Father Pitt

Tag: Classical Architecture

  • Dollar Bank

    Dollar Bank

    The adjective “tasteful” does not naturally attach itself to this structure. It has the look of a building specified by a banker who hired an expensive architect and was determined to wring every cent of his money’s worth out of the details. It is magnificent in a slightly horrifying way: this is the kind of monstrosity that was in the minds of the modernists when they condemned all things Victorian. Old Pa Pitt would not change a single swirl or swag or grotesque half-vegetable naked lady.

    The architect in question was the firm of Isaac H. Hobbs & Sons from Philadelphia. Isaac H. Hobbs was a kind of celebrity architect. He was familiar to the thousands of ladies across our fair land who read Godey’s Lady’s Book, the premier fashion magazine of the middle 1800s: every month, Hobbs contributed a design for an elaborately Victorian residence for the lady readers to drool over. It was something like having a regular segment on a popular daytime talk show today. According to the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation’s Fourth Avenue walking tour (PDF), Hobbs designed a number of houses around Pittsburgh, but Father Pitt does not know any of them; he wonders whether they were original designs, or whether they were adaptations of the many designs published in Godey’s.

    It appears that the crust of 150-year-old ornamentation requires some stabilization: netting is stretched over the top half of the building at the moment.

  • Colonial Trust Company

    Colonial Trust Company

    A splendid banking hall with façades by Frederick Osterling. The Wood Street one above is one of his late works, from 1926. Many of the banks along Fourth Avenue went for height, building some of the first skyscrapers; the Colonial Trust Company went for length. Its main hall extends all the way through from Fourth to Forbes, with elaborate façades at both ends; it later extended a perpendicular arm to Wood Street. Below, the Fourth Avenue façade from 1902, also by Osterling. We can see how much his ideas of classical architecture had changed in 24 years. In 1902 he chose the Corinthian order and elaborated it with every kind of ornament of which classical architecture is capable; in 1926 he chose the Ionic order and kept the ornamentation to a minimum.

  • Entrance to the Union National Building

    Entrance to the Union National Building

    This is very definitely a corner building, and architects MacClure and Spahr made the corner the most identifiable thing about it. That curved corner runs all the way up to the top, and the main entrance is right on the corner of Fourth and Wood.

    Notice the capitals on those prominent columns. How do you adapt square Doric capitals to a fairly tight curve? Making them octagonal is a solution that might have given Vitruvius a stroke, but works very well in this context.

    The building is now luxury apartments under the name “The Carlyle.”

  • Free to the People for 125 Years

    Inscription over the Carnegie Library entrance
    Entrance to the Carnegie Library

  • St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Cathedral

    St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Cathedral

    The classical style of this church, which is now the cathedral for the Metropolis of Pittsburgh, is quite unusual for a Greek Orthodox church. Greek Christians do not usually build in a Greek classical style—and the style of this church, with the prominent arch in the front, is more Roman than Greek. The explanation is that it was built for Methodists; the Orthodox congregation bought it from them.

    Even if you don’t know much Greek, you can probably guess that this is the name of the church in Greek: “St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Cathedral Church.”

    Ionic capital

    One of the splendid Ionic capitals that hold up a front of which Vitruvius would have approved.

  • A Polychrome Balcony

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

  • Roof Ornaments, Soldiers and Sailors Memorial

    Above, the distinctive grotesque eruption at the pinnacle of the pyramid roof. Below, the alternating eagles and torches of the cornice.

  • Twentieth Century Club and Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, Oakland

    Two great cultural institutions that vacated their landmark buildings for different reasons. The Twentieth Century Club, Pittsburgh’s premier women’s club, fell on hard times like most clubs in our antisocial twenty-first century. The Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, on the other hand, prospered and moved its collection to the Heinz History Center in the Strip. Old Pa Pitt is delighted to see that the old Historical Society building will soon be a Latin American Cultural Center, so that once again it will be a cultural landmark in Oakland.

    The Twentieth Century Club was designed by the prolific Benno Janssen.

    The Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania was by the firm of Ingham and Boyd.

  • Soldiers and Sailors Memorial, Oakland

    The story told by architectural historian Franklin Toker is that the architect Henry Hornbostel wanted this building to face Fifth Avenue, with a long vista back from the street, but the clients insisted that it had to face Bigelow Boulevard. Reluctantly Hornbostel acquiesced—and then built it his way anyway. What are you going to do? Tear it down and do it over?

    This is one of a number of buildings in Pittsburgh inspired by the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, and this is the one that most obviously follows its model.

  • Top of Presbyterian Hospital, Oakland

    The top of the tower portion of Presbyterian Hospital is one of several buildings in Pittsburgh inspired by the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. This one belongs to the sub-style that Father Pitt calls Mausoleum-on-a-Stick: skyscrapers where the echo of the Mausoleum is at the top of the tower. Two of those in Pittsburgh are hospitals (Allegheny General is the other), and Old Pa Pitt would be delighted to know why “hospital” seems so likely to make architects think “Mausoleum.”