Father Pitt

Tag: Modernist Architecture

  • St. Anne’s Church, Castle Shannon

    St. Anne’s Church

    Edward J. Schulte was a master of the modern in ecclesiastical architecture. Wherever he went, all over the United States, he left churches that were uncompromisingly modern in their details, but also uncompromisingly traditional in their adaptation to Christian worship. St. Anne’s, which was finished in 1962, is a fine example of his work.

    Date stone
    A date stone on the grounds.

    The details are modern, but the form of the church is perfectly adapted to the ancient Christian liturgy. Too many modern architects expected the liturgy to adapt to the building, but Mr. Schulte obviously knew Christian tradition.

    We might point to the baptistery as an illustration of what we mean.

    Baptistery of St. Anne’s

    It’s a strikingly modern building, bang up to date for the Kennedy administration. But in its form and position it reminds us of…

    Baptistery of Neon

    …the Baptistery of Neon in Ravenna, seen here in a photograph from A History of Architecture in Italy by Charles A. Cummings (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1901). Built in the late 300s or early 400s, it was originally an extension of a large basilica, just like this baptistery. The one in Ravenna is one of the oldest Christian buildings still standing; Mr. Schulte reached right back to Roman imperial days to find his inspiration.

    St. Anne’s with baptistery
    The church and tower

    The most striking feature of the church is a detached bell tower more than a hundred feet high.

    Philip Murray tower
    Philip Murray tower

    The tower was donated by the United Steelworkers of America in honor of Philip Murray, the union’s first president. St. Anne’s was his home parish, and he is buried in St. Anne’s Cemetery.

    This tower is dedicated to the memory of Philip Murray by theUnited Steelworkers of America, November 9, 1962
    Relief of St. Anne and St. Mary and inscription

    A relief of St. Anne and St. Mary is accompanied by a quotation from Psalm 44 in the Vulgate numbering (Psalm 45 in the numbering used in Protestant and newer Catholic Bibles).

    Base of the tower
    St. Anne
    St. Anne and St. Mary
    Base of the tower
    Base from the side
    Tower from the side
    Top of the tower with cross
    The west front of the church

    The (liturgical) west front of the church1 is a balaced composition in geometry and symbolism.

    West front
    St. Anne’s Church

    Some roof work was going on when old Pa Pitt visited. (Update: A parishioner informs us that the work was in the basement, including an elevator, which is doubtless why we saw workers on the roof.)

    St. Anne’s convent entrance

    The entrance to the convent.

    St. Anne’s Church
    St. Anne’s through a trellis
    Side entrance
    Side entrance
    Window
    Kodak EasyShare Z1285; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.
    1. In traditional churches, the altar end is always referred to as “east,” even when it is not in the east by the compass. The end opposite the altar, where the main entrance is traditionally placed, is thus the west, and if—as in this case—the compass says the west front faces northeast, then the compass is entitled to its opinion. ↩︎

  • Scheibler Apartment Building in Highland Park Condemned

    936 Mellon Street

    After years of neglect and decay, this apartment building in the otherwise prosperous neighborhood of Highland Park is finally condemned.

    Condemnation sticker

    And it will be a tragedy to lose it, because it is an extraordinary work by an extraordinary architect.

    Frederick Scheibler is possibly the most-talked-about architect Pittsburgh ever produced, and this building—put up in 1906 for Mary M. Coleman—marks a turning point in Scheibler’s style, according to his biographer Martin Aurand. “The facade departs from precedent, however, in the sheer strength of its massing, and in its near total lack of common domestic imagery—even a cornice.… There is virtually no exterior ornament at all. The Coleman facade continues a process of abstraction begun at the Linwood [in North Point Breeze], but the leap forward in Scheibler’s developing style is sudden.”1

    Coleman apartments

    Considering the value of real estate in Highland Park right now, restoring this building should be not only public-spirited but also profitable. Is any ambitious developer willing to take it on? That blue sticker isn’t necessarily a death sentence: it will be removed if the dangerous conditions are remediated. To make it easier for you, Scheibler’s original drawings for this building are preserved in the Architecture Archive at Carnegie Mellon, so there need be no guesswork in the restoration.

    936 Mellon Street, balconies
    Balconies
    Balcony canopy
    Upper balcony
    Steps and entrance
    Entrance
    936 Mellon Street
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

    1. Martin Aurand, The Progressive Architecture of Frederick G. Scheibler, Jr., p. 42 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994). ↩︎

  • Gothic Meets Modern on Acorn Hill

    3084 Marshall Road

    This stone mansion on Acorn Hill, with its eye-catching combination of Gothic and modernist details, was designed by William C. Young and built in 1937.

    “One Model Home Finished, Another Nears Completion,” Pittsburgh Press, February 21, 1937, p. 50
    Pittsburgh Press, February 21, 1937, p. 50.

    “The above drawing by William C. Young, architect and builder, is of the model home being erected at the intersection of Watsonia Blvd. [now Marshall Road] and Norwood Ave., North Side, for Mr. and Mrs. John H. Phillips by the Young firm. The home is a combination of all that is modern in electrical equipment and labor saving devices with all that is charming and quaint from the old Norman English Architecture.” Old Pa Pitt thinks of “Norman” as implying the English branch of Romanesque rather than Gothic, but he will not argue about the charm.

    3084 Marshall Road
    Steps to the house

    The steps leading up to the house from Marshall Road are a masterpiece of romanticism in landscape design.

    3084 Marshall Road
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

  • Allegheny Towers

    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

    Tasso Katselas designed this mixed-use building, an apartment tower on top of a parking garage. It opened in 1966. For a while it was known by its address as 625 Stanwix Tower. Now it has been refurbished and given a spiffy new coat of black, which makes a big difference in its appearance. Compare the picture old Pa Pitt took from across the Allegheny nine years ago:

    625 Stanwix Tower in 2015
    Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z3.

    Back then, Father Pitt was a bit harsh in his criticism: “There is no rhythm to the apartment section, not even a jazzy syncopation,” he wrote. But the new coat of black emphasizes the vertical lines and gives the building exactly the rhythm it was missing—which turns out to be a jazzy syncopation.

  • One PNC Plaza

    One PNC Plaza

    Sometimes the false is truer than the true. It is not possible to get a good picture of One PNC Plaza from the ground. The only way to get in the whole building—well, almost the whole building—was to stitch together multiple pictures, which produced a hideously distorted perspective. To create a rendering that looks more like what we perceive (which is not the same as what we see) when we look at the building, old Pa Pitt resorted to complicated trickery for the picture above, making four vertical slices of the picture and adjusting each one of them separately. If you look at the ground level, you can see how everything else has been broken and distorted to make the building look more like itself.

    Base of One PNC Plaza
    Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

    Here is the base of the building without the radical distortions.

    One PNC Plaza was designed by Welton Becket and Associates; it opened in 1972. Mr. Becket died at the beginning of 1969; but it is probable that he left drawings of this building on his drafting table, since it had been planned before 1968. The firm continued under his name long after his death; One Mellon Center, which opened in 1980, was also designed by Welton Becket and Associates.

    It is a curious fact that One PNC Plaza replaced another skyscraper that was shorter by only four floors: the First National Bank Building, which was designed by Daniel Burnham and ranks at number 35 on Wikipedia’s “List of tallest voluntarily demolished buildings.” It is the tallest building destroyed in Pittsburgh so far.

    The First National Bank Building, which One PNC Plaza replaced.

  • Neville House, Oakland, in Black and White

    Port cochere of the Neville House apartments

    We saw Neville House in color earlier. These three monochrome pictures were taken with a Kodak Retinette made in the middle 1950s. Above, the exit from the porte cochere under the building. Below, the main entrance, including the porte cochere and the patio in front of it.

    Entrance to Neville House
    Entrance to Neville House
    Kodak Retinette with Kentmere Pan 100 film.

    Thanks to Bodega Film Lab for developing the film and making it worth taking the Retinette out for a walk.

  • 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