Hult Center for the Performing Arts

Eugene waited a long time for a concert hall of its own and then received two at once. Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates, chosen from twenty-seven competing practices, planned the building that opened in 1982 around the 2,448-seat Silva Concert Hall and the smaller Soreng Theater, which seats 495; a black-box room called the Studio takes two hundred more. The complex reaches outdoors as well, to the Cuthbert Amphitheater in Alton Baker Park, where several thousand people sit on grass. What distinguishes the Hult Center is less its architecture than its constitution: it was conceived as a shared house rather than a monument, and its resident companies hold their places by meeting agreed thresholds of performances and audience, an arrangement that has kept the building's diary largely in the hands of the city's own musicians rather than of touring promoters alone.