Father Pitt

Category: Downtown

  • May Building

    May Building

    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.

    Wreath on the cornice

    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.

    Cartouche on the May Building
    May Building and addition

    The modernist addition on the right-hand side of the building was designed by Tasso Katselas.

  • Westinghouse Building

    Westinghouse Building

    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.

    Entrance

    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.

    Colonnaded porch

    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.

    Porch

    In fact, as insulting as it is to say this to a pair of distinguished modernists like Harrison & Abramovitz, this porch is merely decorative.

    Westinghouse Building

    We also have pictures of the Westinghouse building from Mount Washington, and from the Monongahela River.

  • United Steelworkers Building

    Base of the United Steelworkers Building

    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.

    United Steelworkers Building
    One pier of the United Steelworkers Building
    Nikon COOLPIX P100.

    More pictures of the United Steelworkers Building from Gateway Center Park, from the Boulevard of the Allies, and from across the river.

  • Merry Christmas

    Horne’s Christmas tree
    Nikon COOLPIX P100.

  • Firstside

    Firstside
    Composite of three photographs from the Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

  • Bell Telephone Company of Pennsylvania Western Headquarters Building

    Bell Telephone Company of Pennsylvania Western Headquarters Building

    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.

    Wall detail
    Porch

    The Stanwix Street front has a Miesian colonnaded porch, with a cheerful abstract mosaic ceiling.

    Window

    Those cheerful square polka dots also show up in other parts of the building.

    Cornerstone dated 1956

    The cornerstone, with its late-Art-Deco lettering and date.

    Bell emblem
    Nikon COOLPIX P100.

    The Bell System emblem.

    More pictures of the building, including the unique clock and globe (unfortunately out of order).

  • Boulevard of the Allies

    Boulevard of the Allies

    Looking eastward from the pedestrian bridge at Gateway Center Park.

  • Steel Facing of Two Gateway Center

    Side wall of Two Gateway Center
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

    Though credited to Eggers & Higgins in most guides to Pittsburgh architecture, the Le Corbusier–style cruciform-towers-in-a-park design was the work of Irwin Clavan. According to Franklin Toker, “The design of these cruciform towers represented a tug-of-war between the traditionalists Eggers and Higgins, former partners of John Russell Pope (Eggers was also a major force in building the Pentagon), and the more progressive Clavan, who in the same years designed cruciform-tower housing estates in New York on the model of Le Corbusier’s 1922 towers-in-the-park scheme for Paris. Between seven and fifteen cruciform towers were originally projected, in traditional brick and limestone. At the last minute the designs were respecified for stainless steel, but scarcities during the Korean War required that chrome-alloyed steel be substituted.”1

    Old Pa Pitt does not know whether the last-minute substitution of steel was a matter of cost or aesthetics, but it made all the difference in the world. Like most big cities, Pittsburgh is littered with postwar brick cruciform apartment towers. They are not missed if they go away. But the glimmering steel face of the Gateway Center towers makes them unique and attractive. They catch the light and throw it back in constantly shifting patterns throughout the day. The steel lifts these towers out of the bland and forgettable, and we should appreciate how lucky we are to have it.

    1. Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait, p. 26. ↩︎

  • Phipps-McElveen Building

    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

    One of several buildings in this part of downtown put up by Henry Phipps, this is now student housing under the name Penn Commons.

    We have a front elevation of the Phipps-McElveen Building from a few years ago.

  • Penn Avenue in the Cultural District

    Penn Avenue looking northeastward
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.