Mattern Avenue is a short street that illustrates what Father Pitt calls the Dormont Model of Sustainable Development. In population density, Dormont is number 119 out of tens of thousands of municipalities in the United States, and it is the most densely populated municipality in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area—denser than Pittsburgh.1 Yet the streets do not feel crowded. Mattern Avenue has a mixture of large houses designed by prestigious architects, smaller single-family houses, duplexes, and an apartment building, so that a fairly large number of people are housed in a small area, but without piling them up into concrete warehouses. Instead, we get a pleasantly varied streetscape and a quiet residential street that feels roomy.
The house above and below is by far the most original composition on the street. It seems as though the architect was told, “I want a bungalow, but with three floors.” So that was what the client got: a mad bungalow with some sort of growth disorder.
