Father Pitt

Tag: Modernist Architecture

  • The Yards at Three Crossings, Strip

    The Yards at Three Corssings
    Kodak EasyShare Z981.

    This large apartment development between Railroad Street and the Allegheny opened in 2016. WTW Architects were the architects of record, and this is a good example of the type of patchwork-quilt architecture that has been fashionable in the last decade or two. On the one hand old Pa Pitt thinks these buildings are much more interesting than the plain brick boxes that were fashionable after the Second World War. On the other hand, bricks last, whereas Father Pitt fears some of these other materials will begin to look a bit scraggly in about fifteen years.

  • New Addition to the Church of the Ascension, Shadyside

    Addition to the Church of the Ascension

    The Church of the Ascension, an obviously prosperous Anglican congregation in Shadyside, has just finished a new narthex and several other improvements. The architects were Rothschild Doyno Collaborative.

    Church of the Ascension sign

    No lights are hid under bushels here.

    Narthex addition

    The new entrance was meant to be “welcoming and transparent.” It does not attempt to imitate the style of William Halsey Wood’s original design for the church, but it does use similar stone, so that it seems to belong to the church.

    Face-on view of the addition
    Cornerstone: 2024

    The cornerstone is the only direct imitation: it is patterned after the original cornerstone of the church.

    Old cornerstone: 1897

  • Neville House, Oakland

    Neville House

    Tasso Katselas designed this apartment building, which opened in 1959. James D. Van Trump described it a few years later: “Glass, brick and concrete cage raised into space on arched stilts in the manner of Le Corbusier and at the time it was built the most ‘advanced’ apartment house in Pittsburgh.”

    Entrance portal

    The drama of the building is in those arched stilts. They make approaching the building from the street an event. In typical Katselas fashion, they also solve a practical problem: they make room for a useful porte cochere while allowing the rest of the building to take up as much of its lot as possible.

    Front
    Entrance
    Neville House
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

  • Wyndham Grand Pittsburgh Downtown

    Wyndham Grand Pittsburgh Downtown

    Still Pittsburgh’s largest hotel, this opened in 1959 as the Pittsburgh Hilton. It was designed by William Tabler, the Hilton company’s pet architect. Originally it was, as James D. Van Trump told us in The Stones of Pittsburgh, “partially sheathed in panels of gold anodized aluminum, very appropriate to a luxury hotel.” The panels have been painted over.

    Front of the hotel

    The addition to the front opened in 2014; it does not seem to go with the rest of the building.

    Pittsburgh Hilton

  • Carnegie Science Center

    Carnegie Science Center

    Tasso Katselas designed the Carnegie Science Center, which is being renamed for the Kamins after a huge donation. The picture above is combined from two separate photographs.

    Carnegie Science Center
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

  • Grant Street Transportation Center

    Grant Street Transportation Center

    This is a rather grandly named bus station and parking garage. It’s certainly a striking building to look at; it was designed by IKM, descended from the grand old firm of Ingham & Boyd. There ought to be someone in the crow’s nest at the top of the tower to shout “Bus ho!” whenever a Greyhound is sighted.

    Grant Street Transportation Center
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

  • U. S. Steel Tower

    U. S. Steel Tower behind the Bluff
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

    Looming behind Duquesne University on the Bluff.

  • Gateway Center

    Gateway Center

    The gleaming modernist towers of Gateway Center in afternoon sunshine.

    Gateway Center
    Fountain at Gateway Center

    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.

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

  • Gateway Towers

    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.

    Entrance

    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.

    Gateway Towers
    Gateway Towers
    End of Gateway Towers
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS; Kodak EasyShare Z1285.

  • 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.