooms, and from a mobile device, from a tablet. Which does not exclude, of course, traditional tumblers. There is something fantastic in the fact that one person, moving around the building with a tablet - he is the control interface - in his hands, can, for example, dim the lights in any room, turn everything on and off at once, or activate, which is especially important, which some of the lighting modes of the entire building. Obviously, in this way you can save a huge amount of not only electricity, but also time - just walking to the switches. Of course, one person with a tablet in his hands in this case is impossible to do - the system is monitored by a team of specialists. But the speed of response, capabilities and technical perfection of this solution are obvious.
Modern music not only largely rests on mixing and amplification capabilities, but also often flaunts its manufacturability, flaunts it, turning into a kind of high-tech aesthetics. The considerable possibilities of modern technology, ultimately subordinated to one soloist - the "star" - definitely make an impression. The Ziggo Dome building works in unison, its aesthetics - laconicism and the ability to quickly, provided with technology, transformations. All of it as a whole - in essence, delicate, but working like a clock stage equipment, deus ex machina, a robotic theater that receives 17,000 spectators at a time. Without an intelligent control system that operates from a single button if needed, this building-tool effect would be incomplete.
