It’s getting close to done—our fifteenth-tallest skyscraper, if old Pa Pitt’s calculations are right, and the first really big one built outside downtown since the Cathedral of Learning. When the Lower Hill was demolished to get all those poor people out of sight of the executives downtown, the promise was that it would be replaced with a gargantuan cultural and commercial center that would make Pittsburgh proud. Instead it became mostly arid wasteland. This complex, of which the tower is the most visible manifestation, is promoting itself as finally delivering on those promises made all those decades ago, with “next-level social impact” and everything. Since we waited this long, we came out of the era of arid and uninspired International Style architecture, went straight through the era of Postmodernism, and landed smack in the middle of the Arid and Uninspired International Style Revival. The design came from Gensler, the world’s largest architecture factory.
