The Lumière, the latest luxury condo tower downtown, is currently going up where Saks Fifth Avenue used to be, at Smithfield Street and Oliver Avenue.
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Lumière Residences
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The History Behind the Façade
For years this building has been hidden behind a garish modernist façade. Renovation work shows us a modest mid-nineteenth-century building typical of old Birmingham, the narrow-streeted section of the South Side up to 17th Street.
Update: The building has been restored to something more like its original appearance.
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Frick Environmental Center Under Construction
The old Frick Environmental Center in Squirrel Hill burned in 2002. It has taken this long to replace it, but we have every reason to believe that our patience will be rewarded. The new building is designed to meet the standards of the Living Building Challenge, providing its own heat, power, and water.
Camera: Canon PowerShot S45.
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Tower Two-Sixty
For the first time since the 1980s, downtown Pittsburgh has two skyscrapers going up at once (the other being the Tower at PNC Plaza). The project was begun as “the Gardens at Market Square,” but became “Tower Two-Sixty” at about the time construction began. The skeleton has risen, and now the skin begins to take shape.
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Lower Fifth Avenue
Camera: Kodak EasyShare Z1485 IS.
In the distance, the Tower at PNC Plaza looms over the next block.
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A New Tower Rises
The Tower at PNC Plaza, the biggest skyscraper project in Pittsburgh since the 1980s, has just begun to rise at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Wood Street. Traditionally skyscrapers have grown in a doughnut-shaped area of the Golden Triangle, with the hole in the Fifth Avenue shopping district; but now that much of the shopping has moved elsewhere, the hole may begin to fill in.
