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| The view on Monday night |
Hall Auditorium is another Oberlin College landmarks that I never get tired of seeing. I like a lot of different styles of architecture, and to me, this building is perfection (at least from the outside). It looks as modern now as it did when it was built in 1953.
Here's its page on the Oberlin College website.
And it was already being touted as a tourist attraction (along with Allen Art Museum) in this article that ran in the Lorain Journal on August 8, 1956.
Like Wilder Hall (which the subject of yesterday's blog post), Hall Auditorium has been featured on many postcards over the years. Here's an ample sample, with approximate dates gleaned from eBay listings.
And they swapped places on this version.
By 1966, that tree/shrub just to the north of Hall Auditorium – so spindly in the earliest postcards – had reached enormous proportions.
It's interesting seeing the whole building in this aerial shot. That's the Oberlin Inn next door. Boy, has that area changed a lot in the intervening years.
But Hall Auditorium remains – just as modern and impressive as ever.
Thanks, Dan - a splendid building. Your photos capture its appeal the best, I think. The architect was Wallace Harrison of Harrison & Abramowicz, a firm that is perhaps best known for Lincoln Center in New York, and for coordinating the architecture for the UN Headquarters.
ReplyDeleteHall Hall. Looks like open sheet music!
ReplyDeleteIt’s surely an interesting building, but sadly it took the place of a, shall I say, much more historic, architecturally speaking, building…
ReplyDeleteDo you mean Town Hall? If so, I agree....
DeleteHi Colonel, I went back and looked and couldn't find any indication that a building was torn down to make way for Hall Auditorium. The July 1951 coverage of the ground breaking just said that four trees had been taken down as the first step in the land clearing. Was there something that had been there long before?
DeleteThere was the Town Hall near there (I'm thinking closer to Allen Art Museum?). But I was thinking the First Methodist Episcopal Church, which I believe actually burned years before. So nothing demolished immediately before...
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