Carnegie Hall facade
— — the brick that has heard the most.
Not only on a wall.
“The facade of Carnegie Hall faces 57th Street in narrow ranks of Roman brick and brownstone, an Italian Renaissance Revival front designed by William Burnet Tuthill and opened in May of 1891. Andrew Carnegie paid for it. Tchaikovsky conducted the opening week. The building has stayed essentially intact, its modest entrance giving almost no warning of the room behind it. Most people walk past without looking up.
Carnegie Hall facade, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Carnegie Hall stands at 881 Seventh Avenue, on the southeast corner of 57th Street and Seventh Avenue in Midtown Manhattan. The concert hall opened on May 5, 1891, funded by the industrialist Andrew Carnegie, who had committed to the project two years earlier. The architect was William Burnet Tuthill, an amateur cellist as well as a working architect, whose design balanced practical acoustic needs with an Italian Renaissance Revival exterior. The building was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1962, the year a citizens' campaign saved it from demolition.
The facade is built primarily of long, narrow Roman brick over a brownstone base, with terra-cotta detailing at the cornices and around the arched windows. The composition is restrained, almost civic in feel, with three principal arched entrances along 57th Street rather than the grand portico a later age might have given a concert hall of this rank. The brick was chosen in part for its colour and in part for its acoustic mass. More than a century later, the front still reads as a working building, not a monument.
Carnegie Hall remains an active concert venue, with three performance spaces inside the building: the main Stern Auditorium, the smaller Zankel Hall, and the recital-scale Weill Recital Hall. Guided tours of the building run on a posted schedule most weekdays during the concert season, and the Rose Museum on the second floor is open to ticket-holders and tour visitors. The 57th Street entrance is the public face; performers and press use side doors on West 56th.