Sanders Theatre
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Sanders Theatre or Sanders Theater is the premiere lecture and concert hall at Harvard University. It is internationally known for its superior acoustics, which in New England are surpassed only by Jordan Hall, Mechanics Hall, Worcester, and Boston Symphony Hall.
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[edit] History
Plans for the theater began when a committee of fifty Harvard alumni met in 1865 who wanted to build a structure to honor those who had died for the Union in the American Civil War.[1] The building was designed to serve as an academic theater, contains classrooms, and served as a dining hall for commencement dinners. The theatre's design is based upon Christopher Wren's Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford, England. The 1,166 seat theatre features three tiers of seating: the orchestra, the mezzanine, and the balcony. The final design turned out to be twice the original size and cost more than twice its original budget at $390,000.[1]
[edit] Description
Sanders Theatre is located in the apse of Memorial Hall, which consists of Annenberg Hall, the Memorial Transept and Tower, and Sanders Theatre.
The theatre is currently the largest lecture hall at Harvard College. Although Sanders saw its last commencement exercise in 1922, the theatre continues to play a major role in the academic mission of Harvard College, hosting undergraduate core curriculum courses, many of the Harvard a cappella groups, the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, and the undergraduate choirs. Many of the most venerable academic, political, and literary figures of the nineteenth and twentieth century have taken the podium at Sanders Theatre, including Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, and Mikhail Gorbachev. Current popular lecturers in the Theatre include Professors N. Gregory Mankiw, who teaches Principles of Economics ("Ec 10"), and Michael Sandel, whose famous course "Justice" commands an audience of over 1,000. The Ig Nobel Prize is also awarded annually there. Sanders Theatre is the venue of the Christmas Revels every year during much of the month of December.
[edit] Exterior
The exterior of the theater contains busts of seven great orators: Demosthenes, Cicero, John Chrysostom, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham, Edmund Burke, and Daniel Webster.[2]
[edit] Acoustics
Sanders Theatre was the location of a long series of epochal experiments in architectural acoustics by Wallace Sabine and students, a junior physics professor at Harvard, who nightly moved seat cushions in and out investigating the effects of acoustic absorption, whose unit is still known as the sabin.
[edit] Gallery
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The hallway leading to the theatre
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Inside the theatre
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ a b Wilson, Susan (2003). Boston Sites and Insights: An Essential Guild to Historic Landmarks. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. pp. 126–127. ISBN 0-8070-7135-8. http://books.google.com/books?id=GJTlLbPzmDMC&pg=PA126&dq=%22sanders+theater%22&as_brr=3&cd=3#v=onepage&q=%22sanders%20theater%22&f=false. Retrieved 11 January 2010.
- ^ Description of Exterior of Sanders Theater from the Office for the Arts at Harvard
[edit] External links
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