Park Auditorium

The Auditorium del Parco is a complex for musical use built in L'Aquila as a temporary replacement for the Nino Carloni concert hall, located inside the Spanish Fort and rendered unusable by the 2009 earthquake. The project, financed by the Autonomous Province of Trento as a sign of solidarity with the Abruzzo capital, was born on the initiative of maestro Claudio Abbado, with the aim of returning a place dedicated to music to the city as soon as possible. The arch. Renzo Piano thus conceived the structure formed by three cube-shaped volumes, of which the main one, in the center, contains the actual hall.

The location of the auditorium within the Castle Park, in the vicinity of the Spanish Fort, stems from the decision to keep alive the vocation of the area as a place of meeting and cultural enjoyment for citizens. In addition to the building proper, the open space surrounding the auditorium was also designed to host performance and entertainment initiatives when necessary, with the possibility of exploiting the building's blind facades for video projections. The facility was inaugurated on October 7, 2012, with a concert by the Mozart Orchestra, conducted by Maestro Claudio Abbado himself.

The Park Auditorium is located between the Spanish Fort and the Luminous Fountain, slightly off-center from the directrix that connects the latter to the western bastion of the castle. It consists of three volumes: the main one, which houses the auditorium, is rotated with respect to the ground line, as if an edge of the cube were driven into the ground. The other two smaller side cubes contain the "foyer" and are intended for audience services, technical rooms and artists' dressing rooms.

The hall has a raised stage capable of holding 40 musicians, surrounded by a double stalls of 8 tiers on the south side and 2 on the north side, for a total of 250 seats; in case of need, the smaller tiers can be used by choristers. The three volumes are connected by iron and glass walkways, and are built in accordance with earthquake-resistant design criteria. The wood used comes from conifers in Val di Fiemme, Trentino.

The structure of the Auditorium consists of a lattice of glulam fir beams, infilled on both sides with X-Lam type panels and resting on a 100-cm-thick reinforced concrete slab, rectangular in shape. In turn, the slab rests on sixteen reinforced concrete pillars, arranged around the perimeter of the plate. The structures, the tallest of which reaches 18 m in height, then rest on elastometric isolators, capable of absorbing much of the seismic energy in the event of an earthquake. The type of construction chosen for the intervention ensured a high assembly speed.

Acoustical aspects related to the proper reverberation of sound with respect to the position of the source and that of the listeners were solved through the insertion of curved wooden resonance sails, hung from the ceiling and arranged at the sides of the hall and stage. If necessary, the opening of sound-absorbing curtains placed at the top of the hall, controlled by an automated system, makes it possible to change the internal reverberation time. This particular acoustic flexibility makes it possible to calibrate the hall according to the function for which it is to be used from time to time.