Next year sees the opening in Los Angeles of the 2,300 seat Walt Disney Concert Hall by Frank Gehry. This musical Guggenheim extends to 11 acres the 1960s campus of LA’s Music Center, which already has several auditoria. Gehry also has a plan in for a huge revamp of New York’s multi-theatre 1960s Lincoln Center, though the cost is making even New Yorkers pause for breath.

But the one that all today’s architects doff their caps to - including Gehry, Piano and Vinoly - is the Berlin Philharmonie by Hans Scharoun (1893-1972). Scharoun was unusual for his time in developing a highly original “organic” architecture. Placed in charge of planning Berlin’s reconstruction after the Second World War, he designed the Philharmonie - home of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra - from the inside out.

Sited right on the border between East and West, it formed part of a “cultural forum” including a state library by him and a national art gallery by Mies van der Rohe. Scharoun envisaged that this forum would eventually be the centre of a reunited Berlin. Designed in 1956 and opened in 1963, the concert hall later had a chamber music hall added in the same style.

Until Gehry came along, nobody had designed a concert hall remotely like this. The key to its success is the extraordinary auditorium with its virtuoso arrangement of different levels entirely surrounding the stage. The unusual metal-clad shape of the building outside is generated by this unique interior.

This was Scharoun’s masterwork, and it came to epitomize free Berlin. With the eventual fall of the Wall and the rebuilding bonanza that followed, it did indeed find itself part of the new centre. It looks a lot better than some of the recent buildings round about. And unlike its contemporary, the Sydney Opera House, it works inside.