Tasso Katselas designed this building, put up in 1965, and in old Pa Pitt’s eyes it is one of his most successful designs. It conveys its message perfectly: this is a place where the future is being made today. (We remember having heard that slogan somewhere: it might have been at the Pitt Information Sciences Department.) Yet it has enough variety, enough light and shade, and the right scale and setback to fit well with the older buildings on Bellefield Street.
A matched set of apartment buildings, just behind St. Paul’s Cathedral, whose simple modernist forms are enlivened with just enough medievalistic detail to let the tenants imagine they live in a castle.
Shadyside seems to have a larger concentration of modernistic mid-twentieth-century apartment buildings than any other Pittsburgh neighborhood. Without any other information, old Pa Pitt would guess this one dates from about 1940.
Glass block from Pittsburgh Corning became a badge of modernity. If that were not enough, the metal awning over the entrance should do it.
A view from Fifth Avenue between Three and One PNC Plaza toward Two PNC Plaza and the K&L Gates Center.
The postwar boom was a very busy time for architects of apartment buildings, and Philip Friedman was probably the busiest of them all. Friedman seems to have owed his success to his willingness to make compromises when the client asked for them. Here we have Friedman at his most purely modernistic, borrowing the very practical cruciform plan from Le Corbusier—a plan that was getting a lot of publicity from its use in the Gateway Center development. But even here…
…the froufrou grapevine-pattern metalwork that holds up the porch roof, which seems quite out of character for the modern-to-the-max building, was probably the client’s idea.
A New Deal housing project built on the site of the abandoned Andrews mansion in Fineview. Construction began in 1940; the architects were Marks, Fisher & Simboli.1 The first tenants moved in at the end of 1942. The buildings have been updated, and the grounds are neatly kept.
When the complex was nearly ready to open, it was noted in the papers that the manager, Rose Marie Demestitchas, was the first woman ever appointed manager by the Housing Authority.
When the complex opened, America had entered the Second World War, and most spots were reserved for defense workers.
Although preference will be given to war workers, the housing authority officials urge others from sub-standard homes to register in the event there is room for them.…
“Preference will be given to war workers who come here from other districts and are living in temporary or unsatisfactory quarters,” Supervisor [Saul] Weisberg said. “Also first opportunity for the new homes will go to defense workers living an unreasonable commuting distance from their employment—men whose daily round-trip from home to job takes more than two hours or costs more than 40 cents.”2
Inglenook Place is something unique: a whole street where all the houses were designed by our noted early modernist Frederick Scheibler. There are two qualifications to be made here: first, one house on the corner of Oakmont Street, addressed to Inglenook Place, is not a Scheibler house; and second, there are two more blocks of Inglenook Place on the map, but they are a stairway with no houses addressed to it.
Here we see, at the end of the row, the one oddball house on the street.
These houses are two of Scheibler’s simplest designs, obviously meant to be built as cheaply as possible; but his modernist instinct is on full display in them. The larger group was built in 1907, all in this straightforward design; a second, smaller group was built in 1909 in a different though also simple design.
This is slightly less straightforward in that Scheibler has played with the rhythm of four houses in a row by putting the upstairs windows in three groups of 1, 4, 1.
Unfortunately, the neighborhood fell on hard times, and about a third of the houses are abandoned and will probably vanish eventually. When that happens, we’ll lose one more unique streetscape, in spite of the valiant efforts of neighborhood advocates.
This sign is so ancient that it dates from a time when it was normal to do lettering by hand on public signs. A designer of today would be baffled if you said you didn’t want every occurrence of the letter E to look the same: how would you even do that?
This huge complex was built in two stages, one opening in 1955 and the other in 1957. It was designed by Arthur E. Tennyson, who was responsible for dozens of modernist apartment blocks in Pittsburgh and suburbs. Tennyson seems to have been a get-the-job-done kind of architect; his designs seldom strike old Pa Pitt as remarkable aesthetically, but he must have been a master at managing large projects and bringing them in on budget.
The complex was newsworthy as the first cooperative apartments built in Pittsburgh in a long time. The first stage included 126 apartments, with 88 more planned for the second stage, according to a Press article that appeared when the first stage opened.1
The swank Shadyside co-operative was dedicated formally this week. It is composed of two and three-bedroom apartments, all of which have a living room, a separate dining room and a foyer. Most have two baths and some have a balcony. Standard equipment in all kitchens is a dishwasher and garbage disposal unit. All have maximum closet space. A master television antenna guarantees each apartment owner five channels.
Special provisions for inside air conditioning allow each tenant to control his own weather. Beneath the eight-story building are two floors for inside parking.
The lobby, designed by Robert Janisse, features a fountain set in a bed of plants and flowers. Lobby and hallways are completely carpeted. Entrances, framed in cut stone, give access to exterior walks which traverse a spacious lawn, complete with shrubs and trees.
Frederick Scheibler produced two variations on the same theme in 1906: this building and the Linwood a few blocks away. Each had half a dozen large and luxurious apartments. The general shape and layout was the same, and the windows were originally identical (the ones on the Linwood have been replaced). In both the balcony towers are the strongest visual features; here they terminate in large gables that give them even more emphasis. In both the eye is funneled down to the main entrance in the center by the placement of the windows on the third and second floors.
The entrance, with its receding concentric abstract-Gothic arches, is unique to the Whitehall.
This would be a very ordinary double house if it were not for the way the front entrances are placed in a sort of modernistic tower, turning a simple brick box into a fantasy of the Home of the Future.
