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Piano Concerto: Piano transforms a factory into a concert hall that respects past and present and gives hope for the future

Architectural Review, The, Oct, 2002 by James Partington

In the middle of Parma, close to the medieval centre, is a park complete with fine specimen trees of many species that curiously surround a disused sugar factory. Renzo Piano Building Workshop was given the task of transforming the old building, a fine example of the nineteenth-century metal and mansonry functional tradition, into a new municipal concert hall.

Piano's approach was radical. He decided to put the auditorium into the main factory, and use the ancillary building to the east to house a rehearsal room and all the services. Other subsidiary buildings were demolished. The main building was transformed. Its side elevations were retained and repaired, but all floors and cross walls were removed, though the roof and its steel trusses was repaired and restored. So a huge tunnel-like shed was created, three stories high and some 90m long. The long walls are reckoned to be stiff enough to withstand residual lateral thrusts from the roof and to remain stable longitudinally. Piano wanted to retain the magic of the enormous volume, its tectonic majesty and its close relationship to the surrounding park. Enclosure from the elements is achieved by making three transparent glass screens that take the place of the former opaque masonry cross walls. Visitors approach the building from the south, where the side walls and the roof project beyond the first glass screen to form a breathtaking, Chiricoesque portico that both welcomes you and shades the glass wall. Through this transparent barrier, you enter a foyer that is on two levels, joined by a grand public stair. Ticket boxes and a cloakroom (behind the stairs) greet you as you come in. Up stairs, you look through another great glass wall down the auditorium to the stage, and beyond that, through the huge volume's transparent north wall to the trees and lawns of the park again.

Piano was keen to let the almost Roman structural dignity of the old industrial work speak for itself. To make such a rectangular and austere space appropriate for music, walls are treated with acoustic plaster and ceilings are absorbent too. Designed to accommodate both a symphony orchestra and a large choir, the stage is about 250m square. Sound from its platform is projected onto the 780 seats of the auditorium by hovering bent-wood reflectors. Surprisingly, the atmosphere seems right. For all the apparent austerity and hardness, reverberation times are not long.

Most unusually for a concert hall, you can see out into the park during performances -- all the old windows have been retained, save for the ones on the east side of the hall, which would have looked directly onto the smaller services building. Of course, blinds can be used to mask windows as directors of individual performances want. Perhaps one of the most poignant arrangements is when blinds are left open (or partly so) on the upper tier of windows only, allowing light to shine down into the interior, almost as it does from the clerestory of a medieval cathedral, where the body of the church is dim with stained glass, but luminance comes from the sky.

The Nicola Paganini auditorium is the latest in a series of the Building Workshop's wonderful transformations of fine old buildings, ranging from Palladio's canonical Basilica in Vicenza (AR March 1987) to Giacomo Matte-Trucco's amazing Fiat factory at Lingotto in Turin (AR March 1989 and AR November 1996). The Eridania sugar factory may not have been as distinguished as those two, but Piano's boldness has as usual transformed the old for new uses while enhancing existing essential qualities and creating a new presence, combining the properties of cathedral with Modern Movement notions of the endless shed and close contact with nature.