B-flat is an international 2-stage competition winning underground vineyard concerthall for central Sarajevo
| Project Location | Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina |
| Project Type | Concert hall, cultural building, public landscape, civic infrastructure |
| Project Description | 1st prize international competition proposal for a new national concert hall combining a 1,500-seat vineyard concert hall, 500-seat chamber music hall and folded public landscape. |
| Architect | UFO Architecture |
| Consultants | Structure: Hanif Kara, Adam Kara Taylor Engineers (AKT); Environment: Klaus Bode, BDSP; Traffic: Halcrow & Fox; Acoustic: Arup SoundLab, Seb Joun |
| Competition | Sarajevo National Concert Hall international architectural design competition |
| Project Status | 1st prize winner in an international 2-stage architectural design competition |
| Project Duration | 1999 |
| Programme | 1,500-seat vineyard concert hall, 500-seat chamber music hall, public foyers, access routes, service areas and public landscape |
| External Publications |
BJCEM — International Design Competition Sarajevo Concert Hall Architects’ Journal — UFO goes underground in Sarajevo concert hall win |
| Design Focus | Folded public landscape, vineyard concert hall, chamber music hall, civic ground, spiralling access routes, daylight, foyer landscape, cultural urbanism and acoustic performance |
Sarajevo National Concert Hall Competition is UFO Architecture’s 1st prize proposal for a new national concert hall in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Developed for an international two-stage architectural design competition in 1999, the project combines a 1,500-seat vineyard concert hall with a 500-seat chamber music hall and extends the public surface of the city into a continuous architectural landscape.
The proposal is conceived as both a concert hall and a civic terrain. Rather than treating the building as an isolated cultural object, the project folds the surrounding park-scape into and beneath the ground, creating a public surface that wraps the foyers, auditoria and service areas while forming an accessible landscape above.
Three spiralling access routes draw visitors from different points in the city and descend through the building towards the main auditorium tiers. The bifurcated landscape creates entrances, daylight openings and spatial transitions between city, park, foyer and performance spaces.
The surface expands and contracts as it moves through the building, accommodating different public events and creating a fluid relationship between urban space and acoustic interior. The concert hall is developed as a folded civic landscape for music, gathering and movement.
This competition proposal forms the basis for the later Sarajevo National Concert Hall Auditoria Development, where the acoustic and spatial qualities of the main hall were further developed with Arup SoundLab and Seb Joun for the Venice Biennale Metamorph exhibition in 2004.
