Concertgebouw

The Concertgebouw has acoustics so perfect they were an accident. When architect Adolf Leonard van Gendt designed the hall and it opened on April 11, 1888, the science of acoustics literally did not exist. The first concert hall designed using actual acoustic calculations — Boston's Symphony Hall — wouldn't open for another twelve years. Van Gendt drew inspiration from the Gewandhaus in Leipzig, made some educated guesses about proportions, and got spectacularly lucky. The reverberation time measures approximately 2.4 seconds, essentially unchanged since Leo Beranek first measured it in 1958.

Today the Concertgebouw sits alongside Vienna's Musikverein, Boston's Symphony Hall, and Carnegie Hall as one of the four greatest concert halls in the world. Its resident ensemble, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, gave its first performance here on November 3, 1888, and has become one of the most acclaimed orchestras on the planet.

Construction started in 1883 in a pasture that was then outside Amsterdam's city limits. The inaugural concert featured 120 musicians and a chorus of 500 performing Wagner, Handel, Bach, and Beethoven. Like everything in Amsterdam, the building sits on wooden piles — 2,186 of them — driven into the city's famously unstable soil. By 1983, the building was literally sinking into the earth, with inch-wide cracks appearing in the walls. A massive restoration project saved it.

Today the hall hosts roughly 900 concerts and events per year for an audience of over 700,000. In 2013, on its 125th anniversary, Queen Beatrix bestowed the royal title "Koninklijk" upon the building. Catch a free lunchtime concert on Wednesdays if you can — it's one of the best deals in European classical music.