Jackson’s city auditorium and home of the Mississippi Symphony Orchestra is one of Mississippi’s finest New Formalist compositions. As its designer, Addkison noted, “the proportions are traditional, the details are contemporary.” As in New York City’s earlier Lincoln Center, classicism is expressed in the podiumlike base, monumental colonnaded porch, symmetrical facade, and grand processional staircases. The materials and ornamental details are modern: steel framing, buff brick walls, concrete square piers with geometrical capitals, and metal brise soleil above the entrances. Two fountains heighten the formality of the entrance plaza. A 1986 rear addition connects via a breezeway with the Mississippi Museum of Art (2007, Glavé and Holmes, with Dale and Associates), which has a spacious full-height glass-walled entrance lobby and a flat roof that projects several feet beyond the walls to provide a sheltering canopy.
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THALIA MARA HALL (MUNICIPAL AUDITORIUM)
1966–1968, W. L. Addkison for Overstreet, Ware, Ware and Lewis; 1986 addition, Canizaro Trigiano, with Eley Associates. 255 E. Pascagoula St.
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