Auditorium brings arts to University

When the IU Auditorium was officially dedicated in 1941, it stood in large part because then-president Herman B Wells wanted to provide IU students and faculty with an avenue to the arts.\nMore than 60 years later, the facility has fulfilled Wells' wish, offering space for students to develop their artistic skills as well as providing a venue that has attracted all sorts of acts, speakers and performers, ranging from top Broadway plays to Mikhael Gorbachev to Jerry Seinfeld. \n"Here, the students, members of the staff and citizens of the state can receive the inspiration of the best in lectures, music and drama," Wells said at the building's dedication. "This building ... has (a) function of paramount importance. It will augment substantially our facilities for training in the arts."\nDesigned by the New York architecture firm Eggers & Higgins, the Auditorium was built out of limestone quarried in southern Indiana in a Collegiate Gothic design. It officially opened March 22, 1941, after the University received a $495,000 grant from the U.S. Federal Energy Administration of Public Works toward its completion.\nThe carved figures that appear in the upper corners of the Auditorium's front facade might be one of the structure's mysteries. Doug Booher, director of the Auditorium, said he's not sure of the history behind them. \n"We've never been able to find out what they represent," Booher said. "We looked at that during the course of the renovation, and there's very little information out there."\nThe Auditorium turned into a contentious issue in the years before its construction, as donors decried the trustees for devoting more money and attention to another project: the Indiana Memorial Union.\nOne donor wrote an anonymous letter to the editor of a local paper, insisting that the Auditorium was more important than a large union. He wrote that IU was only building a large student union to keep up with Big Ten counterpart Michigan State.\n"Isn't living beyond one's means in an effort to keep up with one's neighbors one of the things we decry in private life?" the author wrote.\nThe Auditorium's foyer features Thomas Hart Benton's "Century of Progress" murals, which Wells and Ward G. Biddle, his vice president at the time, wanted to include as an homage to Indiana's history.\nThe Auditorium closed for two years for renovations in 1997. The facility now plays host to everything from concerts to weddings to lectures to University ceremonies, like Adam Herbert's presidential inauguration in spring 2004.