Stanford Memorial Auditorium
On April 14, 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. stood in Stanford's Memorial Auditorium and delivered a speech called "The Other America." He described a country split between those who prospered and those who suffered -- a message delivered in what was already one of the wealthiest corners of California. The auditorium, built thirty years earlier to honor Stanford students and faculty who died in World War I, had become exactly the kind of stage its designers intended: a place where the university confronted ideas that mattered.
Arthur Brown's Memorial
Memorial Hall -- informally known as MemAud -- was designed by Arthur Brown Jr. in conjunction with Bakewell and Weihe and completed in 1937. Brown was one of San Francisco's most prominent architects, responsible for City Hall and the War Memorial Opera House, and his design for MemAud reflects the same Beaux-Arts grandeur scaled to a university setting. The building commemorates Stanford community members who died in World War I, and its purpose as a memorial gives even routine events a weight they might lack elsewhere. Modifications in 1997 by Sebastian and Associates added new entry stairs, a terrace, and an accessibility ramp.
The Speakers Who Came
MemAud's size -- it is the largest indoor performance space at Stanford -- made it the natural venue for events that drew crowds too large for any classroom. After King's 1967 speech, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev spoke here in 1990, and the Dalai Lama visited in both 2005 and 2010. Each summer, the IEEE's Hot Chips symposium on hardware chips fills the seats with engineers rather than dignitaries. Much of New Student Orientation takes place inside the auditorium, meaning that most Stanford students' first experience of the university happens in a building dedicated to those who left it and did not return.
Student Rituals
MemAud doubles as the campus cinema -- Flicks, Stanford's student movie service, screens films here weekly. In the days before the Big Game against Cal, Gaieties -- a student-produced musical comedy that skewers campus life -- fills the hall with laughter and terrible puns. The juxtaposition is characteristic: a memorial auditorium that honors the dead with the living, hosting symposia and stand-up comedy and foreign heads of state and first-year orientation with equal ease.
From the Air
Stanford Memorial Auditorium is at 37.429°N, 122.166°W on the Stanford campus, near the main quad. Nearest airports: Palo Alto (KPAO) 2 nm northeast, San Jose International (KSJC) 10 nm southeast.