Concertgebouw Amsterdam

Adolf Leonard van Gendt designed it with the Leipzig Gewandhaus in mind, and it opened on 11 April 1888 in what were then meadows outside the city. The Grote Zaal, a shoebox of roughly two thousand seats, produced an acoustic that no one had entirely calculated and no one has since dared alter: reverberation long enough to let a chord bloom, clear enough to count the desks of the strings. An orchestra was assembled for the building within months and took its name; under Willem Mengelberg, chief conductor from 1895 for half a century, the house became a Mahler city, the composer himself conducting his symphonies there. In the 1980s the foundations, sinking into Amsterdam clay, were underpinned on new piles, and a glass entrance wing was added for the centenary. The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra plays there still, and several hundred concerts a year pass through the building's two halls.