Casa da Música

Lonely Planet review

The vast roundabout at Praça de Mousinho de Albuquerque roughly marks the boundary between 'old' and 'new' Porto. Here you'll find Casa da Música, Porto's extraordinary new concert hall. Called 'insane' yet 'brilliant' by the Times and 'ruthlessly inventive' by the Guardian, Casa da Música finally opened its doors in 2005 - four years late but every bit worth the wait.

Like a gigantic piece of a raw crystal, the cloud-white concrete exterior is at once rigorously geometric and defiantly unsymmetrical. But that monolithic sheathing doesn't prepare you for the surprisingly varied delights inside. At the building's heart is a classic shoe-box-style concert hall meticulously engineered to accommodate everything from jazz duets to Beethoven's Ninth. It's also home to most of the building's only right angles. The rest of the rooms, from classrooms and practice halls to a light-filled VIP lounge, wind around the central hall in a progression of trapezoids and acute angles. It's as if architect Rem Koolhaus has deliberately crushed and twisted the sombre geometry of High Modernism, then added narrative touches such as azulejos and gilded furnishings - though always refracted through his own peculiar vision. The hall holds concert most nights of the year, from classical to jazz, fado to electronica. It also offers guided tours led by students from Porto's highly regarded school of architecture.