Japanese inflatable concert hall heads to Switzerland for the first time

The concert hall was moved to the festival site and inflated © Lucerne Festival Ark Nova 2013

It can hold up to 300 people and takes just a few hours to set up: the world’s first inflatable concert hall, Ark Nova, is heading to Switzerland for the first time.

+ Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox

It looks like a giant balloon made of shiny purple plastic. When fully inflated, the Ark Nova concert hall stands 18 metres tall. Its outer shell is made from fabric just six millimetres thick – two layers fused together, with air pumped in between to give it shape.

In theory, the Ark Nova can be fully inflated in just ten minutes. But to avoid putting stress on the delicate material, the team takes several hours to let the air in gradually. There’s no metal framework holding it up; the structure is stabilised by an inward-facing, air-filled arm.

The Ark Nova has been assembled four times to date – each time in a Japanese city. But this September, it’s heading to the Lucerne Festival, marking something of a homecoming. Back in 2011, it was Michael Häfliger, the long-serving director of the classical music festival, who first sparked the idea for the mobile concert hall.

+ Inflatable ‘ark’ brings artistic relief to Japan

The Ark Nova was created as an artistic response to Japan’s 2011 triple disaster, when a massive earthquake struck, triggering a devastating tsunami. More than 18,000 people lost their lives. The flooding also led to the Fukushima nuclear crisis, one of the worst in history.

“Music is hope and confidence,” says Häfliger, reflecting on the project. His vision was to bring the mobile concert hall to the heart of the disaster zone, so that even those most affected could still experience live music. He reached out to friends in Japan and began rallying support from donors.

A 1.7-tonne inflatable concert hall

The inflatable structure was designed by British artist Anish Kapoor and Japanese architect Arata Isozaki. It was first put up in 2013 in Matsushima, on the Pacific coast of northern Japan. Since then, it’s travelled to three more locations across the country. The venue has hosted everything from big band performances to chamber music concerts.

The hall was last inflated in Tokyo in 2017 and has been in storage in Japan ever since. Now, the 1.7-tonne structure is making its way to Lucerne by ship and lorry. It will be assembled over the course of August on a meadow by Lake Lucerne.

35 concerts in Lucerne

This September, the purple interior of the Ark Nova will host 35 concerts, each lasting 45 minutes. The line-up spans classical, folk and pop music. The events are part of this year’s Lucerne Festival, the last under long-time Artistic Director Häfliger.

Once the final concert is over, the air will be let out, and the hall carefully dismantled, packed away and shipped back to Japan. For now, no further performances are planned there.

Translated from German with DeepL/sp

How we work

We select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools to translate them into English. A journalist then reviews the translation for clarity and accuracy before publication. 

Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. The news stories we select have been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team from news agencies such as Bloomberg or Keystone.

If you have any questions about how we work, write to us at [e-mail]