Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 01:11:00

A radio-and-TV student from the class of 1980 remembered the venue his campus never had - and 35 years later he wrote the 6.5-million-dollar cheque that built it. The Howard L. Schrott Center for the Arts, at 610 West 46th Street on Butler University's arts mall in Indianapolis, opened on 18 April 2013 as the university's purpose-built mid-size hall. The design brief was intimacy with concert-hall acoustics: the 450-seat proscenium theatre puts its last row just 70 feet from the stage, combining a rectangular concert-hall shape with steeply raked theatre seating so the room serves orchestra, ballet, theatre and amplified music equally. Acoustician Charles Bonner voiced the hall by listening to Butler's own ensembles and adjusting until it fit them. The gap it filled was structural: Butler's venue ladder jumped from a 120-seat recital hall and 110-seat black box straight to 2,000-plus-seat Clowes Memorial Hall, leaving chamber orchestras and dance companies to rattle around a room ten times too big. The Schrott's 4,500-square-foot stage, orchestra pit, fly tower with 38 motorised line sets and broadcast-grade camera system gave the Jordan College of the Arts a properly scaled home. The programming spans campus and city: Butler Theatre, Butler Ballet and the School of Music produce here through the academic year, the Butler Arts and Events Center folds the hall into its public season of touring music and speakers, and the opening Butler ArtsFest christened the room with more than 40 performances in ten days. Practical notes: the center sits beside Clowes Hall and the Lilly Hall studios on the campus arts block, sharing parking with the Clowes garage; sightlines are effectively perfect throughout, and the hall's scale makes even orchestral concerts feel like chamber music.