Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center

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Meyerson Symphony Center Exterior

The Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center is a concert hall located in the Arts District of downtown Dallas, Texas (USA). It was designed by architect I.M. Pei and acoustician Russell Johnson's Artec Consultants, Inc. and opened in September of 1989.

The Center is named for Morton Meyerson, arts patron and business partner of Ross Perot, who provided $10 million in funds for its construction. 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 as well as several other Dallas based musical organizations. The Meyerson Symphony Center is owned and managed by the City of Dallas Office of Cultural Affairs.

1 Design
- 1.1 The Center's basic statistics
2 See also
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Design

The center from Flora Street

The Herman W. and Amelia H. Lay Family Organ

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. The concert hall, designed by Russell Johnson's firm, Artec Acoustic Consultants, is in the standard shoebox style and seats 2,062. Acoustical canopies above the hall can be raised or lowered to reshape the auricular properties of the hall.

The Meyerson Symphony Center also is home to the C.B. Fisk Opus 100 organ, known as the Lay Family Concert Organ. While it had been Charles Fisk's dream to build a monumental concert organ (the firm unsuccessfully bid on the contract for San Francisco's Davies Hall), and despite years of planning and design, he never lived to see it built, dying in 1983. The resulting instrument, nearly unanimously hailed as a musical triumph, while building on some of his ideas, was quite different from his original designs.

The shoebox design of the main concert hall was designed to achieve acoustics performance comparable to that of the Vienna Musikverein and the Amsterdam Concertgebouw.^[1]^[2]

[edit] The Center's basic statistics

The Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center has: · 260,000 square feet (24,000 m²) above ground space · 225,000 square feet (20,900 m²) below ground space · 35,130 cubic yards (26,860 m³) of concrete · 30,000 square feet (2,800 m²) 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 (26 m) 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