Aesthetic or aesthetic?

There are building projects that architects lick their fingers for. The design of a concert hall is certainly one of them. Despite tricky acoustic aspects, despite spatial constraints and despite some of the client's special wishes, the architect is able to spread his special ideas: see the equally expensive and fascinating Elbphilharmonie by Herzog & de Meuron, see Norman Foster's imposing Zénith de Saint-Étienne Métropole or the Berlin Philharmonie by Hans Scharoun, inaugurated in 1963.

Not only Foster's and Scharoun's buildings are included in the photo book Concert halls to see. In total, the editor Michel Maugé presents 104 largely well-known European houses. Photographer Manfred Hamm has taken some beautiful pictures, both interior and exterior views of the buildings from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. The collection is based on a "primarily aesthetic perspective", write Michael Astroh and Manfred Hamm in the foreword. Ultimately, however, one could also speak of aestheticism taken to the extreme when looking at the deserted interior views of the large halls, which often seat up to 2,200 people. The images "sound" in your head even without musicians on stage. But the fact that architecture is ultimately made "for people" is lost from view in a presentation form that is too sterile and aseptic.

Michael Astroh, the author of the introductory text "Spaces of Music", also has to put up with the accusation of a presentation that is not very "grounded" and far removed from reality. He writes far too little about specific problems, be it acoustic issues or the particular architectural requirements of 20th and 21st century works. Instead, the philosopher Astroh oscillates between generalities and strangely redundant observations about something like metaphysical constellations. After such elaborate episodes as the following, one prefers to turn to the many color and black-and-white photographs: "In a technologically oriented culture, art and entertainment contrast quite obviously with each other. Their disparate objectives, on the one hand the shared internalization of autonomous expression, on the other the here and now intense experience of shared perception and movement, require different aesthetic strategies. However, the alternatives converge in the apotheosis of a communal subjectivity that relies on its cultural assets." (p. 23) Well, yes.

Concert halls, photographed by Manfred Hamm, edited by Michel Maugé, 192 p., € 98.00, m:con Edition, Mannheim 2012, ISBN 978-3-9814220-0-9