The Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center is a concert hall located in the Arts District of downtown Dallas, Texas, US. Ranked one of the world's greatest orchestra halls,[1] it was designed by architect I. M. Pei and acoustician Russell Johnson's Artec Consultants. The structural engineers for this project was Leslie E. Robertson Associates, and it opened in September 1989.
The center is named for Morton Meyerson, former president of Electronic Data Systems and former chairman and CEO of Perot Systems, who led the 10-year effort by the Dallas Symphony Association to create a home for the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. The new concert center was named in his honor in 1986 at the request of Ross Perot, who made a $10 million contribution to the building fund for the naming rights. It is the permanent home of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and the Dallas Symphony Chorus, as well as the primary performing venue of the Dallas Wind Symphony and several other Dallas-based musical organizations. The Meyerson Symphony Center is owned by the City of Dallas and operated by the Dallas Symphony Association.[2]
There are four private suites, for small concerts, meetings and events designed by Booziotis & Company Architects of Dallas.
Design
The exterior of the large pavilion and lobby is circular and constructed of glass and metal supports to contrast with the solid geometric lines of the actual hall. Architect I. M. Pei, and structural engineer Leslie E. Robertson Associates has described the structure of the hall's interior as "very conservative". "It is conservative for reasons I no longer accept", he said in 2000. "I feel that the hall doesn't fully represent what I would have liked to do. It was my first one."[3] Because the music performed in the hall was likely to be from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Pei was unwilling to impose modern styles of architecture on the interior.[4]
The trustees and acoustic team had decided on the shoebox style before Pei was hired, and he sought to sculpt the exteriors with more innovative designs. "I felt the need to be free", he said. "Therefore, to wrap another form around the shoebox, I started to use curvilinear forms... It does have some spatial excitement in that space for that reason."[4]
Organ
The Meyerson Symphony Center also is home to the 4,535 pipe C. B. FiskOp. 100 organ,[5] known as the Lay Family Concert Organ.[6] Although it had been Charles Fisk's dream to build a monumental concert organ (the firm unsuccessfully bid on the contract for San Francisco's Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall), and despite years of planning and design, he never lived to see it built, dying in 1983. The resulting instrument, built in 1991 and nearly unanimously hailed as a musical triumph, whilst it built on some of his ideas, was quite different from his original designs. The première performance was given in September 1992 by organists Michael Murray[7] and David Higgs.[8]
Acoustics
Eugene McDermott Concert HallHerman W. and Amelia H. Lay Family OrganFoyer
The Eugene McDermott Concert Hall was designed by Artec Consultants (also responsible for the Pikes Peak Center's El Pomar Great Hall). Artec's Nicholas Edwards built upon ideas of Russell Johnson, the firm's founder, combining them with his own research and those of the German group in Göttingen. Systematically working through each area of the hall on each level, he generated sketches that indicated the best placement for walls in order to optimize the all-important lateral reflections. As his ideas crystallized, he began calling the evolving room shape the ‘reverse fan’. This was the eventual shape of both the Dallas concert hall and its younger sibling, Symphony Hall in Birmingham, England. Both these halls have strong ‘shoebox’ shaping, with the ‘reverse fan’ at the back of the room.[9] 74 thick concrete chamber doors around the top of the hall weighing 2.5 tons each can be opened and closed to increase or reduce reverberance, 56 acoustical curtains help diminish sound vibrations and a system of canopies weighing more than 42 tons is suspended above the stage and can be raised, lowered, or tilted to reflect the sound throughout the audience chamber.[6] The shoebox design was intended to achieve acoustical performance comparable to that of the Vienna Musikverein and the Amsterdam Concertgebouw.[10][11] Russell Johnson, who died in August 2007, requested in his will that he be buried in the Meyerson, but logistical complications prevented the request from being granted.[12]
Statistics
The Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center has:
260,000 square feet (24,000m2) above ground space
225,000 square feet (20,900m2) below ground space
35,130 cubic yards (26,860m3) of concrete
30,000 square feet (2,800m2) of Italian travertine marble
22,000 pieces of Indiana limestone
4,535 organ pipes
2,062 seats
918 square panels of African (Makore) cherrywood
216 square panels of American cherrywood
211 glass panels (no two alike) comprising the conoid windows
85-foot (26m) high ceiling in the concert hall
74 concrete reverberation chamber doors, each weighing as much as 2.5 tons
56 acoustical curtains
50 restrooms
4 private suites for meetings, banquets, and recitals
Ieoh Ming Pei was a Chinese-American architect. Born in Guangzhou into a Chinese family, Pei drew inspiration at an early age from the garden villas at Suzhou, the traditional retreat of the scholar-gentry to which his family belonged. In 1935, he moved to the United States and enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania's architecture school, but quickly transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Unhappy with the focus on Beaux-Arts architecture at both schools, he spent his free time researching emerging architects, especially Le Corbusier.
Symphony Hall is a concert hall that is home to the Boston Symphony Orchestra, located at 301 Massachusetts Avenue in Boston, Massachusetts. BSO founder Henry Lee Higginson commissioned architectural firm McKim, Mead and White to create a new, permanent home for the orchestra. Symphony Hall can accommodate an audience of 2,625. The hall was designated a U.S. National Historic Landmark in 1999 and is a pending Boston Landmark. It was then noted that "Symphony Hall remains, acoustically, among the top three concert halls in the world, and is considered the finest in the United States." Symphony Hall, located one block from Berklee College of Music to the north and one block from the New England Conservatory to the south, also serves as home to the Boston Pops as well as the site of many concerts of the Handel and Haydn Society.
The Wiener Musikverein, commonly shortened to Musikverein, is a concert hall in Vienna, Austria, which is located in the Innere Stadt district. The building opened in 1870 and is the home of the Vienna Philharmonic orchestra.
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The year 1989 in architecture involved some significant architectural events and new buildings.
David Geffen Hall is a concert hall in New York City's Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts complex on Manhattan's Upper West Side. The 2,200-seat auditorium opened in 1962, and is the home of the New York Philharmonic.
The Schermerhorn Symphony Center is a concert hall in downtown Nashville, Tennessee. Ground was broken on December 3, 2003. The center formally opened on September 9, 2006, with a gala concert conducted by Leonard Slatkin and broadcast by PBS affiliates throughout the state. The center is named in honor of Kenneth Schermerhorn, who was the music director and conductor of the Nashville Symphony from 1983 until his death in 2005; the center was named before maestro Schermerhorn's death.
The Arts District is a performing and visual arts district in downtown Dallas, Texas.
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The Sibelius Hall is a concert hall in Lahti, Finland, named after the composer Jean Sibelius. The concert hall was completed in 2000. Architects Kimmo Lintula and Hannu Tikka designed the hall, which is made out of glulam. The acoustics were engineered by Artec Consultants, New York. Its acoustics are one of its strongest points, while the architecture follows the Scandinavian tradition of sophisticated design. The concert hall has a capacity of 1,250 seats.
The Pikes Peak Center for the Performing Arts is a concert auditorium in Colorado Springs, Colorado. It serves as an entertainment, cultural, educational, and assembly center for the citizens of El Paso County, the Pikes Peak region, and the surrounding area.
The Konzerthaus Berlin is a concert hall in Berlin, the home of the Konzerthausorchester Berlin. Situated on the Gendarmenmarkt square in the central Mitte district of the city, it was originally built as a theater. It initially operated from 1818 to 1821 under the name of the Schauspielhaus Berlin, then as the Theater am Gendarmenmarkt and Komödie. It became a concert hall after the Second World War, and its name changed to its present one in 1994.
Robert Theodore Anderson was an American organist, composer and pedagogue.
Frederick Russell Johnson was an architect and acoustical expert. Johnson was the founder of Artec Consultants Incorporated in 1970. Nicknamed the "guardian of the ear" by Jean Nouvel in 1998 and an "acoustic guru" by others, Johnson was best known for works that included technical designs for the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas, Texas, Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York, New Jersey Performing Arts Center, Centre in the Square in Canada, Pikes Peak Center in Colorado, Chan Centre for the Performing Arts in Canada and the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts in Florida.
Artec Consultants Inc, is an acoustics design and theater planning firm located in New York City. The company was founded by Frederick Russell Johnson in 1970. In 2013, Artec was integrated into the acoustic design and theater consulting practice Arup Group.
The vineyard style is a design of a concert hall where the seating surrounds the stage, rising up in serried rows in the manner of the sloping terraces of a vineyard. It may be contrasted with the shoebox style, which has a rectangular auditorium and a stage at one end. Other possibilities are the fan-shaped and the arena. The design might be considered a musical theatre in the round.
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Kyoto Concert Hall is a concert hall in Sakyō-ku, Kyoto, Japan. It opened in 1995 as part of the 1200th anniversary celebrations of the foundation of Heian-kyō. The shoebox-style Main Hall seats 1833 and the Ensemble Hall Murata 500. It is the home of the Kyoto Symphony Orchestra. Arata Isozaki was the architect, with acoustical design by Nagata Acoustics.
Morton Herbert Meyerson is an American computer industry executive who held positions in the Ross Perot-founded Electronic Data Systems and subsequently at Perot Systems and General Motors. Ross Perot paid $10 million for naming rights to Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center, home to the Dallas Symphony Orchestra.
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