Auditorium Building

The Auditorium Building at 50 E Ida B. Wells Drive in the Loop of Chicago, Illinois, was designed by Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan and completed in 1889. Commissioned by businessman Ferdinand Peck, the ten-story structure combined a grand theater, a hotel and an office block in a single building, an ambitious project meant to bring opera and culture to a wide audience. Its heavy granite and limestone exterior is in the Romanesque Revival style associated with Henry Hobson Richardson, while the interior shows Sullivan's ornament at an early stage of his career. The centerpiece is the Auditorium Theatre, which originally seated about 4,300 and became famous for its acoustics, due largely to Adler's engineering, with sightlines and a curved ceiling of ornamental plaster arches. The theater hosted opera, concerts and civic events, and Chicago's opera company performed there until the late 1920s. After decades of decline through the Depression and the war years, the hotel space was used for servicemen's activities. Roosevelt University took over the building in 1947 and still occupies much of it, including the former hotel lobby and library spaces. The theater itself was restored beginning in the 1960s by community volunteers and has since continued to be renovated, and it reopened to performances in 1967. It is a National Historic Landmark. Visitors can view the exterior at no charge, and the theater is typically visited through guided tours arranged through the Auditorium Theatre, which show the auditorium, the plaster work and the lobby areas, with some tours also covering parts of the university's spaces. The building sits across from Grant Park and Michigan Avenue, close to the Chicago Cultural Center and Millennium Park, so it fits easily into a Loop architecture walk. Tours generally last about an hour, and performance schedules should be checked on auditoriumtheatre.org.