London’s Next Concert Hall Design Looks Crazy, But the Design Has a Purpose

According to plans released Monday, London could soon be getting a new “acoustically perfect” concert hall. The design, from New York’s Diller Scofidio + Renfro would cost £288 million ($371 million) to complete the city’s Barbican Centre on a site now occupied by a traffic roundabout and the soon-to-relocate Museum of London. In a country grappling with austerity and Brexit, a plan for a 2,000-seat “center for music” seems to hark back to the more confident, stable time in the early 2000s when the Tate Modern opened. Indeed, there have been claims that it could do for the city’s classical music scene what the new Tate did for London’s standing as a center for modern and contemporary art.

Unveiling in an altogether different atmosphere, the concert hall plan nonetheless poses some questions: Does London need such a facility? How will its design mesh with that of the widely admired Barbican Center? And in a city whose global standing has shriveled somewhat, will it be possible to fund?