The New National Opera House for Greece: Reflections from an Acoustical Design Practitioner

At the heart of Athens's new Stravros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center will be the new Greek National Opera House. The creation of this space poses a number of fascinating design questions, tied to the long and complex history of the relationship between the Greek nation and opera.

Greek antiquity was a primary influence on the birth of opera in Italy at the turn of the sixteenth century. Several ancient amphitheaters, still in use today, demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of acoustics, and they have had a profound impact on the art and science of venue design through the ages. Despite all this, Greece did not develop a tradition for opera until the mid-twentieth century. For the international team tasked with the design of a new national opera house, it was clear that the historical context required careful considerations.

Since 2008 I have led the room acoustical design on this project, collaborating with the architects at the Renzo Piano Building Workshop and with my acoustic consulting colleagues at Arup. Financed by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, the project aims to create a state-of-the-art facility with all required rehearsal and staging facilities for contemporary international opera productions, scheduled to be completed in 2015. The project also includes a National Library of Greece, an outdoor agora connecting the library with the opera house, and a 170,000-square-meter park surrounding the complex. The architectural design situates the buildings at the apex of the park's topography, which is conceived as a gradually rising manmade hill. Poetic circulation paths leading visitors through the park to the buildings will provide striking views of both the Aegean Sea to the south and the Acropolis to the north.

The project is symbolically important in many ways. As one of the biggest construction projects in recent Greek history, it will provide jobs and infuse capital into a challenging economic climate. In some respects, the opera house also represents a sense of unification of the Greek culture. The center has been designed to serve as a social and cultural hub that will attract many kinds of people, and it will be the first major national opera house built since Greek's independence in 1821.

Design History

In the fifteenth century, the spirit of the Renaissance reverberated across Europe. Early forms of opera emerged in Italian palaces for court entertainment. Opera quickly spread across the continent, leading to the emergence of distinctive national opera house design traditions. Toward the end of the Baroque era, the modern opera theater archetype (deep orchestra pit, vertical scenery system, horseshoe-form auditorium) became widely accepted as the standard typology.

During this period, the strong influence of ancient Greece was evident throughout the opera world. This was partly because many key aspects of operatic performance had already been experimented with by ancient Greek dramatists (perspective scenery [skenographia], sung entertainment, venue design, and so on), but also because Greeks had successfully rationalized the design of performance spaces. Designers of opera houses have often looked back at the nation's history as a source of new ideas. Italian Renaissance-era theaters such as the Teatro Farnese (Parma), the Olimpico (Vicenza), and the Teatro all'antica (Sabbioneta), for example, were designed to resemble enclosed miniature replicas of Greek amphitheaters, with scenery backdrops employing multiple-perspective vanishing points. Later venues such as London's Theatre Royal Drury Lane (1674), the Royal Opera of Versailles (1770), the Berlin Schauspielhaus (1821), and the Bayreuth Festspielhaus (1876) also reveal a strong Greek influence.

In Greece, however, these developments did not take root. During this critical initial period of opera's development, Renaissance culture in Greece was stifled and suppressed by the Ottoman Turks, who occupied the nation from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. While its antique traditions were inspiring opera lovers throughout the continent, Greece did not develop an opera tradition of its own.

After analyzing these historical background and precedents, a design direction for the new opera house started to emerge. To pay tribute to Greece's substantial influence on opera's development and attempt, in some...