Roll over Beethoven!

If you look at a photograph of the music theatre in Graz, Austria, you might think it had been taken with a fisheye lens, but the visual trickery is all in Dutch firm UN Studio’s design.

The €19m (£17m) Haus für Musik und Musiktheater opened on Sunday after two years of construction. It is a performance venue and faculty building for the local music and performing arts university, and incorporates a sense of movement and drama in its form.

Although it is a small structure, the bulge of its outermost mesh makes it appear as if it is bursting at the seams, and it has an impressive 6,200m2 floor area. The architect calls this a “blob-to-box model” and says it means the public entrance at the front of the building, and the rear door, through which the performers and students enter, are linked in an unbroken, flowing line.

On the first floor, a stainless steel staircase with a blood-red interior is the centrepiece for the area in which concert-goers will mingle between acts.

The bulge of this building’s outermost mesh makes it appear as if it is bursting at the seams

Unwinding from the building’s foyer is a coil of sculptured concrete that climbs and twists over the building’s three floors.

Ben van Berkel, UN Studio’s principal, said this “twist” was even more complicated to build than the similar structures in the practice’s RIBA award-winning Mercedes Benz museum in Stuttgart. He said: “The dimensions of this particular twist necessitated far greater precision and the use of self-compacting concrete, which was pumped up from below instead of poured down from above.”

Van Berkel and his co-principal Caroline Bos were recently awarded RIBA international fellowships. Their building subverts Goethe’s now clichéd assertion that architecture is “frozen music”. This structure is music in flowing, effervescent form.