This is a building that belongs to the people of Hamburg Christoph Lieben-Seutter, the chief executive of Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie, can laugh about it now… But just a few years ago, when the north German city’s new complex of concert halls, hotel, apartments and more was failing to meet deadline after deadline and haemorrhaging hundreds of millions of euros, the byword for ‘building scandal’, he admits, was ‘Elbphilharmonie’. Although, he adds, attention was eventually diverted away from them by the even bigger delays of Berlin’s new Brandenburg Airport.
But thankfully, and luckily for Hamburg, the Elbphilharmonie is a triumph, albeit an 800m euro triumph (the original estimate was below 300m euros). Parked atop a disused red brick warehouse, the glass-clad building is a striking addition to the city’s rapidly developing port,…
