BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group is nearing completion of the EVE Music Hall in Čepin, eastern Croatia, designed in collaboration with SIRRAH projekt and Theatre Projects. The 10,000 m² project contains a live music venue, congress facilities, exhibition spaces, a café, and rooftop event spaces. The venue is expected to host concerts, conferences, exhibitions, and cultural activities, accommodating nearly 4,000 guests indoors and up to 25,000 outdoors. The new cultural building marks the office's first project in Croatia and is expected to become its first completed music performance venue in early 2027.
The EVE Music Hall is composed of two distinct volumes surrounded by an agricultural landscape of fields and tree lines. Visitors arrive through pedestrian routes leading to the foyer between the two halls. The larger volume houses the live music hall, while the smaller volume contains the congress hall and supporting programs. Each hall is conceived as an independent venue, acoustically separated and optimized for different uses, allowing them to operate simultaneously or independently.
EVE is composed of two pragmatic music boxes, wrapped in sheets of Slavonian limestone that gently descend from the scale of the building to the scale of a bench. Once inside and between the two venues, the veil of stone is supported by mass-timber hulls that shelter and shape the main foyer at the heart of EVE, creating a warm wooden world. Outside, as it rests gently within the agricultural plain, the building has only fronts, where all façades contemplate equally the entire natural surroundings in all directions. - João Albuquerque, BIG
The facade walls, which are expected to be clad in slabs of local limestone, drape toward the ground like a curtain, referencing the concept of theatrical performance. The shape creates curved openings, revealing glimpses of the interior activity. Curved suspended timber beams span the interior central gathering space and extend downward into integrated seating. Interior walls are mirrored to reflect light and movement, and to extend views across the interior.
The project is designed to accommodate multiple performance formats, from seated concerts and orchestral events to standing audiences and large-scale productions, while the congress hall provides flexible space for conferences, presentations, and exhibitions. Outdoor gathering areas extend the venue into the surrounding landscape for festivals, performances, and open-air events.
The EVE Music Hall is conceived as a musical eruption on the infinite horizon of the Slavonian fields. Two concert halls, one big and one small, frame a public space between them. Facades of timber and stone are draped like fabrics, merging the verticality of the halls with the horizontality of the landscape. Slits in the stone curtains open up, inviting visitors to enter and explore. The main foyer is framed by the two mirror-clad walls of the concert halls, repeating the tent-like timber roof at infinity. The architectural whole is both functional and fantastical, like an architectural manifestation of utopian pragmatism. It is an embodiment of the almost oxymoronic contradiction of the bold ambition to build a regional cultural destination in the middle of the Slavonian countryside. - Bjarke Ingels
Other recent projects from BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group include the design for the new Tennessee Performing Arts Center in Nashville, United States; a newly designed stadium for Shakira's final concerts of her year-long Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran World Tour in Madrid; and the New Hamburg State Opera on HafenCity's waterfront. In collaboration with SCAPE, the firm designed the final vision for Manresa Wilds, a 125-acre waterfront park planned on a former power plant peninsula along Long Island Sound in Norwalk, United States. The office also collaborated with Snøhetta and MVRDV on the design of a new coastal neighborhood in Istanbul, Türkiye, currently under development.
