Erl is a tiny village in Austria’s North Tyrol. Although an idyll of mountain, forests and pastures, it has been the repeated theatre of war and suffering down the centuries. During the last World War, the people of Erl resolved that if they survived, their village would be the venue for performances of the Passionspiele, Christian passion plays.
Since then Erl has hosted the Erl Tiroler Festspiele, a classical and sacred music festival held each year since 1959 in the Passionspielhaus designed by Robert Schuller.
Almost fifty years later, the town has a new concert hall, the Festspielhaus, this time for a winter concert programme, that now sits alongside its summer partner. Set against the mountains and forests of the Tyrol close to the pure white curve of the Passionspielhaus, the new building designed by Delugan Meissl Associated Architects takes its cue from its natural surroundings and the history of the place, becoming the trait d’union between the two.
The spiky geometry, brown colour and materiality of the new volume take their cue from the rocky terrain on which it rests. Its dark mass seems to meld into the mountains behind and the trees in the foreground. The older Passionspielhaus and the new Festspielhaus have a diametrically opposite yet complementary relationship with their natural setting, and with each other: one, unforgivingly white, distant and ethereal, the other, the embodiment of dark materiality. Yet they offset and sustain one another. The white Passionspielhaus fades into non-existence in the snows of the winter months when the new festival hall comes into its own, while in the summer, the new volume is discreetly concealed by the trees to give pride of place to the historic concert hall.
The sloping terrain has been exploited to create a main entrance that resembles a split in a natural rock formation.
The interior is a striking contrast of light and dark, dynamism and contemplative quiet.
The white, symmetrical lobby and distribution circuits direct the glaze both towards the warm dark-coloured reception and sitting areas and to the lights giving views onto the natural landscape. Once in the concert hall, however, asymmetry and movement give way to order, symmetry, orthogonal shapes and warm-timber cladding, an environment conducive to quiet concentration and music appreciation.
Here in Erl, black and white, silence and music resonate to the initial resolve of the villagers: that history and artifice should exalt nature, and war and sorrow make peace a necessity.
Caterina Testa