I've seen that somewhere (3)

Guggenheim Museum Rotunda and the Rotunda at Symphony Center

Cultural institutions occupy buildings, and so often the most interesting stories about those institutions and their buildings really are stories about the humans behind them. This smacks too much of gossip. So I hope in these essays  to minimize such, and focus on design.

Structure. But gossip sometimes is the story.
Consider the Guggenheim museum

The Guggenheim museum in New York City: lotsa juicy gossip, but also some significant architecture. It started out as the Mueum of Non-Objective Painting. Founded by painter Hilla Rebay and collector Solomon Guggenheim, it intended to exhibit only a fixed (and somewhat peculiar) collection that Rebay was building with Guggenheim's money. Once the envisioned collection was completed, it would be closed, with no additions or withdrawls. The founding idea was that non-objective painting had some mystical or psychological significance, perhaps reflecting some aspect of a collective unconscious. This museum would allow visitors to achieve some higher state of being by seeing a fixed collection of non-objective paintings. Rebay approached Frank Lloyd Wright in 1941 asking for a dedicated building, a "museum-temple." His design evolved over time and his final design allows, (maybe even forces) a structured (maybe contemplative) experience: take the elevator to the top floor, and walk down the spiraling ramp, experiencing each painting one at a time.
Apparently, Rebay was interested only in painting (not sculpture or film or much of anything else), not in the process of making art, nor in the lives and backgrounds of artists and patrons, nor in anything like "scholarship", nor in any alternative ways on understanding art: the building's design seemingly does not allow that. (While Rebay had a large private library, it was sorted by the color of the book's spine.) There aren't multiple galleries allowing for multiple displays.

(photo from the Guggenheim website)
Rebay must have been a colorful character: Born in 1890 as Baroness Hildegard Anna Augusta Elisabeth Rebay von Ehrenwiesen in Strassburg Germany (now Strasbourg, France. The Museum's website describes her as "profoundly interested in spirituality, and from the age of 14 explored Theosophy, Buddhism, and astrology....She fervently believed that the translation of spiritual impulses and wordless feelings into nonfigurative art was the creation of a visual language that would transcend boundaries for the betterment of humankind." She was the director of rhe museum from its founding in in 1931 until 1952. While she commissioned Wright's design of its building, it was not opened until 1959, after she had left, and she was not invited to its dedication. Perhaps her mysticism alienated enough influential people in the art world that when Guggenheim died in 1949, she apparently lost her protector, and the Museum's board no longer had to tolerate her. The Guggenheim Museum's website gives it mission now as "Committed to innovation, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation collects, preserves, and interprets modern and contemporary art, and explores ideas across cultures through dynamic curatorial and educational initiatives and collaborations. With its constellation of architecturally and culturally distinct museums, exhibitions, publications, and digital platforms, the foundation engages both local and global audiences." This seems to me to be quite different from the spiritual goals that Rebay pursued at The Museum of Non-Objective painting.

The Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan is an amazing and beautiful place. I love it: both its collection and its building. I hesitate to pick out one feature of the building, but the central skylight really is both beautiful and striking. (The Guggenheim in Bilbao sure looks interesting, but it doesn't look like I'll ever get there.)

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra also has a complex story combining structure and personality.
When the Chicago Symphony Orchestra first played concerts, they were in the Auditorium. The orchestra's founding music director, Theodore Thomas, had been hired away from the New York Philharmonic with promises of good money, a longer season, complete artistic control, and a home for the orchestra. The first three of these promises were easy to deliver on, but getting a hall of its own had to wait. (It is unusual for an orchestra to own its own hall.) But after a decade or so of the Orchestra playing in the Auditorium, in 1904, the Orchestra's new home came into reality.  Thomas wanted something more intimate, like a conservatory recital hall, rather than the grand Auditorium stage.

 

The hall was promised to be finished in mid- December, even though work had begun on May 1st. The first concert took place in December, even 'tho the plaster wasn't quite set and the windows were not in place. Thomas conducted that inaugural concert and reported that he was pleased with the hall's acoustics. 

But apparently many other people weren't. I believe there were whispers of dissatifaction after the first concert. The Wikipedia entry (retrieved October 15, 2021) says Sub-optimal acoustics within Orchestra Hall have been an ongoing concern throughout its history.... One key problem seems to be that the Hall was the wrong shape, and in particular it lacked sufficient resonant volume. This was a key objective of the renovation of the mid-1990s. (The lead architect of this complex project was SOM, with acoutical comsulting by Kirkegaard Associates.) The stage was enlarged and moved back, and the hall was made deeper but narrower, which required removing the back wall of the building. This required demolishing the buildings on the other side of the alley, and replacing them with several buildings, including The Rotunda, which provides a connection between the several levels of Orchestra Hall. (At the same time, the orchestra members also had a hard time hearing each other. This was addressed by adding a sort of "flying saucer" above the stage.)

Fundraising efforts must have fallen short, and one can tell where the funds ran out, for it sure looks like "value engineering" was deployed with a vengance in the Atrium. The Atrium is a multistorey public building which should connect the various levels in the hall with a grand spiral staircase, but the staircase only the ground second floor, although there are five levels above. The space ends at street level, but it there are several rooms on a lower level that look like they should have been connected to the public areas.

Over it all is a beautiful skylight.

The Atrium is a proud, soaring space, which (to my eyes) should connect much grander spaces than it does. Adjacent to the Atrium is a lot, now used for parking, that could have been ideal for another grand performance hall, but about the time that the CSO was building its own new hall, the Lyric Opera of Chicago made grand expansions of its space at the Civic Opera House, and the Harris Theatre for Music and Dance was built in Millenium Park.

There are substantially similarities between the Atrium of Symphony Center in Chicago and the Guggenheim Museum. Both are stately, inspirational, vertical spaces; both have an ascending spiral; and both are topped with a skylight (10 segments for the museum, 8 for the Symphony Center). But the differences between them make it clear that one is not inspired by the other. 

But my reaction on seeing the Rotunda at Symphony Center in Chicago was "Wow, this is great, like the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan."