George Gershwin played a sheep pasture's concert hall in 1936; the pasture became UCLA. Royce Hall at 340 Royce Drive is the defining building of the university's Westwood campus - one of the original four structures of 1929, its twin-towered Lombard Romanesque facade modelled on Milan's Basilica of Sant'Ambrogio by architects Allison and Allison. The building opened as the campus's main classroom block with an auditorium designed for speech rather than music, yet by the late 1930s Duke Ellington, Arnold Schoenberg and Jimmy Dorsey's band had played it, and a 1937 subscription series launched with Marian Anderson and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Successive remodellings turned the room into a regionally important concert hall - 1,836 seats across orchestra and balcony - whose stage list reads like the century's cultural register: Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Leonard Bernstein with the New York Philharmonic, Frank Zappa, Mikhail Baryshnikov and the Philip Glass Ensemble. The 1994 Northridge earthquake nearly ended it - one signature tower cracked horizontally to the verge of collapse - forcing a four-year closure and a 70.5-million-dollar seismic retrofit and renovation, celebrated at a 1998 reopening gala featuring Sidney Poitier, Carol Burnett and Paul Simon. The retrofit smuggled in upgrades the 1929 building never had: a rehearsal hall mirroring the stage footprint, improved auditorium acoustics and modern systems threaded through fabric protected by National Register eligibility. Today the hall is the flagship of UCLA's Center for the Art of Performance, its asymmetrical towers - one deliberately more decorated than the other, a medieval builders' habit the architects copied - still the most photographed image of the university. The seat split runs 1,203 in the orchestra and 633 in the balcony, and the building still holds classrooms and offices in its wings - a working academic hall wrapped around a concert room.

Type: Theater / Concert Hall

Address: 340 Royce Drive, Los Angeles, CA, United States, 90095

Website: https://roycehall.org

Capacity: 1836

Opening Date: 20/09/1929

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