Palace of Peace and Reconciliation
Foster and Partners glass pyramid of 2006, with an opera hall and a stained-glass apex.
The pyramid was designed by Foster and Partners with Buro Happold as engineers and opened on 1 September 2006. It is 62 metres high on a square base of the same span, faced in pale stone and glass. The building was commissioned as the permanent home of the Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions, which gathers delegates of the major faiths in Astana every three years, and its rooms are arranged so that each confession has space for prayer and meeting.
An opera hall seating about 1,300 occupies the lower part of the structure, sunk below ground level and lit from above through the atrium. Higher up are a university of civilisations, a research centre, a library and exhibition rooms on the peoples of Kazakhstan. At the apex, reached by a lift set at an angle, a meeting chamber sits inside roughly 900 square metres of stained glass by the artist Brian Clarke, in which doves fly through the blue and gold of the national flag.
Highlights
- Glass and stone pyramid 62 metres high by Norman Foster
- Apex stained glass of flying doves by Brian Clarke
- Opera hall of about 1,300 seats below ground level
- Built for the Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions
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