Rem Koolhaas's Casa da Musica

Famed Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas has designed the new concert hall in the Portuguese city of Oporto. My opinion of it is based solely on Nicolai Ouroussoff's article and slide show in the New York Times (link - registration required).

Here's an excerpt from the article:

The main hall seems hyperrational by comparison. Since conventional wisdom holds that acoustically, the world's best concert halls - Symphony Hall in Boston, say - are built in the shape of a shoebox, Mr. Koolhaas gives us a shoebox. Similarly, the seats are arranged with the precision of an assembly line, in simple repetitive rows.

Judging by the photos in the slide show, Mr. Ouroussoff is right - this building is hyperrational, with all of the terrible modernist geometry that implies. The only nod to organic form (and even then, not human-scale) that I can make out is the interior wall decoration of the hall itself, which depicts freakishly blown-up wood grain. The rest - interior, exterior - looks like it was built by a little boy who had taken a chainsaw to his Lego set: an odd jumble of lines, triangles, diamonds, trapezoids and rectangles. Even worse - the Lego set was colored gray, white and black. Bilbao must be laughing...