The multifunctional hall in the Imperial Baths is already serving for symphony rehearsals

Karlovy Vary - The multifunctional hall inside the Imperial Spa in Karlovy Vary is already being rehearsed for the opening concert, which will take place on Friday. The Imperial Spa itself is a unique monument, and the hall built into its atrium is also a technical marvel from many perspectives. It is variable as needed, acoustically adaptable from a philharmonic to a cinema, it is disassemblable, and it does not touch the building itself, in the middle of which it stands. According to the designer, architect Petr Hájek, its universality is exceptional, he told reporters today.

"There are halls that have mobile stages or mobile auditoriums. But in the complexity of elements and technologies that are all here in one place, there are very few halls, and I don't know of any similar ones. The fact is that halls are built for specific purposes; you either build a philharmonic or a multifunctional hall. But you don't expect a multifunctional hall to be top-notch in all parameters. But here, the assignment from the investor was for the hall to be top-notch in all parameters,” Hájek stated.

The hall for three hundred spectators cost about 140 million crowns, and an additional 90 million was needed to change the roof of the Imperial Spa to accommodate the hall within the interior.

The atrium of the Imperial Spa originally served as technical support for balneological operations on the sides. The original reconstruction project of the Imperial Spa, utilizing the atrium, did not account for it. However, the current leadership of the Karlovy Vary region pushed for the idea of building a multifunctional hall that would also serve for concerts of the Karlovy Vary Symphony Orchestra.

The design, production, and installation of the hall then took an unusually short time, just over a year. Individual elements of the structure had to be brought into the atrium through the ceiling using a crane and assembled on site. Because the hall is to be disassemblable, the structure is not welded, but bolted together.

One of the biggest challenges was to devise an acoustic solution. This was handled by acoustic specialist Martin Vondrášek from AVT Group. The ceiling of the atrium of the Imperial Spa is almost 20 meters high. It was therefore necessary to devise technical solutions to ensure that sound does not spread uncontrollably within the hall, while maintaining a reverberation time of around two seconds for the symphonic hall and under one second if it was to also serve as a cinema. As a variable curtain that would shorten the reverberation has not yet been installed, spectators of the International Film Festival will not see films here this year.