Glassmaker Dale Chihuly has filled Phipps Conservatory with whimsical creations that look like mad experiments in botany. Chihuly may be the only installation artist working today who consistently manages the extraordinary feat of appealing equally to three-year-old children and old grumps.
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The plaza at the center of PPG Place is now filled with a skating rink in the winter. But a few years ago, before the skating rink, on Light-Up Night it used to be filled with luminarias—paper bags weighted with sand and lit by candles. (Luminarias, normally associated with Latin American culture, are an old tradition in Pittsburgh for some reason.)
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Streets in downtown Pittsburgh are extraordinarily narrow by American standards. Here Oliver Avenue cuts through a narrow gorge formed by some celebrated buildings (the Union Trust Building, the William Penn Hotel, the Oliver Building) and some slightly less celebrated buildings.
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The sidewalk of Lincoln Avenue in Allegheny West. A hundred years ago, this neighborhood had more millionaires per square mile than anywhere else on earth.
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The Linden Avenue School in Point Breeze. Learning must be something beautiful and important if it takes place in a building like this.
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There are three Ralph Adams Cram churches in Pittsburgh, but by far the most fantastical of the lot is Holy Rosary in Homewood.
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The Gulf Building, an Art Deco tower with a top modeled after the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, is rendered here in old-postcard colors through the marvel of modern digital technology.
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Italianate detail on the upper floors of a storefront on Carson Street, South Side.
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Like a forgotten Khmer temple rising out of the jungle, this octagonal mausoleum in the Allegheny Cemetery is partly overgrown, sprouting small trees from its roof. The black-and-white pictures were taken with an old Agfa Isolette, the color picture with a Yashica-A TLR.
More and larger pictures are here.
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A light fixture on the Frick Building. Henry Clay Frick intended this to be the best commercial building in America, so naturally his architect, the great Daniel Burnham, specified the best light fixtures in America.
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