Tasso Katselas designed this building, put up in 1965, and in old Pa Pitt’s eyes it is one of his most successful designs. It conveys its message perfectly: this is a place where the future is being made today. (We remember having heard that slogan somewhere: it might have been at the Pitt Information Sciences Department.) Yet it has enough variety, enough light and shade, and the right scale and setback to fit well with the older buildings on Bellefield Street.
The Cathedral of Learning is nearly unique among large skyscrapers in that it sits in the middle of a large landscaped park, isolated from other tall buildings. That gives us the opportunity to practice the kind of photographic composition that was popular in the 1930s, when the building opened, by using trees to frame and draw attention to the central subject.
Here is a different kind of framing: the Cathedral of Learning as seen from the Ailsa Mellon Brice Galleries at the Carnegie Museum of Art.
A matched set of apartment buildings, just behind St. Paul’s Cathedral, whose simple modernist forms are enlivened with just enough medievalistic detail to let the tenants imagine they live in a castle.
In spite of the ever-growing number of additions that obscure more and more of it, the original Presbyterian Hospital building is still a commanding presence in Oakland. It was built in 1926; the architect was E. P. Mellon, who flourished with his family connections: Presbyterian Hospital had strong ties to the Mellon family.
Seen here from up the street at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Craig Street.
We have more pictures of Webster Hall, including some of the decorative details.
Many visitors to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History bolt right past the Hillman Hall of Minerals and Gems on their way to the dinosaurs, but it’s worth a stop. There are informative exhibits of various sorts, including a gallery of glow-in-the-dark minerals that will catch children’s attention. And then there’s the room full of properly categorized minerals. Wall mirrors make the systematic collection look practically infinite, but even without the mirrors it is an impressive collection. There is certainly no better place in Pittsburgh to learn to recognize various minerals, and examining them in three dimensions is much more educational than seeing pictures in a book.
John White Alexander gave us one of the great mural sequences in America in the Grand Staircase of the Carnegie Institute. The Crowning of Labor, also known as The Apotheosis of Pittsburgh, is the part of the sequence that gets the most attention. But it was all meant to lead upward to a climax on the third floor.
The Carnegie Museum of Art site has an informative page on the Grand Staircase and its murals, with of course an obligatory paragraph to tell you that because they are old they are evil. The figures on the third floor were meant to represent crowds of ordinary people marching toward enlightenment—to be represented in Carnegie’s Noble Quartet of Art, Science, Music, and Literature. But the artist died before he could paint Enlightenment, so that, like the rest of humanity, these people will never reach it.
Here are all the murals in the sequence individually.
When the murals were restored a few years ago, one square was left unrestored in this mural to show us how a century of Pittsburgh atmosphere had affected the paintings.
It was one of the oddest things in the Carnegie, and few people ever made it that far after an afternoon of gawking at dinosaurs: a whole gallery on the third floor, the Wyckoff Hall of Arctic Life, dedicated to the “Polar World.” Now, after decades of informing visitors one or two at a time, the exhibit is finally being taken down. But it is being taken down slowly and carefully; and since the hall is also the only route in and out of the Alcoa Hall of American Indians—an exhibit even more invisible to most museum visitors, but one well worth your time—the few visitors who make it to the third floor have a chance to see what happens when a longstanding exhibit vanishes.
The space will be used for a greatly expanded Egyptian gallery, which will doubtless be more popular. But it will not be as odd. Every museum that can afford one has a good Egyptian gallery; few museums below the Arctic Circle had a gallery of Polar Life.
These are far from the first pictures of this cathedral that old Pa Pitt has published, and they certainly will not be the last. A cathedral is too big a deal to take in all at once.
The west front (liturgically speaking1) is a towering Gothic fantasy whose scale is hard to convey in a photograph. Here the human figures on the steps give us some context.
The main doors turn on the mightiest hinges in Pittsburgh.
This would be a magnificent main front for any church; here it is just the façade of the south transept.
The south-transept entrance.
We have many more pictures of St. Paul’s from many years of passing by with a camera.
Edward J. Weber, who wrote the book on Catholic Church Buildings, was the architect of this little building, part of the cathedral complex and now known as the St. Paul Cathedral Center. This building and Synod Hall behind it were built in 1914.
We have more pictures of the Chancery here.
