Father Pitt

Tag: Relief

  • Bronze Doors on the Carnegie Institute Building

    It took tons of beautifully cast bronze to make the grand entrances on the original Carnegie Institute building, as opposed to the modern entrance in the Scaife Galleries addition, which takes a bunch of glass doors ordered from a catalogue.

  • Romanesque Capital on the Music Building

    The Music Building at the University of Pittsburgh was originally a house designed by Longfellow, Alden & Harlow for the pastor of the Bellefield Presbyterian Church across the street. It has been expanded for institutional use, but with some effort made to keep the expansion in sympathy with the original house.

  • More Art Deco in Mount Lebanon

    Though it currently houses a real-estate agency, the terra-cotta reliefs tell us that this was built as a medical office. The splendid Art Deco eagle made it a very patriotic medical office.

  • Art Deco Vegetation

    A decorative panel on a building on Forbes Avenue seems to capture the spirit of medieval decoration filtered through an Art Deco lens.

  • Carved Stoop on the South Side

    Doors and doorframes often have elaborate carvings on the South Side, but not many stoops have elaborate decorations like these, either carved or stamped into the concrete.

  • Reliefs on the City-County Building

    On the left, the arms of Allegheny County; on the right, the arms of the City of Pittsburgh.

    Allegheny County.

    Pittsburgh.

    Addendum: The sculptures are by Charles Keck, who also worked with architect Henry Hornbostel on numerous other buildings, including Soldiers and Sailors Hall.

  • Terra Cotta on the Kaufmann’s Building

    The Kaufmann’s building at Fifth and Smithfield was designed by Benno Janssen, who gave it a facing of ornate terra-cotta tiles. Compare these decorations to the similar ones on Janssen’s earlier Buhl Building farther down Fifth Avenue.

  • Grotesque Face on Fifth Avenue

    This small piece of the old façade sticks up over the undistinguished tiles that cover the rest of this Fifth Avenue building. It must have been quite a façade when we could see the rest of it.

  • 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.

  • Decorations on the Buhl Building

    The Buhl Building on Fifth Avenue, one of Benno Janssen’s earlier works, is covered with terra-cotta reliefs in Wedgwood colors.