A massive new apartment tower for Duquesne University students, and a big improvement in the Uptown cityscape (it replaced a parking lot). The architects were Indovina Associates, who designed the building in a subdued version of the currently popular patchwork-quilt style, with materials that harmonize well with the other buildings along the Uptown corridor.
Rockwell Hall was not quite finished when it was featured in an Alcoa advertisement as one of the Pittsburgh skyscrapers made possible by aluminum. The restrained modernist classicism of the building has been faithfully maintained, so that it looks just about the same now as it did when it was new.
Now, who designed the building? Father Pitt asked Google, “Who was the architect of Rockwell Hall at Duquesne University?”—and instantly got a confident answer from artificial intelligence: “The architect of Rockwell Hall at Duquesne University was Newman-Schmidt. The building, also known as the Duquesne University Building, features a student lounge, vending area, and computer labs, and connects to downtown Pittsburgh via a skywalk.”
Newman-Schmidt was a photography company that provided this excellent picture, and the rest of the information comes from the “description” at that page, which our friend with the artificial brain has confidently misinterpreted.
So we asked a human architect, who told us that “the real answer is William York Cocken (probably with others).”
It seems to old Pa Pitt that, if he has to do the research himself anyway, then AI just adds an unnecessary step that can be profitably eliminated.
Mr. Cocken died just a week before the building was dedicated, and yet none of the articles on the dedication mentioned the name of the architect. However, the building was mentioned in his obituaries in all three daily papers (for example, this one in the Press).
Built in the 1950s as the Duquesne University Hall of Law and Finance, this building was featured in the Alcoa advertisement “How Many of These Pittsburgh Skyscrapers Can You Name?” as an example of the new ultra-modern sort of aluminum-clad skyscraper.
The lower side of College Hall as seen from Locust Street. We also have pictures of the front of College Hall.
This small Romanesque commercial building at the corner of Forbes Avenue and Marion Street, probably built in the late 1880s or the 1890s, has a stone front that makes it a little more elaborate than its neighbors. It probably had a couple of pinnacles along the roofline that would have made it stand out even more. It has been modernized a little, which obscures some of the original details, but it appears that it originally had a corner entrance, and weathered Romanesque carvings—including an almost-obliterated face peering out of the foliage—still adorn the capital of the thick column at the corner.
The building next door, which seems to have been built a few years later, was obviously meant to continue the stone front of the corner building, with similar stone and lintels and a similar broad arch.
Back in the days when busy middle-class city-dwellers expected to send their laundry out to be done and have it brought back to them pressed and folded, large laundries used to be more ubiquitous and bigger than they are now. Many of the old laundry buildings have been torn down or severely altered; this one, which is now part of the Duquesne University campus, has found another use as the university’s Public Safety Building without extensive exterior changes.
Frank & Seder was never our biggest department store, but it was a pretty big store. Like all the other department stores downtown, it needed a big warehouse to hold the merchandise until it was ready to delight downtown shoppers. This colossus on the Bluff was designed in 1923 by William E. Snaman,1 an architect who had already had a long and prosperous career and by this time in his life was specializing in large warehouses and other industrial buildings. The Boulevard of the Allies runs past on a course that is not perpendicular to the side streets, so that the front of the building is at an odd angle to the rest of the building.
Just a little later, Snaman was designing another warehouse on the North Side for Rosenbaum’s, another big downtown department store.2 This is a slightly blurred picture from the window of a car stopped in traffic on the approach to the West End Bridge, but it will have to do for now.
Looming behind Duquesne University on the Bluff.
Built in 1968, this is the only design in Pittsburgh by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; it was one of his last works. (The IBM Building at Allegheny Center was designed by Mies’ firm after Mies died.) This is a composite of four long-telephoto photographs taken from the back streets of the South Side across the Monongahela River. At full magnification, atmospheric distortion makes the straight lines slightly wavy.
We also have some closer pictures of Mellon Hall.
Built in 1885 from a design by William Kauffman, this was an astonishingly lofty building when it went up—our first skyscraper college. Its position up on the bluff gave it spectacular views, at least when the smoke from the city below was not too dense, from the cupola that used to stand at the peak of the roof.
We also have a picture of the building as it was built, along with a modern picture from the same angle.
