Pavilion of the Bavarian State Opera by Coop Himmelb(l)au

On Monday, June 29, 2009, during the opening of the Munich Opera Festival, Wolf D. Prix borrowed from Herman Melville in his speech “the most beautiful description of architecture.” He quoted a sentence from his famous novel Moby Dick, which says: “I would wish to have the wind body.”
This year's Munich Opera Festival takes place under the motto “Under Construction” and Wolf D. Prix was invited to a conference on art, music, and architecture. His architectural office Coop Himmelb(l)au was also approached to build a temporary pavilion for the Bavarian State Opera at Munich's Mastallplatz next year. The mobile pavilion is set to replace this year's tent structure located behind the opera, which will serve the cultural program dedicated to “the principles of transforming opera and its interaction with contemporary theater architecture and urban building art.” The new pavilion is also meant to promote the State Opera during their travels in Germany and across Europe and to testify to the creativity of the Bavarian State Opera.
Nikolaus Bachler, the director of the State Opera, sees the pavilion as a perfect “fusion of theater with architecture.” Wolf D. Prix explains his concept of architecture, space, aesthetics, and permanence in a bit more detail: “I am thinking more of buildings that are not limited boxes, but those that gain energy through their form and facade and show the shape of the future society through their shape. However, I do not mean those that are depicted in many colorful magazines, lifeless architecture of telephone sex, whose images promise a lot but can fulfill none of it. Buildings in our cities are the imprint of our culture.”