The Tower at PNC Plaza will be ten years old this year. It occurred to Father Pitt that he had enough pictures in his collection to make up a visual story of the construction of the building, so here they are. Above, the progress as of February 18, 2014.
June 27, 2014, before the construction of the cap began.
Old Pa Pitt’s New Year’s resolution is to bring you more of the same, and to try to get better at it.
The May Building was designed by Charles Bickel, probably the most prolific architect Pittsburgh ever had, and a versatile one as well.
The famous Sicilian Greek mathematician and philosopher and inventor and scientist Archimedes was nicknamed “Beta” in his lifetime, because he was second-best at everything. That was Charles Bickel. If you wanted a Beaux Arts skyscraper like this one, he would give you a splendid one; it might not be the most artistic in the whole city, but it would be admired, and it would hold up for well over a century. If you wanted Richardsonian Romanesque, he could give it to you in spades; it might not be as sophisticated as Richardson, but it would be very good and would make you proud. If you wanted the largest commercial building in the world, why, sure, he was up to that, and he would make it look so good that a century later people would go out of their way to find a use for it just because they liked it so much.
The modernist addition on the right-hand side of the building was designed by Tasso Katselas.
The Westinghouse Building (now known by its street address, Eleven Stanwix) was designed by Harrison & Abramovitz, who completely changed Pittsburgh’s skyline in the years between the Second World War and the Postmodernist era of the 1980s.
Years ago old Pa Pitt said that the building reminded him of two Mies van der Rohe buildings stacked one on top of another. The building has a Miesian colonnaded porch, but there is an essential difference, and the difference is in favor of Mies.
In a Mies building, the porch creates a useful space that is a transition between outside and inside. You can set up tables on the porch if you like, and they will be out of the weather. People caught in a storm can run to the porch and be sheltered until security chases them back out into the rain. But here the porch is shallow and nearly useless. It does not provide shelter, and the space between the columns and the building is so tight that it eliminates the possibility of using the porch for much. The tables above are pleasant on a clear day, but they are exposed to the weather, and you would not want to sit there in the rain.
In fact, as insulting as it is to say this to a pair of distinguished modernists like Harrison & Abramovitz, this porch is merely decorative.
The “diagrid” construction of the United Steelworkers Building (originally the IBM Building) is unusual, both from an aesthetic and from an engineering standpoint. The grid is not just decorative: it holds up the building from the outside. The piers on which all that weight rests are dramatic from close up. The architects were Curtis and Davis of New Orleans; as far as old Pa Pitt knows, this is their only building in Pittsburgh.
Dowler & Dowler, father-and-son architects, designed this building for the Bell System’s western headquarters in Pennsylvania. We have seen the building from this angle before, but we have not seen it with a bus coming toward you, which is always an improvement.
The Stanwix Street front has a Miesian colonnaded porch, with a cheerful abstract mosaic ceiling.
Those cheerful square polka dots also show up in other parts of the building.
The cornerstone, with its late-Art-Deco lettering and date.
