The venue opened in the Goudi Olympic Complex just before the 2004 Games, built for a sport most Greeks barely followed. When the Olympics ended, the building faced the usual reckoning. Instead of abandonment, it went up for public tender, and a company called Athens Badminton Cultural Development won a twenty-year lease. The post-Olympic transformation of Athens venues is a story full of disappointments and shuttered arenas; the Badminton Theater is one of the few clear successes, a place that found a second life by becoming something completely different from what it was designed to be.

The reconstruction ran from the summer of 2006 into 2007. Almost nothing of the original interior survived. Crews kept the post-industrial shell and the building's generous open spaces, then stripped everything inside and started over. What rose in its place was a modern auditorium seating 2,430 people, wrapped in foyers and reception halls. The numbers behind the stage tell their own story: thirty meters wide, eighteen deep, with a ceiling rising more than fifteen meters - room enough for the most elaborate touring productions, where a badminton net once stretched across an empty court.

A theater lives or dies on its acoustics, and the Badminton Theater was tuned with obsessive care. The acoustic design firm of Theodore Timagenis shaped a room with an average reverberation time of under 1.1 seconds, and sound that stays even - varying no more than a couple of decibels from one seat to the next. That consistency is what lets a whispered line in a play or a single struck note in a concert reach every listener with the same clarity, whether they sit in the front row or the back of the upper tier. The hall was built so that no seat is a bad seat.

Once it reopened, the booking calendar read like a passport stamped across the world's stages. Matthew Bourne's all-male Swan Lake danced here. So did Mamma Mia!, Jesus Christ Superstar, STOMP, and West Side Story on its 50th-anniversary tour. Tango troupes from Argentina, flamenco companies from Andalusia, Cuban son musicians, Russian ballet, magicians and acrobats all passed through. Caetano Veloso sang. Woody Allen brought his New Orleans jazz band for two December nights. Among the lighter fare came heavier work too: in 2012 the venue staged a play built on Mikis Theodorakis's Mauthausen Trilogy, set to the songs that memorialize the victims of the Nazi concentration camp - work rooted in Greek poet Iakovos Kambanellis's own imprisonment at Mauthausen - a reminder that even a converted sports hall can hold the weight of grief.

By 2012 the building had grown beyond performance. New facilities turned it into a venue for conferences, corporate events and presentations, its stage reconfigurable for panels and podiums in minutes. The foyers spread across more than 1,500 square meters; an entrance hall lined with service counters handles the crowds, complete with barcode check-in and step-free access for visitors with disabilities. Set inside the green expanse of Goudi park near the junction of two major avenues, with parking for hundreds of cars and dozens of buses, it became one of the most flexible large venues in Athens. Not bad for a hall that started life hosting a sport played with a feathered cork.