Which theater does the country need in the next decades?
Who sets the course, makes the decisions?
Is it the directors, the architects, the cultural politicians, the treasurers?
For the public sector it is not only about a lot of money, but also about questions of cultural self-image.
Both call for the participation of civil society.
But that also raises questions: How much say does the audience have, and how do they make themselves heard and competent in such a complex debate?
Theaters are expensive, both to build and to maintain. If you add up the estimated costs for the thirteen largest new construction and renovation projects that are currently under construction or in planning in Germany, you get a total of around five billion euros. The general renovation of smaller three-division houses is apparently no longer available for less than a hundred million, as our current overview of a good dozen current projects shows that the large houses have long since reached the billion mark.
After all, the days of fine arithmetic are over.
The cases of the Elbphilharmonie, the State Opera Unter den Linden in Berlin and the Cologne Opera have had a healing effect in this regard.
It is now frowned upon to initially work with deliberately kept low costs in order to politically enforce a new cultural building, as was the case in Hamburg.
And from Cologne and Berlin you could learn how important it is to examine the building fabric intensively at an early stage and also to include high risk buffers for unforeseen additional costs and price increases in the calculation.
Anyone who initially deceives themselves and the audience will be punished with citizen anger and continuous negative press.
Honest Frankfurt
Frankfurt am Main was one of the first cities to be honest from the start. In June 2017, a study was presented according to which both the renovation of the double theater in the city center and the construction of a new opera and drama would cost around nine hundred million euros each. The in-depth and insanely expensive examinations that followed have essentially confirmed the result. The shock of the enormous sum was deep even in wealthy Frankfurt. But nobody in politics and citizens questioned that there had to be a high-quality solution. The passionate debates revolved around the question of whether renovation should be preferred in order to preserve the foyer with its striking glass facade, or whether a new building was advisable and, if so,whether opera and drama should be better separated from each other in the future.