Opera’s biggest current scandal is Cologne
OperaTen years ago, the city of Cologne commissioned a refurbishment of its ghastly modern opera house.
The approved budget was 288 million Euros.
Last night, the city of Cologne signed off the latest estimated cost: 665 million euros.
Someone has not been telling the truth. They never do when cultural buildings are involved.
Not just cultural building projects….ANY building project in which the government is involved.
For context, that’s more than what it would cost to build Sydney Opera House from scratch today…
I’ve seen better architectural aesthetics in elementary schools on the American plains built at 20% of that budget.
Background to that: They’re trying to keep up with Dusseldorf at all costs, no matter how unsuccessful their efforts might be.
Actually Düsseldorf signed off on a new opera house in 2019 instead of a renovation because of the Cologne scandal, looking at these sort of problems it makes sense to just build from scratch with a big publicity project from an architect who really wants it to be good publicity instead of renovating a house that already has serious technical problems!