Father Pitt

Tag: Mies van der Rohe (Ludwig)

  • Highland House, Highland Park

    Highland House

    Designed by Tasso Katselas, this 22-storey apartment tower opened in 1962. It has reverted to its original name, Highland House, after some years as “the Park Lane.”

    Highland House

    Many projects for skyscraper apartments or hotels were proposed for Highland Park, but this is the only one that ever succeeded. “A dramatic use of the Miesian glass cage formula applied to a 22 story apartment house” was how James D. Van Trump described it in “The Stones of Pittsburgh.” “Located on the edge of Highland Park it seems to float above a nearby reservoir.”

    Ground floor

    Miesian is a good term for it: the building adopts the colonnade of stilts that became the signature of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Many imitators of Mies seem to lose courage and make the peripteral colonnade a narrow and useless space; see, for example, the Westinghouse Building. Katselas, on the other hand, if anything exaggerated the width of the porch, so that the ground floor is reduced to a little entrance cage, leaving a big broad outdoor space under the shelter of twenty-one floors of steel and glass.

    Base of Highland House
    Stilts
    Highland House

  • Westinghouse Building

    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.

    Entrance

    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.

    Colonnaded porch

    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.

    Porch

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

    Westinghouse Building

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

  • Mellon Hall, Duquesne University

    Mellon Hall from across the river
    Composite of four photographs from the Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

    Built in 1968, this is the only design in Pittsburgh by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; it was one of his last works. (The IBM Building at Allegheny Center was designed by Mies’ firm after Mies died.) This is a composite of four long-telephoto photographs taken from the back streets of the South Side across the Monongahela River. At full magnification, atmospheric distortion makes the straight lines slightly wavy.

    We also have some closer pictures of Mellon Hall.

  • Mellon Hall, Duquesne University

    Richard King Mellon Hall of Science

    The Richard King Mellon Hall of Science was designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and is therefore a black box on stilts. Old Pa Pitt sometimes makes fun of Mies’ black boxes on stilts, but he means it good-naturedly. The colonnades of stilts have a job, and they do it well. They humanize some inhumanly large buildings by creating a human-sized interface between building and street. They also create an expansive outdoor space that is out of the rain and snow, but still open to the world. Here we see a good use of that space, with tables being set up for graduation festivities.

    In the colonnade
    Among the stilts

  • Mellon Hall, Duquesne University

    Mellon Hall

    It is surprising to discover, considering how many of his buildings sprouted in other cities, that this is the only building by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in Pittsburgh. (The IBM Building in Allegheny Center was by his architectural firm, but the design was actually by one of his minions in his Chicago office.) It is an unusually long and low building by his standards, but it is otherwise a typical Miesian black box on stilts. Here we see it from across the river with a long lens.

    Mellon Hall