A Coruña Opera Palace (La Coruna, Spain)
A Coruña Opera Palace
The A Coruña Opera Palace was opened in 1989 as an architectural reference to host cultural events in the city and has been the headquarters of the Galician Symphony Orchestra since its creation in 1992 by the La Coruña City Council. In its main room, it has a capacity for 1,805 people seated.
The building, embedded in the quarry of the Santa Margarita Park, has a semicircular plan and its facade is formed by a peristyle of 32 smooth columns topped with triglyphs and glass metopes. At the meeting of the Palace with the quarry, a great waterfall emerges. Its postmodern architectural language makes it a reference for the movement in the city and one of the most recognizable endowment buildings in La Coruña.
Originally, the Opera Palace was conceived as a Conference Center, for this reason, it has a conference room with a capacity for 425 seats and a 50m2 stage, and a control center prepared for simultaneous translation. In 1999 a project was carried out to condition it structurally and acoustically to host operatic and theatrical productions together with symphonic concerts.
Today, with an average of 311 days of annual occupation, the Opera Palace has become a cultural reference in the city, allowing the development of all kinds of projects and events that enrich the cultural life of the citizens of La Coruña and its visitors. Among the events that are held periodically, it is worth highlighting the Mozart Festival.
The Opera Palace project was conceived by Grupo TAU with the technical collaboration of García BBM (acoustic), Alessandro Traldi (acoustic shell) and Müller-BBM (acoustic improvements in 1999).
Its unique characteristics make the Opera Palace one of the few in Europe where both symphonic music and operatic shows can be offered with acoustic quality. The García BBM company was in charge of auditing its acoustic data sheet in which the specific data of the technical requirements that are specific to listening rooms are reflected (reverberation time, clarity, brightness, etc.) and in which the confirms that the La Coruña Opera House is in the optimal reverberation time at the medium frequency for a symphonic music auditorium, with a reverberation time with a full room of 1.7 seconds.