Fifty seventh Street at night, the brick and terracotta front with its arches, a lobby in cream and gold, then the hall: five levels in a horseshoe round the stage, a full house, and the orchestra playing with the bows all going together. The works hang round the parquet under the first tier, where you walk the ring.
Carnegie Hall opened on May 5, 1891, with a concert conducted by Walter Damrosch and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. William Burnet Tuthill designed it in a modified Italian Renaissance style in Roman brick and terracotta. The main hall seats 2,790 on five levels. Sold to developers in 1956, it was saved by Isaac Stern's campaign and bought by the city for five million dollars in 1960, and it became a National Historic Landmark in 1962.
Source · Carnegie Hall, Wikipedia ↗
The Roman brick and terracotta front on 57th Street with its arched windows and the studio floors above, the lobby, the cream and gold horseshoe of five levels, the boxes of the first and second tiers, the red seats and a full house, the stage under its elliptic arch, the orchestra in its arcs and the conductor on the podium. Mood: concert black. Everything is procedural geometry with painted surfaces; nothing is a scan or a photograph. The room is an interpretation, and it hangs the New Yorkers the census recorded at this place first.