Jahrhunderthalle

Frankfurt's Jahrhunderthalle opened on 11 January 1963 to mark the centenary of the Hoechst company. Architect Friedrich Wilhelm Kraemer's project was completed after seventeen months of construction. From its early years, the hall presented a programme extending across classical music, jazz and popular performance. Yehudi Menuhin appeared in March 1963 and Duke Ellington in February 1965, followed by performers including Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin in 1969. Its orchestral history includes the Chicago Symphony under Georg Solti, the Vienna Philharmonic under Karl Böhm and the Berlin Philharmonic under Herbert von Karajan. Concerts and congresses have remained complementary uses of the building. The Farbwerke Hoechst commissioned the hall for the company's hundredth anniversary and opened it on 11 January 1963, in the Höchst district west of Frankfurt. Friedrich Wilhelm Kraemer and Ernst Sieverts set a dome eighty-five metres across on six supports over a rectangular base, giving a room of 4,800 square metres that seats up to 2,700 or takes 4,800 standing. Hoechst sold it to the Berlin promoter DEAG in 1999 for a symbolic mark. It has worked as a concert and congress hall since.