Civic Hall Peforming Arts Center

A high-school gymnasium became a concert hall in Richmond, Indiana. Conversion work begun in the late 1980s brought it into use for pupils and public alike in the autumn of 1993, paid for by Richmond Community Schools together with the Lucille Gamp Trust and local donors, and the schools own and run it still. Nine hundred and twenty-four seats — six hundred and sixteen on the floor, three hundred and eight in the balcony — make the room large enough for touring opera and orchestral programmes and small enough for a school assembly, which is precisely the double life it leads.