A guest post pleads for a renovation

VThe third report on the feasibility study from 2017 was presented to the head of the culture department in February. Their long-favoured variant of a culture mile with an opera house on Neue Mainzer Strasse was ultimately rejected for reasons that were clear from the start, namely the additional costs of 150 million euros for the purchase of the property. Valuable time was lost. According to the study from 2017, the theater should have been working in an external venue for almost two years, the opera would have moved into the theater on an interim basis, and the renovation of the opera house would be in full swing. By the end of the 1920s everything would have been more or less complete.

On the other hand, the so-called mirror solution in the ramparts is to start in 2027 and the theater there by 2031 and the opera on Willy-Brandt-Platz in 2036. Hope dies last. Since 2017, politicians had repeatedly hoped to find a more cost-effective solution than the 800 to 900 million euros estimated at the time through alternative locations and replanning or further detailed investigations. The decision by the city councilors that a new building would be cheaper than a refurbishment was also to be understood in this sense. The authors were not uninvolved in this. Now that renovation options and various new building variants have been examined again, one thing is certain: it won’t get any cheaper and interim venues are unavoidable.