Maximilian Nirdlinger, who rests near the top of Father Pitt’s list of architects whose names are most fun to say, designed this striking house, which is unique in a row that otherwise consists mostly of Pittsburgh Foursquares. Nirdlinger was one of the giants of the first half of the twentieth century in Pittsburgh. He was a pupil of the Philadelphia titan Frank Furness, but left the master to come to Pittsburgh in 1899. By the early 1900s, he had his own practice.¹ He quickly caught the eye of the fashionable set: four of the original houses in Schenley Farms, for example, were designed by Nirdlinger.

Nirdlinger worked in many different styles: he could give you a Renaissance palace or a Tudor mansion with equal flair. For this Art Nouveau cottage, designed in 1916 for C. R. Caldwell, he seems to have taken a lot of hints from those German art magazines that circulated among our architects before the First World War.

1. Much of our information on Nirdlinger comes from “Maximilian Nirdlinger:
   Architect, Interrupted,” by Angelique Bamberger, in Western Pennsylvania History, Winter 2023-24. ↩︎

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