Sanders Theater
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sanders Theater or Sanders Theatre is the premiere lecture and concert hall at Harvard University. It is internationally known for its superior acoustics, which in New England are only surpassed by Jordan Hall and Boston Symphony Hall. The theaters design is based upon Christopher Wren's Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford, England. The 1,166 seat theater features three tiers of seating, the orchestra, the mezzanine, and the balcony.
The theatre was designed to function as a major lecture hall and as the site of college commencements. It is currently the largest lecture hall at Harvard College. Although Sanders saw its last commencement exercise in 1922, the theatre continues to play a major role in the academic mission of Harvard College, hosting undergraduate core curriculum courses, many of the Harvard Acapella groups, the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, and the undergraduate choirs. Many of the most venerable academic, political and literary figures of the nineteenth and twentieth century have taken the podium at Sanders Theater including Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, and Mikhail Gorbachev. Current popular lecturers in the Theatre include Professors N. Gregory Mankiw who teaches Principles of Economics and Michael Sandel whose famous course 'Justice' commands an audience of over 1,000.
Sanders theatre was the location of a long series of epochal experiments in architectural acoustics by Wallace Sabine and students, a junior physics professor at Harvard, who nightly moved seat cushions in and out investigating the effects of acoustic absorption, whose unit is still known as the sabin.
Sanders Theater is located in the apse of Memorial Hall, which consists of Annenberg Hall, the Memorial Transept and Tower, and Sanders Theater.
