Denver Performing Arts Complex

You are passing the Denver Performing Arts Complex, a four-block campus that is one of the largest performing arts centers in the United States. It holds ten performance spaces with a combined capacity of more than ten thousand seats, many of them connected beneath a glass galleria that arches eighty feet overhead. At the heart of the complex is Boettcher Concert Hall, designed by the firm Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates and opened on March fourth, nineteen seventy-eight.

It was the first symphony hall built in the round in the United States, with the audience arranged on all sides of the stage. Eighty percent of its two thousand six hundred seventy-nine seats fall within sixty-five feet of the performers, a closeness that was revolutionary when the hall opened. The Colorado Symphony rehearses and performs here as its primary home.

The resident Denver Center Theatre Company, founded in nineteen seventy-nine, earned the Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre in nineteen ninety-eight, one of the most prestigious honors in American theater. The complex also serves as home to Opera Colorado and the Colorado Ballet. On performance evenings the streets around the galleria fill with crowds moving between the venues, and the glass roof glows above them.