Father Pitt

Tag: Modernist Architecture

  • Daily News Building, McKeesport

    Corner of the Daily News Building, McKeesport

    This is Father Pitt’s favorite newspaper building anywhere, without exception. It looks more like a newspaper building than any other newspaper building on earth.

    Daily News building, McKeesport

    In fact, with its stark horizontals in black and white, it looks like the front page of the Daily News. In its heyday, the Daily News had a distinctive style: well into the 1990s it looked like a very modern paper for 1936, and it usually had one big headline striped across the front page in thick black gothic caps.

    In these photographs we have used a red filter (simulated in the GIMP), which has the interesting side effect of making the red light in the intersection almost pure white.

    The Daily News was owned and edited by the powerful Mansfield family for many years, and it might be hard to say whether it exposed or enabled more political corruption in the Mon Valley. It was, in the words of its masthead, “More than a Newspaper—a Community Institution.” In 2007, it was swallowed by Richard Mellon Scaife, the Charles Foster Kane of southwestern Pennsylvania, joining every other paper in the Pittsburgh area that was not the Post-Gazette. When Scaife died and his news empire was revealed to have been built on a rickety financial foundation (he had burned up $450,000,000 from a trust fund to keep the empire going), the Daily News was one of the casualties. It closed in 2015.

    The exterior of this building is still in good shape. Trib Total Media donated it to the city after the Daily News closed, and it has been kept from falling into a pile of bricks, unlike some other buildings we could mention.

    Addendum: The architects were Hunting, Larsen & Dunnells, who were also responsible for the remodeling of the Pittsburgh Press building.

  • Litchfield Towers from Forbes Avenue

    Base of Litchfield Towers

    To old Pa Pitt’s eyes, International Style architecture always looks best in black and white. Indeed, he has sometimes wondered how much the architects were subconsciously influenced by the desire to make a building that looked good in a photograph.

    Litchfield Towers

  • UPMC Mercy Pavilion

    The new UPMC Mercy Pavilion is supposed to be tons of fun for the entire neighborhood, according to the sponsored news stories distributed by UPMC. It includes a café and art installations and a gym and even a few medical facilities. According to the “Building Overview” page on the hospital’s site, “HOK—a global design, architecture, engineering, and planning firm—designed the pavilion with input from Chris Downey, AIA. Mr. Downey is one of the world’s few blind architects.” HOK, formerly Hellmuth Obata + Kassbaum, also designed One Oxford Centre and PNC Park (with local favorite Lou Astorino).

  • Litchfield Towers on a Rainy Day

    Litchfield Towers

    Ajax, Bab-O, and Comet looking a bit wet.

    Entrance
    Wet

  • Three PNC Plaza

    Designed by Lou Astorino, this is our twentieth-tallest skyscraper (tied with Three Gateway Center), which is not a remarkable record. It was, however, the tallest building that went up in Pittsburgh during the long pause between the 1980s boom and the current boom that began with the construction of the Tower at PNC Plaza. The somewhat taller building to the right is One PNC Plaza, built in 1972 to a design by Welton Becket Associates.

  • College Hall, Duquesne University

    College Hall

    College Hall was built in 1970, two years after Mellon Hall across the way, and we notice that the architect (whose name old Pa Pitt was not immediately able to find) took the idea of stilts from Mies Van der Rohe and applied it to an otherwise very different style of modernism. Although every element is indubitably twentieth-century, the whole effect gives us the impression of a classical temple. The interior is drab and utilitarian, but the exterior has a restrained dignity that is very attractive.

    College Hall

  • U. S. Steel Tower

    U. S. Steel Tower

    Three views of the U. S. Steel Tower from Duquesne University. Below, with Chatham Center in the foreground.

    With Chatham Center
    Again with Chatham Center

  • City View Apartments, Lower Hill

    A fairly early work of I. M. Pei (built in 1964), this was part of the massive redevelopment of the Lower Hill that cleared out all the poor people and replaced their houses, stores, clubs, bars, synagogues, churches, and schools with a modernist wasteland. It was originally called Washington Plaza, and it was meant to be an International Style city-in-a-tower, with everything you would need on the premises and no reason ever to go out into the grubby outdoors. For most of its life, it was gleaming white; the muddy brown came in with the new name.

    Correction: Father Pitt had originally mistyped the date as “1864,” which in geological time is not much of a difference, but in stylistic time is almost enough for the universe to have been destroyed and created again. Much gratitude to “sandisk” for the correction (see the comment below).

  • 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

  • Cathedral Mansions, Shadyside

    Cathedral Mansions

    A modernized form of classicism, or a classicized modernism, makes an attractive apartment block on Ellsworth Avenue at the western edge of Shadyside. It is mostly a group of rectangular boxes, but a few classical details—like the Vitruvian-scroll molding above the third floor—give it some character. Father Pitt suspects that it has lost a cornice; it might have been late enough to do without a cornice, but that Vitruvian scroll looks as though it ought to be echoing something at the top of the building, and slight signs of damage up there suggest that something was peeled off at some point.

    Addendum: Thanks to the research of a kind correspondent, we now have a picture of Cathedral Mansions in 1929, and it does indeed have a proper cornice.

    Another addendum: Another correspondent provides the information that the architect was John M. Donn, the Washington (D. C.) architect who also designed the Investment Building downtown. The information comes from an Iron City Sand and Gravel advertisement in the Pittsburg Press, Monday, November 22, 1926 (page 30).