A bold statement or just another ugly building

The news from Paris--the vicious attack on Charlie Hebdo--that continues to play out in cities across the globe is indicative of how deeply a city--and a nation--can be affected by global terrorism.  But, buried in the headlines is another event: the opening of a new concert hall on the outskirts of the city. Reviews are mixed.

Philharmonie de Paris: Jean Nouvel's €390m spaceship crash-lands in France  Oliver Wainwright, the Guardian

You mean it looks like this?

Orchestre de Paris, Philharmonie de Paris, review: 'elegant eclecticism'

Ivan Hewett, the Telegraph

Concert-Hall Discord in Paris

J. S. Marcus, Wall Street Journal

Nouvel boycotts opening of own Philharmonie de Paris

Colin Marrs, Architects Journal

This is the building in question, the Philharmonie de Paris:

That damn Louvre Pyramid...

This monstrosity joins the Parisian landscape which now includes:

AND the grotesque Opera Bastille

The specs on the new hall are as appalling as its architecture.

• Cost:  Estimate--170M Euros; Actual--381M Euros.  That's $488 M USD
• Construction overrun:  two years late

Even the project's architect is more than a bit upset:

Running two years late and three times over its original budget, the €390m concert hall was still surrounded by an army of workmen fanatically fixing cladding panels to the facade when the conductor took to his dais on Wednesday evening. But Nouvel was conspicuously absent. “The architecture is martyred, the details sabotaged,” he wrote in a blistering editorial in Le Monde that day, describing the finished result as a kind of architecture “that oscillates between counterfeiting and tampering”.  Colin Marrs

Marrs goes on to write, If it is a bewildering arrival in the city, it finds solace here among a zoo of other architectural misfits. The Parc de la Villette is the work of Bernard Tschumi, French godfather of the punkish deconstructivist style, whose bright red follies dot a landscape punctuated by a plethora of strange experiments from the 80s and 90s. There is a mirrored geodesic dome and a hangar-like science museum, a tensile rubbery performance arena and an undulating conservatoire – and, right next to the Philharmonie, the wild postmodern assemblage of Christian de Portzamparc’s Cité de la Musique, already home to a 1,000-seat concert hall.

Many commentators insist that, like other structures within the French capital, the Philharmonie will "grow on us (and them)",  given the time.  Call me old-fashioned, but the outside is as important as whatever happens inside, for the entire space needs to be inviting, something this cash-landed spaceship will never be.

TOMORROW:  Berlin and other German architectural atrocities....