Gabion: Rafael Vinoly’s Kimmel Center in Philadelphia: why can’t London have a concert hall like that? 1/4

London’s lack of a world-class concert hall is beginning to get embarrassing. Much as we all love the dear old 1950s Royal Festival Hall, it is tired and shabby and acoustically rotten: no wonder there is a £54m makeover plan, allegedly due to be approved next week. Across town, the Barbican concert hall - designed in the 1960s, opened in 1982, and always a bit of a dog - has now been acoustically tweaked so that the musicians can at last hear each other. It is much better, but it will never be state of the art. Nor will the glorious crimson oval of the Royal Albert Hall, for all its ambitious Lottery-funded makeover: it is a multi-purpose venue, and the wrong shape.

It is arguable that London has lacked this prime requisite of a world city ever since the 2,500-seat Queen’s Hall in Regent Street was destroyed in the Blitz, and that the Festival Hall, for all its democratic public spaces, never quite made up for that. Which raises the question: if we started from scratch now, rather than tinkering around with the variously flawed big halls at our disposal, could we do better?

Yes, we could. The proof is to be found on Broad Street, Philadelphia. Just before Christmas, that city celebrated the opening of the Kimmel Center - a $265m twin-hall concert complex, the new home of the Philadelphia orchestra, chamber music, and much else besides. Designed by one of America’s architectural elite, Rafael Vinoly, it does everything that such a place ought to, both socially and acoustically. Vinoly’s big idea is to place both large and small halls in a public plaza and then fling a huge glass barrel-vault over the whole lot.

As a result the Kimmel Center, which occupies a complete city block, has something of the feel of a cultural railway station. That’s a compliment. The visual arts equivalent would be the Musee d’Orsay in Paris, which previously actually was a railway station. The Kimmel works. Operating at full tilt, swarming with people as it was when I was there for the opening last month, it was a wonder to behold. And it sounded good, too.