Auditori de Barcelona

The Auditori de Barcelona (in Catalan and officially, L'Auditori) is a modern building of 42,000 m² designed by the architect Rafael Moneo. It was inaugurated on 23 March 1999 and is intended both for staging musical concerts and for teaching and promoting knowledge of music.

It sits at the centre of the new urban hub of the plaza de las Glorias in Barcelona, where the city's three largest and longest avenues converge (the Diagonal, the Gran Vía and the Meridiana), close to the old town, the Eixample, beside the Teatro Nacional, the plaza de las Glorias, the opening of the Diagonal to the sea, the 22@ district and the Fòrum area.

The building, of sober external modernity, contains the following concert halls:

Sala 1 Pau Casals, normally reserved for performances by symphonic ensembles, with a capacity of 2,200 spectators

Sala 2 Oriol Martorell, normally used for performances by chamber music ensembles, with a capacity of 600 seats and

Sala 3 Tete Montoliu, considered a multi-purpose hall, with 400 seats.

Sala 4 Alicia de Larrocha, with a capacity for 152 people and a stage of 80 m², will be used for small-format concerts, closer to experimentation and new creation. It will also be devoted to meeting the current demand for rehearsal space of the Banda Municipal and the BCN216 instrumental group, as well as other resident groups of the Auditori.

In the central access atrium, a monumental cubic glass dome in the form of an impluvium has been built, decorated with paintings by Pablo Palazuelo. The acoustics of the halls were meticulously studied as part of the project by the specialist engineer Higini Arau.

The same musical complex is home to the Banda Municipal de Barcelona, the Orquesta Sinfónica de Barcelona i Nacional de Catalunya (OBC), the BCN 216 instrumental group, the Escuela Superior de Música de Cataluña and the Museo de la Música. All of this makes the Auditori a centre of the city's musical life across the fields of outreach, teaching and research.