Forum Leverkusen

Concrete, and unapologetic about it. Ulrich S. von Altenstadt won the competition in 1960, building began in 1964, and the Forum opened in Wiesdorf in September 1969 on a hexagonal plan of prefabricated exposed concrete. The architect wanted something nearer a shopping centre than a theatre — a place people would enter without holding a ticket — and the programme still follows that thought, with a 969-seat theatre hall, a municipal cinema, an adult education centre, a restaurant and seminar rooms under one roof. The Agam Hall, a hexagonal room for 350 lined with kinetic slatted walls by the Israeli artist Yaacov Agam, is the building's signature. It has been a protected monument since 2006 and is regularly named among the significant brutalist buildings of western Europe.