The Adolphus Busch Hall is located at 29 Kirkland Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, nearby the Harvard University Art Museums. Former home of the Busch-Reisinger Museum, Adolphus Busch Hall now houses Harvard University's Minda de Gunzberg Center for European Studies. Romanesque Hall contains a world-renowned Flentrop organ, used for concerts during the academic year.

Adolphus Busch Hall currently contains an exhibition on the history of the Busch-Reisinger Museum and plaster casts of medieval works of art. It is open to the public on the second Sunday of each month, 1:00 to 5:00 p.m., and when organ concerts are given.

History of Adolphus Busch Hall
This building, completed in 1917, originally housed Harvard's "Germanic Museum," a collection of reproductions of famous German monumental sculpture. This collection was intended to round out the experience of Harvard students who studied German culture and who did not have the opportunity to study the original monuments in Europe.

Early in this century a professor of German literature, Kuno Francke, obtained major donations of full-scale plaster casts from Germany's Emperor William II (Kaiser Wilhelm II). These were reproductions of important large monuments and sculptures like the 11th-century bronze doors from the Church of St. Michael in Hildesheim, the 13th-century Golden Portal from the Church of Our Lady in Freiberg in Saxony, and the Rood Screen from the Cathedral in Naumburg.

Plaster reproductions were often collected by cultural and academic institutions at that time. As in the Museum of Fine Arts and the Fogg Art Museum, students in the Germanic Museum experienced the development of art through photographs and full-scale facsimiles. Although this method of learning was replaced by the study of original works of art, some plaster casts remain here and in other cultural institutions. To this day, in Boston's Symphony Hall are sixteen white plaster reproductions of Greek and Roman sculpture, which were installed at the turn of the century.

This building was specially designed and constructed to house plaster casts. Almost all of the building funds came from generous donations by the brewer Adolphus Busch of St. Louis, his wife Lilly, and their son-in-law, Hugo Reisinger. At the request of Busch, a German architect was chosen, the young Dresden historicist architect German Bestelmeyer. The cornerstone of this building was laid in 1912. It is a sad irony that construction of the building began in earnest in July 1914, only weeks before the outbreak of a war that was drastically to undermine the German-American cultural understanding that Professor Francke had tirelessly striven to promote. As the German architect could not travel to the United States, the construction project was taken over by a Boston architect, Patterson Smith, who worked out the whole scheme of designing, placing and finishing the innovative reinforced concrete frame of the building. Under the facade with its distinctively German architectural charm, are ribbed folded plates, concrete trusses, and a partially precast dome. The building was completed in 1917 and was opened to the public after the War.