Cologne Opera sinks deeper into Rhine
OperaThe city of Cologne has just conceded that its opera house has missed its latest deadline for repoening.
The house was shut for refurbishment in 2012. It should have been ready in 2015, but missed successive targets, including the latest at the end of next month.
The project manager has been dismissed. There is no new opening date, as yet.
This could become Cologne’s second longest building project, after the Cathedral, which took 800 years.
Mmmm…… the prospect of Cologne Opera taking 8 ages to finish, is a bit of a shock. But Cologne cathedral was not built over a period of 8 ages, it was stopped somewhere halfway because money ran out and the Middle Ages ended. Only in the 19th century with renewed interest in the Middle Ages, the original plans were discovered and the immense thing was finished as a national German project.
haven’t you realized what Germany has become in the late 15 years….an absolute disaster and one reason is Angela Merkel
as she didn’t do anything
it does not seem fair to accuse Merkel of the delays of Cologne opera. It is, after all, very very difficult to make something of a modernist building. Better would have been to demolish it and building a new one along the designs that have proven to work very well: like the original Alte Oper in Frankfurt, the Wiesbaden opera house, the Berlin Staatsoper, and of course the Dresden Semperoper.
Except that the Alte Oper in Frankfurt is not an opera house at all but a concert hall. The Oper Frankfurt resides in a modernist building on Willy-Brandt-Platz of similar vintage as the Cologne Opera.
Yes I know, it was the original design that I referred to.
It is remarkable that in project after project in recent years, that vaunted German efficiency has somehow failed. The Berlin Airport, the Koln Opera. Who knows what else? Kahnemann/Tversky’s Planning Fallacy come to life.
It’s not the only dodgy project in Cologne. There’s that U-Bahn line with a gap in it not very far away from the Oper.
Not the only delayed opera house in Germany either. The one in Hamburg took forever to be built.