The Mount Washington branch of the Carnegie Library, built in 1900, was designed by Alden & Harlow, Andrew Carnegie’s favorite architectural firm. It occupies a valuable site on Grandview Avenue across from one of the most spectacular views in North America, but as a historic landmark it has some protection from greedy developers.
This little maintenance building on Bausman Street is an unexpected touch of Art Deco in an otherwise residential neighborhood. Enlarge the picture to appreciate the details.
Update: This building has vanished, so let this picture serve as its memorial.
This Slovak church is no longer used, but the building is still kept in good condition.
The Romanesque façade, with its colorful inlays, is something extraordinary even in a region of extraordinary churches.
The relief of Ss. Cyril and Methodius, apostles to the Slavs, shows more than a little Art Deco influence.
Until a few years ago, the tower held up a fine statue of St. Joseph the Worker, one of the last major works of the great Frank Vittor. It has been moved to St. Maximilian Kolbe parish, where you can see it at eye level.
Update: Some of the information about the architect was wrong in the original version of this article. Back in those days, the Society of Architectural Historians article on this church said, “Little is known about Budapest-born Titus de Bobula.” But Old Pa Pitt has fixed that. Now you can read his article about Titus de Bobula and know way too much.
The cathedral moved farther out into the suburbs (though still in Munhall borough), and this is now the National Carpatho-Rusyn Cultural and Educational Center—an institution that keeps no regular hours and obviously can barely afford to keep the building standing. But the church is loved, and we may hope that whatever love can accomplish will be done for it. The architect was Titus de Bobula, a Hungarian who designed several churches around here. He is a fascinating character: he went back to Hungary in the 1920s and was imprisoned for plotting to overthrow the government; then he came back here and became an arms dealer, while simultaneously working on the designs for the structural aspects of Nikola Tesla’s fantastic, and possibly delusional, electronic superweapons, which of course were never built. It is not often that we find such a direct line from a Carpatho-Rusyn cathedral to the world of science fiction.
Connoisseurs of elegant lettering should not miss the plaque identifying the architect, contractor, and building date. Father Pitt suspects that de Bobula himself designed it: there is nothing else quite like it in Pittsburgh, and the style seems very much like the Art Nouveau of Budapest. (Update: The style is identical to the lettering De Bobula used to sign some of his drawings, so we may be confident that it is his.)
This spectacularly odd building houses the headquarters of M. S. Jacobs & Associates, an engineering firm. But the Egyptian style, and the location right across the street from the Chartiers Cemetery, tell us that it was originally in the death business; in fact, according to the all-knowing Internet, it was built in 1920 for a monument dealer.
The Gulf Tower, with the Koppers Tower (left) and partly completed Tower at PNC Plaza (right). As time goes on, every skyscraper that used to be a “building” changes its name to “tower.”
The skeleton is in place and the sides are filling in.
This picture is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, so no permission is needed to use it for any purpose whatsoever.
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.
Henry Hornbostel’s only real skyscraper was briefly the tallest thing in Pittsburgh when it opened in 1929, before being surpassed two years later by the Gulf Building. It’s famous for the air beacon on top—red until recently, but now green to match the logo of the Huntington Bank—that flashes “Pittsburgh” all night in Morse Code. Behind and to the left, the building with three enormous arches is Hornbostel’s City-County Building.
A jumble of modernist buildings downtown, seen from Point State Park.
