Air Force One | Severance Hall — The Kazakh Palace That Is Really a Concert Hall

The film opens in the dark, with commandos dropping onto the roof of General Ivan Radek's palace in Kazakhstan. Ropes, silenced rifles, a dictator dragged out in his dressing gown. The palace is not in Kazakhstan. It is on Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, and on any ordinary evening it is where the Cleveland Orchestra tunes up.

Severance Hall opened in 1931, paid for by John Long Severance in memory of his wife Elisabeth, and it has the calm, slightly severe front that Depression-era Cleveland thought a great city deserved: pale Georgian brick, a limestone portico, a shallow flight of steps. Lit from below by film crews in 1996, that restraint reads as authoritarian. Wolfgang Petersen's team needed a building that looked like state power without looking American, and this one, sitting among the museums and university halls of University Circle, gave it to them without a single set being built.

Case Western Reserve University's campus wraps around the hall on three sides, so the walk from the Cleveland Museum of Art to the steps takes about four minutes. Come at dusk in winter, when the portico lights are on and the trees are bare, and the shot composes itself.