This Beautiful Concert Hall in Poland Looks Like a Cave

On the outside, the ‪Culture and Congress Center Jordanki—a multi-purpose concert hall and cultural center in Toruń, Poland—is a modern concrete-and-brick building. Inside, however, the venue resembles a cave, thanks to its red brick walls and ceiling.

Spanish architect Fernando Menis won a 2008 international competition to design the unique music hall for Toruń, one of Poland’s oldest cities. Workers began the project in 2013, and on December 12, 2015, the recently-completed building finally opened its doors to the public.

The 21,800-square-meter facility sits between the city’s Old Town, which was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997, and its newer developments. The exterior features a low, sloping facade that was designed to blend in with the neighborhood’s small-scale architecture. In contrast, its cavernous interior boasts two separate concert sites—one large, the other small—that can be converted into a single room by taking away partition walls and removable seats.

Menis created the venue’s geometric, cave-like surfaces by mixing together concrete and broken red brick. He calls the blend "picado." Not only does picado lend a distinct aesthetic, it also provides the Center with excellent acoustics, he says. "Thanks to its dynamic ceiling, the building can be tuned to effectively absorb symphonic performances, chamber, theater, opera, and film and meet any acoustic requirements the theater designer requires," Menis told architecture and design magazine Dezeen.

If you’re a music lover who’s traveling to Poland, you might want to swing by the Culture and Congress Center and listen to a performance by the Toruń Symphony Orchestra, or you can take a tour of the Center by watching the video above.

All images courtesy of YouTube.

[h/t Dezeen]