The Tower at PNC Plaza will be ten years old this year. It occurred to Father Pitt that he had enough pictures in his collection to make up a visual story of the construction of the building, so here they are. Above, the progress as of February 18, 2014.
June 27, 2014, before the construction of the cap began.
Old Pa Pitt’s New Year’s resolution is to bring you more of the same, and to try to get better at it.
The May Building was designed by Charles Bickel, probably the most prolific architect Pittsburgh ever had, and a versatile one as well.
The famous Sicilian Greek mathematician and philosopher and inventor and scientist Archimedes was nicknamed “Beta” in his lifetime, because he was second-best at everything. That was Charles Bickel. If you wanted a Beaux Arts skyscraper like this one, he would give you a splendid one; it might not be the most artistic in the whole city, but it would be admired, and it would hold up for well over a century. If you wanted Richardsonian Romanesque, he could give it to you in spades; it might not be as sophisticated as Richardson, but it would be very good and would make you proud. If you wanted the largest commercial building in the world, why, sure, he was up to that, and he would make it look so good that a century later people would go out of their way to find a use for it just because they liked it so much.
The modernist addition on the right-hand side of the building was designed by Tasso Katselas.
The Market Street end of Three PNC Plaza, which opened in 2009. It is tied with Three Gateway Center as our twentieth-tallest building, and it was the tallest thing built in Pittsburgh in the long skyscraper drought between the 1980s boom and the current crop of skyscrapers. The architects were Gensler and Lou Astorino.
The Pittsburgher was built in 1929–1930 as a hotel; the architects were the H. L. Stevens Company of New York. For many years, converted to offices, it was known as the Lawyers Building. In 2015 it was bought by a company called King Penguin Opportunity Fund, which restored the original name and put it in lights at the top. This view was taken from Gateway Center with a very long lens.
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.
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.
Gateway Towers was designed by Emery Roth & Sons. It was built in 1964, which tells us that it was the & Sons who were responsible for it, since Emery Roth died in 1948.
From a distance, this has never been one of old Pa Pitt’s favorite buildings to look at, although he is going to give it a fair chance by presenting multiple angles. Up close, however, it has a sharp classicism in its spare details that makes it much more attractive.
Good landscaping helps a lot, and all of Gateway Center has very good landscaping. The modernist ideal of towers in a park was never better implemented, and it is because the park part of the scheme was not neglected.
Samsung Galaxy A15 5G. This picture is more than 13 megabytes if you enlarge it; be careful on a metered connection.
Designed by Daniel Burnham, this is the only skyscraper left in East Liberty; another one, designed by Frederick Osterling, was demolished decades ago when the neighborhood’s fortunes were sinking. Now the neighborhood is once again bustling, and the Highland Building, after years of abandonment, is beautifully restored.
