Editorial Note · 04 / 12

A glass crown set
upon a brick warehouse —
acoustic, civic, vertical.

Suspended above the Kaispeicher A on the Elbe, the Elbphilharmonie negotiates two centuries of Hamburg's harbour identity. The reclaimed brick base anchors the gesture; the wave-form glazing above resolves the building as a public threshold rather than a finished form. The Grand Hall — a vineyard-style concert space terraced around the orchestra — was acoustically tuned by Yasuhisa Toyota across a decade of physical modelling.

For this archive, Hélène Binet returned in late winter to photograph the building under flat northern light. Her reading of the volumes — registering brick, glass and the city's grey water as a single continuous tone — informs the editorial selection presented below.