Minneapolis’ Orchestra Hall stands tall at 50: How it went from curb to cube

Orchestra Hall has spent half a century at 1111 Nicollet Mall. It’s a familiar part of downtown Minneapolis’ landscape now, but what did the critics say when it opened in October 1974? And were they correct?

The Minnesota Orchestra took a long time to find a permanent home. The orchestra had three locations before it settled into its 11th Street site. The first concert was held in 1903 at the Industrial Exposition Building, a convention hall on the East Bank of the Mississippi River, across from downtown. The acoustics must have been dreadful. The ensemble — then called the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, and a name it kept until 1968 — had but nine rehearsals, but carried off Schubert’s Symphony No. 8 to the delight of critics and city boosters.

The orchestra’s second home was the auditorium building, an 1,800-seat facility later renamed the Lyceum Theater. Opened in 1905, the building was also home to theater and movies. Architecturally, it was a stern box with a face full of frosting.

The third location was at Northrop auditorium at the University of Minnesota, where the orchestra played from 1929 until its move to its current home — Orchestra Hall.

The acoustics at Northrop were poorly suited to the nuances of an orchestra, and there was talk of rehabbing its old home, the Lyceum, to bring it up to modern standards. The price, however, was too high. It wouldn’t have had enough seats. Plans for a new hall on the Lyceum site were proposed, and the old theater was knocked to rubble in 1973.

Minnesota Orchestra played its first public notes in its new home at Orchestra Hall on Oct. 11, 1974.

The Orchestra Hall plans called for an enormous brick-clad box with rounded corners set at an angle from the street grid, a modern glass-walled lobby and the nearby aquatic pleasures of Peavey Plaza.

The design included six enormous blue tubes that suggested they were enormous ventilation shafts emerged from the sidewalk, an “industrial” affectation beloved by some architects in the 1970s who’d seen the Pompidou center in Paris and figured this was the new thing.

Reviews varied. The San Francisco Chronicle praised the acoustics and the civic-minded, enlightened folk of Minneapolis, but didn’t quite like the structure. “Minneapolis received no architectural jewel. It’s a joyless, windowless brick building. A front structure of glass and aluminum panels furthers the industrial impression. The commodious lobby spaces are dominated by these cool materials and bright primary colors harden the effect.”

The Boston Globe said: “It gives little to the eye.”

Paul Goldberger, writing in the New York Times, said that the restrained interiors added to the concert-going experience. “In its playful simplicity and overall modesty, Orchestra Hall is one of the best rebukes to the pomposity of the red-velvet school of design yet created.”

Whatever opening night patrons thought of the exterior, the big surprise was yet to come. The Cubes.

The ceiling and back of the hall were filled with enormous white cubes jostling one another.

“Spotless dice falling through a blue-gray sky,” the San Francisco Chronicle said.

Although the cubes had a fascinating visual impact, their purpose wasn’t entirely decorative. They were the means by which the sound would fill the hall.

“The cubes, I think they were remarkable,” says Gwen Pappas, vice president of communications and public relations for the orchestra. “Some critics didn’t like the aesthetics of the hall, [but] the acoustics were universally acclaimed. A rectangularly shaped hall seems to be key, if you look at the best around the world. It’s the shoebox shape, so that shape has been tried and true. The cubes were an ornamentation that allows the sound to bounce around the hall.”

Old halls had achieved this effect with baroque gee-gaws, carvings of cupid and vases, but those didn’t fit the starkly modern design.

Whatever the critics thought of the exterior, they raved about the sound, and this was the work of New York acoustical engineer Cyril Harris. His attention to detail was so keen that he insisted on lockers in the hallways that surround the hall. Patrons were supposed to stow their winter coats in the lockers. If parkas were brought inside the hall and draped on the seat, he felt, they’d absorb sound waves.

The modernist facade, almost indistinguishable from a suburban ‘60s office park, aged well. But the lobby space needed a refresh, and was overhauled in 2012-13.

The renovation was intensely focused, Pappas said.

“Let’s do no harm was rule No. 1,” she said. “What Cyril Harris had attained was something wondrous. The lobby was small, wasn’t built to accommodate and there weren’t a lot of amenities. So in the renovation in 2014, they thought, let’s expand the public areas so we can fit an audience of 2,000 in the lobby. It was very focused on the public area and doubled the size of the lobby. It’s been a game-changer for the orchestra.

“You can see outside to the city, opening up the space, so that the city and the hall have a better conversation.”

You wonder if that conversation will ever turn to building another Orchestra Hall, should the need arise.

There are three possible stories for its 100th anniversary: It’s gone, it’s been repurposed to play holograms, or it’s still the home of the Minnesota Orchestra, keeping the fire of the symphonic tradition alive. And there’s only one of those options that will speak as well of the future as the decision to build it spoke well of Minneapolitans in 1974.