Father Pitt

Tag: Modernist Architecture

Emerson Apartments, Shadyside

Update: See the comment from David Schwing below identifying this as a 1906 design by Chicago architect Samuel N. Crowen. Father Pitt looked at some of Mr. Crowen’s other buildings, and the ones from this period certainly seem to bear a stylistic resemblance, although in his later works the architect turned more conservatively classical. Compare this apartment building on Google Street View, with its similar corner balconies, square windows, exaggerated cornice, top floor set off by a masonry stripe, and entrance surrounded by Art Nouveau curves. Imagine how much more that building might resemble this one if this one had not been painted.

Father Pitt keeps the original article, with all its speculations, below, so that his readers can see how his mind works.

Today this strange building that makes faces at you as you go by has no name; on Google Maps, it is called “Apartment Building.” But on a 1923 map it is marked as “Emerson,” belonging to a B. F. Newman. It first appears on the 1910 layer of the Pittsburgh Historic Maps site, where property owners are not marked. And with that, old Pa Pitt has exhausted all the information he has been able to gather about this building. Searching for information is made more difficult by the fact that there is a later apartment building in Shadyside also called “The Emerson,” a Frankenstein construction with a Fifth Avenue mansion at its core encrusted with modern growths of differing ages and styles.

At first sight this has the outlines of an ordinary early-modern apartment building, but when you look up at the balconies you find the building looking back at you.

We know that this building was put up before 1910. Father Pitt knows of only a few architects working in Pittsburgh at the time who were batty enough to do something like this.

Father Pitt’s first guess is Titus de Bobula, whose churches are strongly marked with Budapest Art Nouveau. He also did commercial and apartment buildings, and his career is obscure enough that a number of commissions have probably gone unrecognized. He is known to have done the Everett Apartments (1907) on Ellsworth Avenue at Copeland Street; it has similarly inset balconies flanked by decorated square pilasters, and it uses exactly the same terra-cotta cornice moldings as the ones on this building.

Frederick Scheibler, our most famous early modernist, is known to have designed about 150 buildings around here, of which Father Pitt has fewer than forty in his Great Big List as of this writing. His style varied over the years of his career, but the whimsically grotesque faces do not seem like his sort of thing.

Kiehnel and Elliott were also working here at that time. They were influenced by German modernism, and when they later moved to Miami they became famous for extravagantly decorated Art Deco designs. They are a possibility.

We might also mention Edward Keen, about whom Father Pitt knows nothing (even his name: in some sources it is Kern) except that he designed the D’Arlington in Oakland, a building teetering on the border of classicism and modernism whose lines strongly remind us of this building.

So there you have it: an enigma, and Father Pitt would certainly be grateful for any scraps of information about this building.

The curving lines of this entrance also strongly suggest Titus de Bobula.

August 31, 2023
Minersville Public School, Upper Hill

Ulysses L. Peoples was the architect of this school, which opened in 1902 and even then was something unique.

The building itself is a tasteful but not extraordinary example of Romanesque style with Renaissance overtones—something we might call Rundbogenstil, because we like to say the word “Rundbogenstil.” It is a little bedraggled-looking now, because it closed in 2005. The more modern addition (by the time it was added this was known as the Madison Elementary School) has been adapted for the Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre Company, but nobody seems to know what to do with the original section.

A fine piece of work for a small school, like many another Romanesque school in Pittsburgh. But the carved decorations around the entrances are like nothing else in the city, or possibly on earth.

It seems as though the architect and the artist had conceived the curious notion that children should find school delightful, and that the entrance should convey the message that here is a place where we are going to have fun.

The side and rear of the building. The rear, facing an alley, is done in less expensive brick.

The later addition, from 1929, is by Pringle & Robling in quite a different style, a lightly Deco form of modernism.

A map showing the location of the building.

August 18, 2023
Three Gateway Center from Forbes Avenue

August 11, 2023
Equibank Building

Now known as Two PNC Plaza, this building held an interesting architectural record. It was designed by Natalie de Blois (or DeBlois; old Pa Pitt sees it spelled both ways, and he is not willing to pay a spirit medium to contact the architect) for the firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, and when it opened in 1974 it was the largest building in the world ever designed by a woman. A block of Oliver Avenue was eliminated to make room for this skyscraper, but Oliver Avenue was never much of a street anyway.

August 5, 2023
More Views of the Gimbels Warehouse, South Side

More views of the old Gimbels warehouse on the South Side, now called 2100 Wharton Street. We have a couple of other angles here.

The building covers almost the entire block, but leaves a narrow space for one row of old houses at the eastern end on 22nd Street.

July 26, 2023
South Vocational High School, South Side

The South Vocational High School was designed by Marion M. Steen, who gave us many impressive schools around here. His father, James T. Steen, was a distinguished architect as well; Marion followed in his father’s classicist footsteps, but gradually adopted more and more Moderne mannerisms until he became one of our leading Art Deco architects. This school was a kind of vocational annex for the South High School across the street. Construction began in 1939, and it opened in 1940, just in time to be adapted to round-the-clock wartime training for mechanical trades.

This is Steen’s most aggressively modern design. He seems to have imagined a building that would look like a cross between school and factory.

This composite picture is huge: if you click on it, expect more than 18 megabytes of data.

Here is the Sarah Street front. As in all Steen’s other schools, the decorative details are imaginative and appropriate. These suggest a new world of technological wonder.

Now let’s walk around to the Tenth Street entrance, where we’ll find a remarkable decorative aluminum panel in the transom.

And…wait a minute…is that an inscription in…

…cuneiform?

Yes, it is a cuneiform character. It represents the Sumerian or Akkadian word for “to sow” or “to cultivate,” which is very appropriate over the door of a school.

We have many public buildings with inscriptions in Latin. But is this the only school in North America with a cuneiform inscription over the entrance? Father Pitt would love to have any others pointed out to him.

Do not suppose, by the way, that old Pa Pitt is fluent in Akkadian, much as he would like to be able to read the adventures of Gilgamesh without a translation. It was, however, easy to trace the character and feed it into an image search, and although Google did not come up with the exact character at the top of the list, it took only a bit of scrolling to find the character we were looking for. Father Pitt wishes he could say he had thought of that solution to the problem himself, but, having recognized that this was a cuneiform character, he got no further until a cleverer friend suggested the way forward.

The building is in use as the Pittsburgh Online Academy (which needs a building for some reason; perhaps our school board has only a fuzzy notion of what “online” means), so for the moment it is well kept and externally in original condition.

July 23, 2023
Saint George Ukrainian Catholic Church, Brighton Heights

This is one of Father Pitt’s favorite modernist churches in the city. It seems like an effortless blending of architectural modernism with the ancient idioms of Eastern Christian tradition, but of course things in art that seem effortless always take a great deal of effort. If modernism in church design always came out looking like this, old Pa Pitt would have adopted it enthusiastically.

July 20, 2023
A Kinder, Gentler Brutalism

Brutalism is the school of modernist architecture that uses raw building materials, especially concrete, as its main aesthetic statement. Father Pitt is not a great lover of the style, but some Brutalist buildings work better than others. The Hillman Library at the University of Pittsburgh has a cool elegance lacking in many other Brutalist buildings. The vertical window bays give us shading that keeps the wall from becoming monotonous, and they also flood the interior with natural light.

It is very hard to explain who designed this building. Wikipedia says, “Design of Hillman Library was led by Celli-Flynn and Associates who served as coordinating architects. Kuhn, Newcomer & Valentour served as associated architects with Harrison & Abramovitz acting as consulting architects to the university. Dolores Miller and Associates consulted on the interior design, and Keyes Metcalf served as a library consultant.”

An architect might be able to sort out the nuances of coordinating, associated, and consulting. Harrison & Abramovitz gave us numerous skyscrapers downtown, but Wikipedia adds that “In 1996, architect Celli-Flynn and Associates and Kuhn, Newcomer & Valentour won the Timeless Award for Enduring Design from the Pittsburgh chapter of the American Institute of Architects for its design of Hillman Library.” This suggests that Harrison & Abramovitz really were consultants rather than responsible for the design; perhaps their role was to say, “No, you can’t do that, or it will fall down.”

Kuhn, Newcomer & Valentour still exists as “DRAW Collective,” based in Mt. Lebanon. Celli-Flynn and Associates was absorbed into Buchart Horn Architects, based in York, but maintaining the staff and office of the Pittsburgh company. It is an interesting commentary on architectural trends that both firms’ recent projects, as displayed on their Web sites, lean toward a timid neoneoclassicism. It does not have the courage to break completely with modernist dogmas and go back to Vitruvius, but neither does it have the daring to invent its own forms and make something new. We get the impression that the clients will be satisfied—but satisfied as in “Yeah, it’s okay,” not satisfied as in “They gave me a masterpiece.”

July 4, 2023
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.

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.

July 2, 2023
Litchfield Towers from Forbes Avenue

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.

June 24, 2023