-
Two Gateway Center in Late-Afternoon Sun
-
Fifth Wood Building
This is classicism walking the knife edge between Art Deco on the one side and modernism on the other. The architect was George H. Schwan, a Pittsburgher who was a much-employed designer of attractive smaller houses as well as churches, school, and commercial buildings: his most famous commission was designing practically all the original buildings in the model Akron suburb of Goodyear Heights.
Addendum: The article has been rewritten because Father Pitt knows of many more works by Schwan than he did when he wrote the original article. See the Great Big List of Buildings and Architects for old Pa Pitt’s latest research.
-
K&L Gates Center
-
One Gateway Center
-
Four Gateway Center
-
Geometric Patterns Through the Branches
-
Bell Telephone Company of Pennsylvania Western Headquarters Building
We’ve seen this building elsewhere, from an angle, but here is old Pa Pitt’s best attempt (so far) at seeing it head-on from the front, the way the architects (Dowler & Dowler) might have drawn it back in 1956. The picture is a composite, and there are stitching errors if you examine it closely; but it still gives a better impression of the design of the building than any other picture of it that Father Pitt has seen.
One of the building’s most attractive features is the Pennsylvania relief with rotating globe, illustrating the slogan “Anywhere Any Time by Telephone.” The relief shows outsized Pittsburgh as “Gateway to the West,” and the clearly less important Philadelphia as home of the Liberty Bell and City Hall. The globe used to rotate to show the part of the earth currently illuminated by sunlight; but both the globe and the clock above it have stopped, and the plastic window over the globe is sadly fogged. Now that the building has become luxury apartments, perhaps an enlightened ownership will put a little money into restoring what used to be one of downtown’s unique attractions.
-
Alcoa Building
This is one of several works by Harrison and Abramovitz on Pittsburgh’s skyline—the most prominent, of course, being the U. S. Steel Tower, which dwarfs everything else. This one was built in 1953, making it probably the first of their works here. It was also the first aluminum-faced skyscraper (appropriate for the biggest aluminum producer in the world). To Father Pitt, it always looks like a stack of 1950s television sets.
-
Four Gateway Center
-
Reflections in the Software Engineering Institute
Three landmark buildings reflected in a corner of the Software Engineering Institute on Fifth Avenue: St. Paul’s Cathedral, Webster Hall, and the Mellon Institute.
