Father Pitt

Tag: Apartment Buildings

  • Whimsical Brickwork in Mount Lebanon

    Apartment Building on Central Square

    Here is another example of the odd whimsies that sometimes pop up as small apartment buildings. This is the storybook-cottage style that was popular for single-family houses in the 1920s and 1930s built up into a storybook castle. But the most remarkable thing about it is the deliberately random decorative brickwork. It reminds old Pa Pitt of something Frank Gehry would do.

    Random brickwork

    This extreme randomness would probably not hold up the whole wall, so it is used only in the sort-of-half-timbered section above the entrance. But the rest of the brickwork was made as cartoonishly irregular as possible.

    Irregular brickwork

    Some bricklayer had a lot of fun—or a lot of under-his-breath cursing—with this assignment. We note, however, that the balcony railings have been repaired. Perhaps they were originally wood, or perhaps the irregular brickwork proved less than sound.

  • Adamesque Apartment Building in Oakland

    The Adrian

    A good apartment-building design makes its residents feel better off than they are. Here you can imagine yourself walking into a stately English home by Robert Adam, even if your portion of it is only a studio apartment.

    Entrance

  • Apartment Buildings on Academy Avenue, Mount Lebanon

    Apartment building

    Academy Avenue in Mount Lebanon, just off the Uptown business district, is a street of small to medium-sized apartment buildings, giving way to single-family houses as the street gets farther from Washington Road.

    Apartment building

  • Decorations on the King Edward Apartments

    Plaque and light fixture

    The King Edward Apartments are actually two buildings—a larger one at the corner of Craig and Bayard Streets, and a smaller one behind it on Bayard Street. Both of them have some interesting ornamental features.

  • Emerald Apartments, Beechview

    Emerald Apartments

    Old Pa Pitt’s obsession with small apartment buildings continues. This one is on Broadway in Beechview. It seems to have been originally meant as an imitation of a Georgian mansion of the sort found in Annapolis or Williamsburg. It looks as though smaller windows have been installed, and the semicircle of bricks at the top of the central stairs might have been a “Palladian” window. In spite of alterations and repairs, though, it remains a pleasing and distinctive building.

  • King Edward Apartments, Oakland

    King Edward Apartments

    This is a huge composite picture, so don’t click on it unless you have the megabytes to spare. This elegant apartment building on Craig Street had a typically Pittsburgh problem to solve. The lot is irregularly shaped and (of course) not level. The architect’s answer was a façade that is varied enough to mask the fact that it does not quite line up with the street. At first glance, the front seems symmetrical; the second and third glances will reveal the curious staggering of the wall.

  • Craftsman-Modernist Apartment Building, Mount Lebanon

    Apartment building on Academy Avenue

    Well, this one didn’t quite work.

    Old Pa Pitt has mentioned how he enjoys seeing the experiments builders try with small apartment buildings. Here we see a builder who seems to have absorbed some of the ideas of modernism and added some Craftsman-style details: the three-over-one windows, the decorative brickwork, the wood-framed entrance. But the details seem applied at random, and a modernist architect would have been more regular in the geometry. Note the lack of rhythm or alignment in the windows, which throws off the whole façade. The second and third floors have windows in groups of 2, 1, 3, 2; the first floor has groups of 2, 1, 2, 1, and they do not line up at all with the windows above them. The entrance does not line up vertically or horizontally with anything else in the building; its awkward corner placement seems to leave some of the trim hanging off the edge.

    Someone will probably come along and tell Father Pitt that this building is by a famous modernist architect, and old Pa Pitt will only say that the architect was having a bad day.

  • Georgian Meets Spanish Mission

    Apartment building on Academy Avenue

    You have probably never heard anyone say this before, but Father Pitt is fascinated by small apartment buildings. Larger apartment blocks are often designed by famous architects, and they may be masterpieces of their kind. But small apartment buildings sometimes preserve the adventurous whimsies of a builder who was not technically an architect but could draw a blueprint all by himself.

    Here is a good example. The third floor of this little apartment building in Mount Lebanon is typical of the Spanish Mission style that was very popular in the near South Hills in the first half of the twentieth century. But below that the details are Georgian. It would be hard to imagine a stranger clash than those two styles—and yet they work well together. Pedestrians walking by never say, “Now there is an outrageously mixed metaphor of a building.” A big-deal architect would probably never do it, but it works.

    Addendum: The architect was probably Charles Geisler, who filled Mount Lebanon and Dormont with small apartment buildings.

  • The Berkshire, Mount Lebanon

    The Berkshire

    A typical courtyard apartment building in a corner of Mount Lebanon that is full of small to medium-sized apartment buildings. This one is in a simple but attractive Jacobean style, where a few effective details carry all the thematic weight.

    Lamppost

  • A Polychrome Balcony

    Colorful paint adds a bit of whimsy to a small apartment building in Shadyside.