Tag: Postmodern Architecture

  • Ingomar Methodist Episcopal Church

    Ingomar Methodist Episcopal Church

    This is an old congregation, founded in 1837, and its adjoining cemetery has some stones dating from shortly after that. It has grown continuously; the building you see here was designed by Chauncey W. Hodgdon and built in 1915, and encrusted with additions fore and aft in later years. But the congregation (still Methodist, but advertising itself these days just as “Ingomar Church”) outgrew this church and built a much bigger one across the street; this is now the Ingomar Church Community Life Center.

    Front of the church

    The 1915 church was originally built very cheaply; its final cost of about $9,000 was roughly equivalent to the price of two middle-class houses at the time. A good history of the church was written in 1962 by Margaret L. Sweeney, and we take our information from that booklet (but we have corrected the spelling of the architect’s name).

    Steeple
    Ingomar Church Community Life Center
    Ingomar M. E. Church
    Rear of the church
    Ingomar Church, new building
    Kodak EasyShare Z1285; Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

    The new building across the street is in a grandiose New Classical style that recalls colonial New England churches and refracts them through a Postmodernist lens.

    Ingomar is an unincorporated community that straddles two municipalities. Most of the church grounds and the cemetery are in the borough of Franklin Park, but the border with McCandless Township runs diagonally through this building.

  • 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.
  • Fifth Avenue Place

  • Porches of PPG Place

    Porch of 6 PPG Place

    Adopting and heavily modifying an idea from Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Philip Johnson surrounded the buildings of PPG Place with glass colonnades that create an inviting transition between inside and outside.

    Porch of 6 PPG Place
    Porch of 2 PPG Place
    Kodak EasyShare Z1285.
  • Obelisk and Fountains at PPG Place

  • First & Market Building

    First & Market Building

    At first glance this looks like a postmodernist building from the 1980s, and your first instinct is half right. It was originally an early ten-storey skyscraper built for the Shields Rubber Company in 1903. In 1989, it got a heavy postmodern makeover, with an extra floor at the top.

    First & Market Building

    These views are made possible by the demolition of the buildings along the east side of Market Street.

    First & Market Building

    Cameras: Kodak EasyShare Z1285; Fujifilm FinePix Hs10.

  • Lobby of One PPG Place

  • Liberty Center

    Liberty Center

    The local firm of Burt Hill Kosar Rittelman designed the second-most-important Postmodernist development in Pittsburgh, after PPG Place. This one does not get the attention lavished on Philip Johnson’s forest of glass-Gothic pinnacles: it never gets to play a supervillain’s headquarters in the movies, and it is seldom pointed out as one of Pittsburgh’s top sights. But to old Pa Pitt’s eye it is a particularly pleasing manifestation of what was called Postmodernism at the time, but might be more accurately termed the Art Deco Revival. It consists of two skyscrapers—currently known as the Federated Hermes Tower and the Westin Convention Center Pittsburgh—linked by lower sections of building that fill in the rest of the block.

    Clock tower
    Federated Tower
    Westin Convention Center Pittsburgh
    Westin Convention Center Pittsburgh
    Westin Convention Center Pittsburgh
    Liberty Center
  • One PPG Place from Third Avenue

  • Postpostmodernism in Garfield

    Buildings on Penn Avenue

    These buildings, put up in 2007, were one of the early signs of revival in Garfield. Father Pitt took this picture eight years ago, but it seems that he never published it here, so you might as well see it now.