Symphony Center is a music complex located at 220 South Michigan Avenue in the Loop area of Chicago, Illinois.

In June 1993, plans to significantly renovate and expand Orchestra Hall were approved and the $110 million project resulting in Symphony Center, completed in 1997.

The new hall was specifically designed as a home for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, which had previously performed in the larger Auditorium Theater.

From 1907 through 1996 the ninth-floor penthouse of the building served as the home of the Cliff Dwellers Club, with interior architecture by Howard Van Doren Shaw and the first significant mural of John Warner Norton.

Lectures and other programs were held at Orchestra Hall in with speakers including Harry Houdini, Richard E. Byrd, Amelia Earhart, Bertrand Russell and Orson Welles.

The low strings, especially, had a new warmth and solidity, and the whole bass and baritonal range of the orchestra provided a firmer basis and a mellower foil for the sound above it, which has always been brash and brilliant.

"[8] In a review of a piano recital, not an orchestral concert, Chicago Tribune music critic John von Rhein wrote "...everything registered with the impact of the old hall, only better.

Lawrence Kirkegaard ... said he and his associates were 'intensively involved' in minor adjustments last week and will continue to tinker with the sound sporadically throughout the season,"[10] and some years after the transformation, critics at the Chicago Tribune newspaper expressed dissatisfaction with the Orchestra Hall acoustics.