Casa da Música

Casa da Música is a major concert hall space in Porto, Portugal. It was designed by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, and was built as part of Porto's project for European Culture Capital in 2001, although it was only finished in the first half of 2005, to immediately become an icon of the city. The Building engineers were Ove Arup - London together with Afassociados, Oporto. The windows, doors and the curved glass wall was made by Facal (www.facal.eu).

Casa da Música was built just across from one of the main traffic centres of the city, Rotunda da Boavista. The place where the building now sits used to be a holding place for the electric cars that ran in Porto. Although construction ran over schedule 4 years and cost roughly 100M€ the building process brought new engineering challenges in order to build the odd shape that it has.