Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 00:33:00

Seattle gave its symphony a full city block and a Chihuly chandelier. Benaroya Hall at 200 University Street opened on 12 September 1998, the 120-million-dollar downtown home of the Seattle Symphony made possible by the Benaroya family's 15-million-dollar founding gift - LMN Architects' glass-fronted block with acoustics by the legendary Cyril Harris, whose isolation engineering floats the concert rooms free of the bus tunnel and traffic rumbling directly beneath. The main room is the S. Mark Taper Foundation Auditorium, a 2,479-seat shoebox hall - 1,525 on the orchestra level, tiers of 282, 282 and 390 above - prized for a clarity that doubled the symphony's budget and performance count within years of opening. The 536-seat Illsley Ball Nordstrom Recital Hall handles chamber programs, solo recitals and the Symphony's family series, and Octave 9: Raisbeck Music Center added a technology-saturated 120-capacity experimental space in 2019, its 360-degree projection and immersive audio built for new-music formats. Dale Chihuly's twin crystal chandeliers cascade through the curved lobby, whose glass wall frames Second Avenue and, on clear evenings, Elliott Bay. Beyond the resident orchestra the hall presents touring classical artists, jazz, speakers and film-with-orchestra nights, while the Boeing Company Gallery and lobbies host civic events year-round. The University Street light-rail station opens practically at the door, and the building's full-block presence between Second and Third avenues gave downtown Seattle what it had lacked for a century: a purpose-built concert hall worthy of its orchestra. Harris's acoustic isolation remains the building's engineering legend: the auditorium is structurally a box floating within a box, its foundations decoupled so the trains passing directly below register nowhere in the hall's celebrated silence. The Watjen concert organ - 4,490 pipes by C.B. Fisk, installed in 2000 - completed the main room, and the Garden of Remembrance along the Second Avenue frontage folds a war memorial into the building's public face.