The acute need for a Concert Hall was on the political agenda during the last years of the Soviet occupation and afterward during the period of Awakening. Already in the late 1980s, the Council of Ministers of the Latvian SSR considered the construction of a new Concert Hall, even a design competition was commissioned in 1988, however the implementation of the project was discontinued due to the lack of funding. A new proposal on the construction of a modern Concert Hall was made by the chairman of the Riga City Council’s Cultural Committee at the time, Dainis Īvāns in 2003. In 2004, the Cabinet of Ministers lead by the Prime Minister Indulis Emsis declared the new Concert Hall to be one of the government priorities. The Ministry of Culture started to implement the project.
The decision on the construction site of the concert hall was taken on December 1, 2004 by the Project Coordination Commission of the Contemporary Art Museum and Acoustic Concert Hall consisting of officials from the City Council and the Ministry of Culture. The commission supported the idea that had been unanimously recognized at the seminar or architects – to build the hall on the Krišjānis Valdemārs dam (AB dam), thus creating a group of culture objects and positioning the Concert Hall close to the new Latvian National Library on the left bank of the Daugava River.
Within the development of the project for Riga Concert Hall the specialists from the Latvian architects’ office Sīlis, Zābers un Kļava observed several important conditions – prospected fast development and intensive construction works in the neighborhood of the Concert Hall, perspective solution for the traffic flow of Pārdaugava, location of the AB dam in the most visible and important spot between Vecrīga and the emerging landscape of the left bank of Daugava.
From the side of Old Riga, the new concert hall with its dark finishing will visually create a unique contrast to the building of the Latvian National Library, which, on the other hand, is going to be light and symbolically emitting information. Elsewhere in the world, architects sometimes tend to follow their fantasies, creating a building without consideration of city planning aspects, in the case of Riga Concert Hall it is different - the architect Andis Sīlis says that his philosophy is different in principle: to help function find its right form. The concert hall as a result will be appropriate specifically for Riga, because it has been designed for its specific location.
