HANGZHOU YUHANG OPERA
Above: The accessible roof
was inspired partly by the
region’s 3,000-year-old manmade
sloping landforms
Right: The ‘cracked ice’
façade is constructed from
UHPC panels and glass
32 AUDITORIA 2020 VOLUME ONE
otherwise things jump. That necessitates
a particularly stiff roof structure.”
Cracked ice façade
Both the main auditorium and the conjoined
black-box theatre are clad in a distinctive pattern
with windows shaped like jagged pieces of
cracked ice interspersed across the concrete
of the façade, allowing the theatre to fully
open to the elevated public plaza. This enables
audiences of 10,000 people to enjoy works staged
in the theatre – 20 times the black box’s interior
seating capacity.
“The black box is probably the most
innovative part of the building,” comments
Godefroy. “And this plaza needed to be animated
sometimes, so we felt the best idea was to make
it a venue. Instead of giving it its own stage,
we decided the stage of the black box could
integrate with the plaza.”
Accommodating such a large movable
wall was challenging. “When you put in
something that moves you need to make
space for it,” explains May of BuroHappold.
“When it opens to the central space, it cuts
through a lot of the cantilevering structure.
There’s quite a lot of gymnastics that need
to happen. When you’ve got things that
move and need to continue to move that run
on wheels and rails, the amount of the structure
that can be allowed to move is much smaller –
Turn
to page 6
to read about
another of Henning
Larsen’s projects,
the expansion of
Opéra Bastille in
Paris, France