Venue: Lisner Auditorium
Address: 730 21st Street
Town: Washington, D.C., US
Capacity: 1,490

Lisner Auditorium is a performance venue sited on the Foggy Bottom campus of George Washington University at 730 21st Street Northwest, Washington, D.C. Named for Abram Lisner (1852-1938), a university trustee and benefactor whose will provided one million dollars towards its construction, it was designed in 1940 and completed in 1946. Constructed in the stripped classicist style of the late Art Deco and host to major classical, folk, rock, blues, opera, and theatrical performances over the decades, it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1990 for its dual significance as an architectural work and as a performance venue. The auditorium played a key role in desegregation at George Washington University and in Washington, D.C.; its 1946 grand opening became a city-wide target for the desegregation of the city's theaters and a catalyst for George Washington students calling on the university to admit African American students. The auditorium seats 1,350 and is the home of the Washington Concert Opera. Lisner Auditorium extends the modernist ethos favored by its architect, Waldron Faulkner (1898-1978), who was born in Paris, France, educated at Yale University, and became influential in Washington, D.C., area architecture, where he designed numerous institutional and residential structures. His work at GW began in the 1930s. Lisner Hall (housing Lisner Library), in whitewashed brick, was completed in 1939 to match the Bauhaus style of flanking Bell Hall (1935) and Stuart Hall (1936). Hall of Government (1939) was the first university building clad in limestone (and in 1951, he designed the adjoining Monroe Hall in similar style). These 1930s modernist additions represented a sharp departure from the university's 1920s Harris Plan, which had called for a full block of Georgian Revival buildings enclosing what is now University Yard. This combination of modernist Bauhaus and Art Deco styles represents the architects' interpretation of university presi