Modern and classic buildings side-by-side in Portuguese city

PORTO, Portugal -- Walk uphill from this Atlantic city's medieval quayside, past the octagonal baroque tower of the 18th-century Clerigos church and the fabulously ornate 19th-century Bolsa palace, and you'll encounter a futuristic spectacle.\nThe brash modernity of Porto's new Casa da Musica -- House of Music -- concert hall is outlandish, even bizarre, in a city that dates to pre-Roman times and cherishes its centuries-old monuments.\nDesigned by acclaimed Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, the recently opened Casa da Musica is public architecture at its most daring. It is shoehorned into a cramped city whose layout captures the busy muddle of Porto's prosperous 19th-century trade in port wine and textiles.\nFlagrantly, defiantly modern, the Casa da Musica sits on an apron of tan-colored stone like a cut gem held up for public view. From a narrow base, it sprouts out diagonally, suggesting a chiseled block of white cement. Discreet nighttime lighting embellishes its space-age quality amid the mundane traffic jams.\nAs with I.M. Pei's glass pyramid over the entrance of the Louvre in Paris, or Frank Gehry's titanium-clad Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, locals feared the unconventional project would jar with, and maybe demean, the charm of its historic surroundings.\nBut Koolhaas has been mindful of local sensibilities. And, increasingly, locals are puffing out their chests with pride.\nFranklin Barros, a 75-year-old retired textile worker who has lived in this old part of the city all his life, said his friends and neighbors were at first suspicious of the Casa da Musica's dramatic modernity.\n"But now that people can go inside and look around, they've started growing fond of it," he said, as he stood next to the traffic-clogged street. "It's unique. You can't see anything like this anywhere."\nGoing through the low, slotlike entrance, the lobby suddenly opens up into a space almost as high as the roof. Angular pillars cut slashes across the uncluttered insides of brief metal stairways and slanting, bare-cement walls. The perspectives are often disorienting. They prevent the viewer from getting a mental grip on the interior and convey the impression that the building is a living, moving thing.\nThe Casa da Musica has been heralded as one of Koolhaas' best works in an already impressive career that has earned him the Pritzker Prize, architecture's most prestigious honor, and the European Union's Mies van der Rohe award.\nThe magnificent main concert hall draws gasps. Banks of silver cushioned seats are flanked by timber walls embroidered with gold leaf.\nAt each end of the rectangular space, high rippled windows ensure acoustic integrity. Their turquoise tint is also a reminder that the River Douro, flowing from Spain, meets the Atlantic Ocean at the bottom of the street.\nCorridors coil around the main hall. Broad, tall windows exhibit vistas of the city and help the Casa da Musica latch onto its incongruous surroundings -- an old hardware store and a dingy cafe where locals gather for a chat, a dusty shoe shop and a butcher shop.\nThe panoramic windows are part of Koolhaas' reply to the conundrum of how to knit 21st-century architecture into an old-fashioned city. The obvious reply to that riddle is that the Casa da Musica in many ways doesn't suit its location, but perhaps the bigger question is, why should it?\nThe Casa da Musica is intended to be something special, not something commonplace. Even so, Koolhaas has been mindful of the neighborhood. Standing about six stories high, the building obeys the scale of its surroundings.\nKoolhaas said he chose a blank cement exterior because he didn't want to drain any color from the neighborhood -- its lush green park across the road, the local buildings' weathered stone facades and terra-cotta roofs.\nThe 60-year-old Dutchman and the authorities also wanted the Casa de Musica to be a broad temple of sound, encompassing musical tastes instead of excluding them.\nA smaller concert room, featuring purple seats and orange walls, can be cleared to create a dance floor where guest disc jockeys or jazz bands perform.\nIn another room, school groups and families can check out Hyperscore, computer software developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. By drawing lines of various colors and shapes across a screen, users with no musical training can cook up their own tunes and hear them played back.\nHiring Koolhaas for this city center project has proved a masterstroke.\nThe nearby Serralves Foundation's Museum of Contemporary Art, designed by Portuguese architect Alvaro Siza Vieira -- also a Pritzker laureate -- was previously Porto's only modern venue of note.\n"Porto now possesses cultural venues that are highly prestigious for Portugal and a source of deep pride for this city," said Mayor Rui Rio.