Father Pitt

Tag: Doric Order

  • Carnegie National Bank

    Carnegie National Bank

    Architecture is a kind of message that we instinctively read. When we see a bank that looks like this, we think without even articulating the thought, “That bank is stable and respectable.” The richness of the materials tells us that the bank has plenty of money; the traditional classical design tells us that it is not some fly-by-night institution that somehow swindled its way into a few bucks and will be gone as soon as its trendy design is passé. This bank on Main Street in the borough of Carnegie hits all the right notes with perfect pitch. We have forgotten how to send these architectural messages, but curiously enough we have not forgotten how to read them.

    Addendum: The architect was Greensburg-based Paul A. Bartholomew; the bank was built in 1926.

    Decoration over the entrance
    Oblique view

  • Soldiers and Sailors Memorial, Oakland

    Soldiers and Sailors Memorial

    In 2000, a planting of deep burgundy celosia gave old Pa Pitt the opportunity to take this picture with his beloved Kodak Retinette.

  • Daniel Burnham Makes a Little Plan

    Union Trust Company

    “Make no little plans,” said Daniel Burnham; “they have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized.” The Chicago Tribune tells us the interesting story of the long search for the original source of that quotation, and the determination that it was in fact what Burnham said. It is probably the second-most-famous quotation from an architect in history: only Louis Sullivan’s “Form follows function” has been heard more often.

    Outside Chicago, Pittsburgh was where the great Burnham was most prolific. Many of our most famous buildings—the Oliver Building, Penn Station, the Frick Building, and a good number of others—are by Burnham. Most of them are colossal. But the old Union Trust Company building—now the Engineers’ Society of Western Pennsylvania—was his first work here, and it is on a small scale. Small, but rich and perfect in its way. The front is a traditional Doric temple; the treatment of the top storey behind the pediment seems to enclose the temple in its own perfect world, insulated from the ugly realities of Fourth Avenue commercialism around it. It was built in 1898, and it can be seen as an answer and a rebuke to the tasteless extravagance of Isaac Hobbs’ 1870 Dollar Bank building across the street.