The great majority of old Pa Pitt’s articles are about the architecture of particular buildings, but this category is reserved for more general essays on the subject of architecture.
The Hall of Architecture in the Carnegie gives us a whirlwind tour of Western architectural history from Egypt to the Renaissance, through the medium of life-size plaster casts. Above, the sphinx on the Votive Column of the Naxians at Delphi. It originally stood on a column more than thirty feet high, and the Carnegie’s cast is elevated to give viewers an approximation of the angle at which the sculpture was meant to be seen.
You see them everywhere in Pittsburgh neighborhoods: those big cube-shaped houses with a pyramid roof, a house-wide porch, and a big dormer facing the front.
House on Fallowfield Avenue, Beechview.
This is the Pittsburgh Foursquare, the local variety of the American Foursquare. It was a style especially popular, with variations, in the years from about 1890 to about 1930.
House on Fallowfield Avenue, Beechview.
These houses are called “foursquare” because they look square, and the ground floor usually has four rooms, counting the reception hall with the grand staircase, which in those civilized days was often the largest room in the house. The stairway usually had a landing with a big art-glass window to impress visitors.
Staircase with stained glass in a Beechview house.
These windows often go missing—sometimes because they are stolen if the house is vacant for a while, and sometimes because, in the middle twentieth century, it was so embarrassingly old-fashioned to have stained glass in one’s house that people either covered the windows with heavy curtains or replaced them with something more in line with modern taste, like glass block. Nevertheless, there are thousands of them still in place in Pittsburgh houses.
On the second floor were three or four bedrooms and a bathroom (and usually a linen closet the size of a small room). The third floor generally had two more full-sized rooms, which might be used as servants’ quarters.
The most distinctive feature of the Pittsburgh version is usually a steeper pitch of the roof, allowing more space in the two rooms on the third floor and giving the houses a taller and beefier appearance than the Midwestern varieties of the species. It is also true that the Pittsburgh version is designed to make the best use of narrow city lots, giving the homeowner as much “detached” house as can be squashed into a lot typically thirty feet wide. For that reason, Pittsburgh Foursquares are usually considerably deeper than they are wide. The design is exceptionally efficient in cramming square footage into a city lot, even allowing for the reception hall, which later generations would consider wasted space.
House on Koehler Street in Mount Oliver.
Whole blocks in streetcar neighborhoods of the early 1900s are lined with these houses.
Alton Street, Beechview.Fallowfield Avenue, Beechview.Fallowfield Avenue, Beechview.Penn Avenue, Mount Oliver.
Though the basic shape varied little, decorative details like the dormer could make the house distinctive.
House on Koehler Street, Mount Oliver.
Pittsburgh Foursquares are built in all materials—frame, brick, stone, and occasionally concrete block.
Aluminum, vinyl, Insulbrick, and Perma-Stone: old Pa Pitt calls them the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. They are the four most common artificial sidings applied to Pittsburgh houses, especially frame houses. (But not exclusively frame houses: siding salesmen were aggressive enough to go for brick houses if they sensed weakness in the buyer.) They are responsible for more uglification in the city than any other single force. That is not to say that it is impossible to use them well, only that they are almost never used well. We can find perfect illustrations within a block of each other on the South Side.
Aluminum is usually easy to recognize by the rust stains, which probably come from the fasteners rather than the aluminum itself.
Vinyl siding is the closest in appearance to wood siding, and if applied well can be hard to distinguish from a distance. But instead of removing the wood siding and replacing it with vinyl, the contractors usually stick the vinyl over the wood siding. That means two bad things: first, that there is an invisible layer of decaying wood; second, that all the trim on the house is swallowed up, leaving the house a cartoon shell. In the picture above, the whole process has been taken to its logical conclusion in the right-hand house. A good deal of money was spent on new windows in the wrongest possible shapes, vinyl trim, and paste-on fake shutters that could not possibly cover the windows, leaving the house an expensive architectural wreck.
Insulbrick is a trademark name (though there were disputes over the trademark) for siding made up of asphalt sheets stamped with a brick pattern. When the siding is new, it looks as if a child drew bricks on the house with crayons. When it is older, it looks like the picture above. In spite of the name, it is very bad at insulating.
Perma-Stone is another trademark name: it is siding that imitates stonework, once again in a cartoonish fashion.
Sometimes more than one of these sidings can grow on a house, either because the owner loved variety, or because different generations attacked different maintenance problems in different halfhearted ways.
Insulbrick and vinyl.
Aluminum and Perma-Stone.
If you are the owner of a frame house that still has wooden siding, congratulations! You are a member of a small elite minority in Pittsburgh. Keep a good coat of paint on that siding, and attack problems while they are still young, and you will keep your house beautiful for generations to come.
If the time comes to replace that siding, though, consider the long term. Contractors will tell you that their artificial sidings will last forever. Look around you. You can see that they are misinformed. Consider replacing wood with wood, or—if wood is not in your budget—consider replacing it with vinyl rather than covering it over with vinyl.
Henry Hobson Richardson’s design for the Allegheny County Courthouse and Jail, from the book Henry Hobson Richardson and His Works, published shortly after Richardson’s death. The last paragraph of the lengthy description of this work, Richardson’s greatest, is worth quoting.
“Taken as a whole the design of this vast and complex structure, both inside and out, is a marvel of good sense as well as of architectural beauty. None of the faults which appear in some of Richardson’s other buildings can be found in this. It seems as simply yet completely right in execution as in first conception. We may take the Court-house as Richardson wished it to be taken—as the full expression of his mature power in the direction where it was most at home. Had he not lived to build it his record would still have been a surprising one and would still have entitled him to be called a man of genius in the full meaning of the term. But it would have been an incomplete, a broken record, while now we see the best of which he himself felt capable; and seeing it we believe that no possible problem which a long life might have brought him would have been too difficult for him to solve. It proves that he was more firmly convinced than ever that in the precedents of southern Romanesque he could find his best inspiration, but that he had worked his way to a very different attitude towards them from the one he had first assumed. The Court-house is the most magnificent and imposing of his works, yet it is the most logical and quiet. It is the most sober and severe, yet it is the most original and in one sense the most eclectic. Although all its individual features have been drawn from an early southern style, its silhouette suggests some of the late-mediaeval buildings of the north of Europe, and its symmetry, its dignity and nobility of air, speak of Renaissance ideals. To combine inspirations drawn from such different sources into a novel yet organic whole while expressing a complex plan of the most modern sort—this was indeed to be original. There is no other municipal building like Richardson’s Court-house. It is as new as the needs it meets, as American as the community for which it was built. Yet it might stand without loss of prestige in any city in the world.”
Colorful Art Deco ornament on a building in the Washington Road business district, the Pittsburgh area’s most thoroughly Art Deco neighborhood.
These splendid details are on a building that, at first glance, seems utterly undistinguished. A bit of sensitive restoration to the storefronts could emphasize the Art Deco character of the building and make it more of an ornament to its streetscape.
Sometimes one finds things one didn’t know one was looking for. Father Pitt had decided to visit Rosedale Cemetery in Ross Township, a small German cemetery that does not show up on many maps, and here it was: the Osterling family monument, with “Fred J. Osterling” inscribed on it. By the dates we know that this is Frederick Osterling, the great architect, and the monument itself is so strikingly tasteful that one suspects Mr. Osterling designed it himself for his parents.
Frederick Osterling is responsible for some of the most important buildings in Pittsburgh:
—among many others. His career pretty much ended with the Union Trust Building, however; the client, Henry Frick, refused to pay Osterling’s fee when the construction ran late, and Osterling sued. After a decade in various courts, the case of Osterling v. Frick ended in victory for Osterling; but meanwhile it seems that Frick, who was good at holding grudges, had made sure Osterling would never work again. On the other hand, it seems he didn’t really need to work: when he died in 1934, Osterling left an estate valued at a million dollars, which was a good bit of money in those days.
The Bertha Osterling whose name appears below Fred’s name is one of Frederick’s sisters, who apparently never married. Frederick never married, either; but, when he died with a million dollars in his estate, he left $10,000 of it to a certain Martha O. Aber in a handwritten codicil to his will (the rest went to his sisters Bertha and Anna). This woman then claimed to be his secret wife, and demanded a much larger share of the estate. Old Pa Pitt does not know what happened after that.
Frederick Osterling built this charming little building in 1917 to be his office and studio. From it he had a fine view of the Pittsburgh skyline that he was helping shape—a view now blocked by the new Alcoa building.
Frederick Sauer was a very reliable church architect responsible for many of Pittsburgh’s better Catholic churches, including St. Mary of the Mount. Nothing about his churches would stamp him as an eccentric; he gave his clients exactly the respectable buildings they wanted. But he had a streak of whimsy in him. He bought a large tract of land on the hill over Aspinwall and designed a very conventional and respectable house for himself. Then he started to play in the back yard. Beginning with his chicken coop, for example, he added fairy-tale projections and curious details, building up and out until he had made an apartment building, the Heidelberg Apartments (above). He did much of the building with his own hands, eventually creating half a dozen or so curious structures back in the woods behind his house. They now form the Sauer Buildings Historic District—one of those curious Pittsburgh treasures probably known less to Pittsburghers than to the rest of the world, where they are often mentioned as one of the most interesting flights of architectural eccentricity in America.
Since old Pa Pitt often talks about classical architecture as it is imitated and adapted in our buildings, he shamelessly borrows his own article on the classical orders from his own Pittsburgh Cemeteries site.
Every schoolchild learns that there are three orders of classical architecture—Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian—and that they can easily be distinguished by the capitals of their columns. And every schoolchild promptly forgets that information. So here it is again.
The Doric order is the simplest of the three, easily recognized by the square capitals.
The Ionic order has distinctive “volutes,” which most ordinary observers would call “curlicues.”
The Corinthian is the most complex of the three, with capitals carved in the shape of a basket of acanthus leaves. The easiest way for the ordinary observer to recognize it is by knowing that it is not Doric and not Ionic, and that the capitals look complex and fiddly.
Corinthian columns also have small volutes, as we see above. When the volutes become more prominent, so that the column looks half-Corinthian and half-Ionic, as we see below, the order is called Composite—a term that came into use during the Renaissance for columns that the Romans would have called Corinthian with big volutes.
The Romans added one more order, which they considered even simpler than the Doric: the Tuscan order, whose columns have simple round capitals rather than the square capitals of the Doric. The Tuscan order is seldom used in our cemeteries.
There’s more than the columns to each order of architecture: there are rules about proportions, and there are rules about mixing the orders in a building with more than one level. (Doric on the bottom, Ionic above Doric, and Corinthian above Ionic.) The architects of mausoleums may or may not follow all the rules. But the capitals are easy to distinguish, so when we say “a Doric mausoleum,” we usually mean one with Doric capitals, whether it follows all the other rules or not.
