Edinburgh commits £75 million to a new concert hall
NewsEdinburgh Council has approved the 1,000-seat Dunard Centre, which is scheduled to open in 2026.
It will be the city’s first new concert hall since Usher Hall in 1914.
The architect is David Chipperfield, the acoustician Minoru Nagata.
The hall will be home to the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.
The budget seems unreasonably modest.
Nagata’s last project, Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie, cost ten times as much.
There’s a simple yet surprisingly reliable technique for estimating the cost of major projects: think of a very large number and treble it! It’s happened with HS2 (or what will be left of it!) and other major infrastructure projects, so there’s good precedent.
No project would get approved if the real cost were ever shown.
I would have thought that ‘unreasonably optimistc’ more to the point. But who knows? If Munich can build one then surely others can too.
One wonders where they think they’re going to find an audience?
Is Edinburgh not blessed with a large population of arts lovers ?Audiences should not be a problem.
And the festival is on top of that.
Clearly you are not aware that the Scottish Chamber Orchestra is one of the world’s finest smaller ensembles and already performs many dozens of concerts annually in the unsuitable Queen’s Hall. Along with other ensembles and activities, the new Hall will have no problem finding audiences, just as the Queen’s Hall does.
Well, the population of Edinburgh is only 540,000, a million less than much bigger Glasgow – not 9m like London, or 68m for the whole of the UK. The whole country of Scotland is only 5.5m at the most. Unemployment is high, and Council Tax coming in will be less other than what the UK government gives them.
I believe their populations are much closer in reality — official Glasgow is physically larger than Edinburgh. Wikipedia says their metro populations are are 900,000 to 1,800,000.
In Edinburgh perhaps?
Hope they have better luck on timing and budget than they did with the tram system
Is that it, it looks hideous? Edinburgh once a beautiful city is being destroyed.
Let’s see….a bankrupt nation, with a governing party hell bent on the self-destruction of independence, currently reliant on the English taxpayers to kepp its head above water…. what could possibly go wrong?
Sounds a bit like Brexit, when you put it like that.
The Elbphilharmonie has twice as many seats (2,100). Cost might scale with the physical volume of the hall, which in turn might scale with something approaching the cube of the number of seats. If that were the case, the Dunard budget could be reasonable.