Father Pitt

Tag: Architects’ Drawings

  • Residence for Mr. Edward Kneeland by Charles M. Bartberger

    Charles M. Bartberger’s perspective renderings were featured more than once in the American Architect and Building News. From December 29, 1900—two days before the end of the nineteenth century—comes this very pleasant mansion for a wealthy Pittsburgher. Mr. Bartberger, whose father was the successful architect Charles F. Bartberger (and the two of them are mixed up all over the Internet), had established himself as a reliable designer of houses for the fairly-well-off, and this Dutch-colonial house is a variation on a very common style in the East End neighborhoods: not an adventurous design, but a respectable one. Father Pitt does not know where it was built or whether it still stands, but he will be looking out for a house with those distinctive dormers. (Update: Mr. Edward Kneeland is shown at 5660 Irwin Avenue in Polk’s Pittsburgh Directory for 1905. Irwin Avenue is now Aylesboro Avenue; the house seems to have been replaced with a store and apartment building at some time in the 1920s.)

  • Completing Plans for Hebrew Institute

    From The Construction Record, September 26, 1914. The building was put up the next year, and still stands almost exactly as Mr. Cohen designed it.

  • School of Mines Building, University of Pittsburgh

    Henry Hornbostel’s drawing of the south façade of the School of Mines Building, later State Hall. It was demolished in 1973 to make way for the Chevron Science Center, and perhaps someone thinks that was an improvement.

    This drawing was published in 1909 in The Brickbuilder, an architectural magazine from which we’ll harvest more illustrations in the future.