Father Pitt

Tag: Gateway Center

Westinghouse Building

The Westinghouse Building (now known by its street address, Eleven Stanwix) was designed by Harrison & Abramovitz, who completely changed Pittsburgh’s skyline in the years between the Second World War and the Postmodernist era of the 1980s.

Years ago old Pa Pitt said that the building reminded him of two Mies van der Rohe buildings stacked one on top of another. The building has a Miesian colonnaded porch, but there is an essential difference, and the difference is in favor of Mies.

In a Mies building, the porch creates a useful space that is a transition between outside and inside. You can set up tables on the porch if you like, and they will be out of the weather. People caught in a storm can run to the porch and be sheltered until security chases them back out into the rain. But here the porch is shallow and nearly useless. It does not provide shelter, and the space between the columns and the building is so tight that it eliminates the possibility of using the porch for much. The tables above are pleasant on a clear day, but they are exposed to the weather, and you would not want to sit there in the rain.

In fact, as insulting as it is to say this to a pair of distinguished modernists like Harrison & Abramovitz, this porch is merely decorative.

We also have pictures of the Westinghouse building from Mount Washington, and from the Monongahela River.

December 30, 2024
United Steelworkers Building

The “diagrid” construction of the United Steelworkers Building (originally the IBM Building) is unusual, both from an aesthetic and from an engineering standpoint. The grid is not just decorative: it holds up the building from the outside. The piers on which all that weight rests are dramatic from close up. The architects were Curtis and Davis of New Orleans; as far as old Pa Pitt knows, this is their only building in Pittsburgh.

Nikon COOLPIX P100.

More pictures of the United Steelworkers Building from Gateway Center Park, from the Boulevard of the Allies, and from across the river.

December 27, 2024
Bell Telephone Company of Pennsylvania Western Headquarters Building

Dowler & Dowler, father-and-son architects, designed this building for the Bell System’s western headquarters in Pennsylvania. We have seen the building from this angle before, but we have not seen it with a bus coming toward you, which is always an improvement.

The Stanwix Street front has a Miesian colonnaded porch, with a cheerful abstract mosaic ceiling.

Those cheerful square polka dots also show up in other parts of the building.

The cornerstone, with its late-Art-Deco lettering and date.

Nikon COOLPIX P100.

The Bell System emblem.

More pictures of the building, including the unique clock and globe (unfortunately out of order).

December 19, 2024
Steel Facing of Two Gateway Center
Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

Though credited to Eggers & Higgins in most guides to Pittsburgh architecture, the Le Corbusier–style cruciform-towers-in-a-park design was the work of Irwin Clavan. According to Franklin Toker, “The design of these cruciform towers represented a tug-of-war between the traditionalists Eggers and Higgins, former partners of John Russell Pope (Eggers was also a major force in building the Pentagon), and the more progressive Clavan, who in the same years designed cruciform-tower housing estates in New York on the model of Le Corbusier’s 1922 towers-in-the-park scheme for Paris. Between seven and fifteen cruciform towers were originally projected, in traditional brick and limestone. At the last minute the designs were respecified for stainless steel, but scarcities during the Korean War required that chrome-alloyed steel be substituted.”¹

Old Pa Pitt does not know whether the last-minute substitution of steel was a matter of cost or aesthetics, but it made all the difference in the world. Like most big cities, Pittsburgh is littered with postwar brick cruciform apartment towers. They are not missed if they go away. But the glimmering steel face of the Gateway Center towers makes them unique and attractive. They catch the light and throw it back in constantly shifting patterns throughout the day. The steel lifts these towers out of the bland and forgettable, and we should appreciate how lucky we are to have it.
1. Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait, p. 26. ↩︎
November 22, 2024
The Forest at Gateway Center

The modernist ideal of towers in a park often runs up against the unwillingness of developers to put any resources into the park part. Gateway Center is a notable exception. The park has always been beautifully maintained, and it was planted with an eye on the long term, so that the saplings planted decades ago have grown into a forest of mature trees in the middle of the forest of towers.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

November 9, 2024
Fall Colors at Gateway Center

November 2, 2024
Gateway Center

The gleaming modernist towers of Gateway Center in afternoon sunshine.

Did you notice how Father Pitt did not slow down the shutter speed for the flowing water, the way every photography site on the Internet dogmatically insists you must do it? Did you notice the fascinating patterns of falling water that were captured by the deliberately fast shutter? Are you ready yet to abandon the dentist’s-office-wall-decor cliché of slow shutter speeds for waterfalls and fountains? You can join the rebel alliance!

The picture above is made from three separate photographs at different exposures, which gives us a better range of detail—but it also adds to the complexity of the play of falling water. To approximate the golden color of the late-afternoon sunshine, it was then put through a simulated Kodachrome 64 filter, with many thanks to the obsessive fiddler who did his best to match the color and light response of Kodachrome film so that the rest of us can have at least an echo of that Kodachrome look. Since Kodachrome has been extinct for fifteen years, this is as much as we can do.

Kodak EasyShare Z1285; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.

September 14, 2024
Gateway Towers

Gateway Towers was designed by Emery Roth & Sons. It was built in 1964, which tells us that it was the & Sons who were responsible for it, since Emery Roth died in 1948.

From a distance, this has never been one of old Pa Pitt’s favorite buildings to look at, although he is going to give it a fair chance by presenting multiple angles. Up close, however, it has a sharp classicism in its spare details that makes it much more attractive.

Good landscaping helps a lot, and all of Gateway Center has very good landscaping. The modernist ideal of towers in a park was never better implemented, and it is because the park part of the scheme was not neglected.

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Kodak EasyShare Z1285.

September 13, 2024
Wyndham Grand Pittsburgh Downtown

This was built as the Pittsburgh Hilton, which opened in 1959. William Tabler, the house architect for Hilton Hotels, designed the main building, which is a box of square windows. Originally the parts between the windows were gold-colored aluminum, but that was painted over to remove the last trace of anything exciting about the building.

In 2014, after years of delays and a change of ownership, a new lobby addition opened on the front of the building, designed by Stephen Barry of Architectural Design, Inc. In old Pa Pitt’s opinion, the addition does not belong on this building. It belongs on a much more interesting building. Here it looks like some sort of parasite attacking the main structure. Nothing about it matches the original building in shape or color, and it is too interesting not to draw attention to itself as something that does not belong here.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

August 13, 2024
Two Gateway Center

March 24, 2024