Tag: Modernist Architecture

  • Minnetonka Building, Shadyside

    Minnetonka Building

    Built in 1908, the Minnetonka Building was designed by Frederick Scheibler, and it would be hard to imagine the impression it would have made in Edwardian Shadyside. It looks like a building thirty or forty years ahead of its time, with its simple forms and streamlined curves that look forward to the Moderne architecture of the 1930s and 1940s. But it also has details that remind us of the most up-to-the-minute ideas from those Viennese and German art magazines that we know Scheibler got his hands on.

    Doorway, Minnetonka Building

    This doorway with its Art Nouveau window and Egyptian-style tapering would have been right at home in a magazine like Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration.

    Art glass with roses
    Storefront entrance
    Perspective view of doorways
    Minnetonka Building
    Olympus E-20N.

    More pictures of the Minnetonka Building.


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  • Frank H. Mazza Pavilion, Brookline

    Frank H. Mazza Pavilion

    The challenge: take a 1970s Brutalist retirement home that seemed to interrupt the neighborhood streetscape of Brookline Boulevard and re-imagine it as something bright and welcoming that would fit with the little one-off shops that make up the rest of the Boulevard. Rothschild Doyno Collaborative responded in 2011 with this design, whose muted but varied colors, large windows, and human-scaled ground floor seem at home on the street, whereas the previous incarnation of the building seemed to loom menacingly.

    Mazza Pavilion
    Perspective view
    Olympus E-20N; Nikon COOLPIX P100.

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  • Centre City Tower

    Centre City Tower

    Built in 1971, this is now number 23 on the list of tallest buildings in Pittsburgh. The architects were the venerable Chicago firm of A. Epstein and Sons.

    To make a more realistic-looking rendition of the building than is optically possible, old Pa Pitt adjusted the perspective on two planes. This adjustment has comical effects on the background, but the main subject looks natural now.


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  • Crafton Ingram Apartments, Ingram

    Crafton Ingram Apartments

    Philip Friedman was busy in the years after the Second World War. He designed an incredible number of apartment buildings, and he seems to have owed his success to two things (in addition, of course, to hard work and skill in managing projects): a knack for combining modern design with more traditional elements to attract a wide range of renters, and a willingness to compromise. When the July, 1950, issue of the Charette, the magazine of the Pittsburgh Architectural Club, published a layman’s criticism of Friedman’s work, Friedman replied that he was at the mercy of his clients, and sometimes they really did throw out his drawings and stick classical columns on a modernist building. However, he did what he could. “He contends…that while his buildings are admittedly far less esthetic achievements than economic realities, many other new multiple dwellings in this area reflect no concern for esthetics whatever.”

    Crafton Ingram Apartments

    The Crafton Ingram Apartments, originally called the Crafton Ingram Arms, are typical of Friedman’s work. They were built in about 1950. The buildings are square brick modernist boxes. But they have quoins and pediments and other Georgian details to convince the rubes that this is a high-class establishment. Originally there were four identical groups—three in Crafton and one in Ingram. Two of them have disappeared: this is the one that still stands in Ingram.

    Crafton Ingram Apartments
    Crafton Ingram Apartments
    Crafton Ingram Apartments
    Olympus E-20N; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

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  • Modernistic Double House in Brookline

    5230 and 2528 Wedgemere Street

    “God is in the details,” as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe said, and the details that would have refined the style of this double house have been lost: windows have been replaced, a hipped roof (invisible from this angle) replaced the original flat roof about six years ago, and we suspect that the porch railings and aluminum canopies are not original. Even so, we can see enough to see that this was an interestingly modern construction when it went up, probably in the late 1930s or the 1940s. The corner windows were a badge of modernity.


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  • Building More Hospital

    New UPMC Presbyterian building with cranes
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

    The new UPMC Presbyterian building nears completion in Oakland.


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  • Detective Building, East Liberty

    Detective Building

    Built in 1972 for the Bureau of Police Investigations, this building sat vacant for a long while. It was restored in 2019 with a very sensitive eye for its original modernist style.

    Those steps in the front were part of the restoration. They make a very attractive composition. To old Pa Pitt’s eyes, they look like a liability lawyer’s every architectural fantasy come true.

    Irregular steps
    Sign: The Detective Building
    Cornerstone with date 1972
    Detective Building
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Sony Alpha 3000 with 7Artisans 35mm f/1.4 lens.

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  • YWCA

    YWCA in downtown Pittsburgh
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

    “One of the most handsome modern structures in Pittsburgh, this building is oriented inward, with a blank wall on each street facade above the ground floor windows.” So said James D. Van Trump in “The Stones of Pittsburgh,” and Father Pitt defers to Mr. Van Trump’s superior taste. The wedge-shaped sign above the entrance is a relatively new addition, put up in 2016, but it fits well with the spare modernism of the rest of the building. The architects were Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, one of the biggest firms in the business and most famous for supertall buildings like the Sears Tower and the Burj Khalifa.


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  • 700 Fifth Avenue: The Sharpest Corner in Pittsburgh?

    700 Fifth Avenue

    If it isn’t the sharpest, it must at least be close. Father Pitt remembers when the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art was going up in Washington (Big Worshington, that is): it was boasted that I. M. Pei’s design included the most acute angle in any American building. This angle is nearly congruent with Pei’s, except that here the point has been slightly blunted. The architect has made sensible use of that sharp corner by putting the stairwell there, with a column of windows to light it.

    700 Fifth Avenue
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

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  • FNB Financial Center

    FNB Financial Center

    The biggest skyscraper project since the Tower at PNC Plaza, this was billed as the nucleus of new development that will finally make good on the promises of prosperity made when the Lower Hill was cleared out in the 1960s. The design was by Gensler, a huge architecture conglomerate also responsible for the Tower at PNC Plaza.

    FNB Financial Center
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10; Samsung Galaxy A15 5G.

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