The developer Oliver Tyrone, who had built a high-class shopping center called Manor Oak on Cochran Road, brought in the New York firm of William N. Breger & Associates to design a high-class high-rise office building for the rising land behind the shops.1 In his early career, Breger had worked for Walter Gropius, and by 1966 his International Style credentials were well established. This building brought some distinguished modernist design to the quiet suburban landscape of Scott Township, and it still stands out as one of the more notable modernist office buildings in Pittsburgh suburbia.
It seems Mr. Tyrone’s investment was a success: two years later he started construction on a much larger nine-floor office building farther up the hill. Breger’s firm was once again in charge of the design,2 but instead of just repeating Manor Oak One but bigger, the architect made a completely different design—very Miesian to old Pa Pitt’s eye, though like many buildings inspired by Mies it narrows the Miesian colonnaded porch to vestigial width.
A native Pittsburgh architect might have adapted the buildings to their sloping site. But instead, the ground was completely leveled for each building, and the buildings could just as easily have grown in a flat city like New York.
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