Warm weather has fooled the gullible plant kingdom into thinking spring has arrived already. Cherry blossoms, dandelions, wood sorrels, and clovers were all blooming in the grounds of the Carnegie in Oakland.
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Chrysanthemums at Phipps Conservatory
The Fall Flower Show is over, but yesterday enough of the chrysanthemums were still in place for one last glimpse. These are hurried snapshots from a cell phone, but they give us some notion of the spectacle. Meanwhile, the Winter Flower Show is half installed, and already looks spectacular.
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Elevator Shaft in the Tropical Forest at Phipps
Of all the elevator shafts in Pittsburgh, the most elegant is probably this one—faced with stone, dripping with vines, and surrounded by lush vegetation—in the Indian Tropical Forest at Phipps Conservatory.
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Grand Staircase, Carnegie Museum
Originally the main entrance and still the centerpiece of the vast Carnegie establishment in Oakland, this three-storey open space is decorated with murals by John White Alexander depicting the Apotheosis of Pittsburgh. Most museum visitors ignore them while hurrying on past to the dinosaurs, but the mural group is actually one of the museum’s great artistic treasures. It’s worth spending half an hour in the Grand Staircase picking out the details, like the faces of the damned in the billowing smoke.
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Hall of Architecture, Carnegie Museum
This is the most breathtaking single room in the Western Hemisphere. That statement is likely to provoke some opposition, but Father Pitt is willing to defend it.
In the late nineteenth century, many museums collected plaster casts of the great monuments and sculptures of the past. The casting preserved the minutest details of the surface in three dimensions, so that a museum visitor can study every chisel mark on a famous Romanesque facade without having to hop on a steamer and travel to Europe.
In the twentieth century, the cult of originality persuaded most museum curators that these plaster casts were worthless. Almost all the great collections were broken up and thrown out. Only three of them remain in the world, and only one of them—this one—is still in the space that was built to house it, never having been shuffled from one wing to another or stored for years under a highway overpass.
Now, at last, some of the more enlightened art historians are beginning to understand the value of the casts. Here a Pittsburgher can study the whole history of Western architecture from Egypt to the Renaissance without so much as crossing the Monongahela. But even more important is the fact that these casts are more than a century old. The twentieth century, with its corrosive pollution and horrendous wars, was more destructive to ancient monuments than any other century. But here we can see exact replicas of these monuments as they were before all the corrosion and destruction. This collection is a unique cultural treasure, worth crossing a continent or an ocean to see.
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Hall of Sculpture, Carnegie Museum
The Hall of Sculpture was built in imitation of the interior of the Parthenon, with marble from the same quarry that supplied the marble for the famous Athenian temple. It was intended to house the Carnegie’s collection of plaster casts of famous sculptures, some of which still adorn the balcony, and some of which have been moved to the Hall of Architecture. On the floor below, staff are hanging transparencies from clotheslines. Why? We’ll find out when they’re done.
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Fall Flower Show at Phipps
The Fall Flower Show is perhaps the biggest event of the season at Phipps Conservatory. This year’s show is not a disappointment. Here is a dragon that has taken over the whole length of the Sunken Garden.
This whimsical display is enlivened by the constant music of falling water raining from sunflower showerheads, spouting from fountains,and tumbling down a waterfall in the back.
Outside, the leaves are changing colors, making quite a spectacle in the interior courtyards.
This little arbor in the garden cleverly reflects the Gothic architecture of the original 1893 glasshouses.
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Boston Ivy in Fall Colors
Boston ivy growing on a stone wall at the Pittsburgh Zoo turns bright colors for fall.
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Phipps Conservatory in Phipps Conservatory
The latest incarnation of the Garden Railroad in the South Conservatory at Phipps includes this delightful little model of the original Phipps Conservatory as it appeared in 1893. The scale is not exact, but it’s still a very convincing illusion from certain angles.
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Cruising on the Monongahela
The Duchess, one of the Gateway Clipper fleet, putters down the Monongahela late in an autumn afternoon.
