The secret behind the Danish Broadcasting Corporation's new concert hall

We know how to build the impossible

Want to know a secret? The Danish Broadcasting Corporation's new concert hall was impossible to build. Even before we broke ground, we knew that to have the remotest chance of realizing this exceptionally beautiful and distinctive concert hall, there was a serious need for engineering innovation.

The concert hall is shaped like a giant walnut – 42 x 58 metres in the horizontal plane – with the "shell" composed of steel and concrete. It doesn't seem problematic, if you think of it as a finished building. But if you look at the construction process, it is a rather different matter.

A giant framework of steel and concrete

The problem was how to construct the shell. The original plan was to build a giant framework of steel and face it with trapezoidal plates and gunite.

But when you build to heights in excess of 40 metres, the force of the wind is much stronger than at ground level. The framework would have acted as a giant sail, resulting in a highly unstable structure during the period in which we were going to build.

A special task force

To solve the problem we decided, in collaboration with the Danish Broadcasting Corporation, to set up a special task force including all parties involved in the construction. And we established a close collaboration with our subsidiary Promecon, which specialises in steel constructions.

The solution we reached together was actually relatively simple. Because it quickly turned out that some of the experience we acquired during the construction of the Great Belt Bridge and the Øresund Bridge was highly relevant to the construction of the concert hall.

240 tons of concrete

The problem was solved by casting six 40 ton concrete elements at the site. Then we used one of Denmark's mightiest mobile cranes to lift all these tons of concrete 25 metres up in the air.

The six concrete elements were installed and supported by steel buttressing frameworks, which were only removed when the construction of the shell was complete. The elements functioned as a kind of bridge, which we used as a platform for constructing the rest of the giant steel and concrete construction.