Father Pitt

Tag: Weber (Edward J.)

  • The Chancery, Oakland

    Chancery with entarnce pillar

    Edward J. Weber designed this companion to St. Paul’s Cathedral, and he succeeded in the delicate balance of making the building individual and distinct while still making it fit comfortably in the cathedral complex.

    Cornerstone with date 1914

    The Chancery and the accompanying Synod Hall were built in 1914, as we can see from this elaborate blackletter cornerstone. Today, after extensive renovation and restoration, the Chancery building is the St. Paul Cathedral Center.

    Chancery
    Chancery
    Samsung Galaxy A15 5G with Open Camera.

    The architect Edward J. Weber was one of Pittsburgh’s most interesting contributions to ecclesiastical architecture, and his ideas are embodied in a book that you can find in a good scan in the Internet Archive:

    Catholic Church Buildings: Their Planning and Furnishing. By Edward Joseph Weber, A.A.I.A. New York: Joseph F. Wagner, 1927.

    It includes many illustrations, among them some of Weber’s own buildings, especially St. Joseph’s Cathedral in Wheeling.

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  • Louis Brown House, Shadyside

    Louis Brown house
    Kodak EasyShare Z1285.

    Edward Weber was best known for his school designs—notably Central Catholic High School and St. Mark’s School in the McKees Rocks Bottoms. The sense of fairy-tale whimsy he showed in those designs was on full display in this house, which Weber designed for Louis Brown in 1913. It shows the same Jugendstil influence that we identified in the Lilian Henius house in Highland Park, which was designed by our noted early modernists Kiehnel & Elliott; this one is on a grander scale, but if we did not know the architect we would be forgiven for speculating that the two houses were drawn with the same pencil.

    Louis Brown house
    Nikon COOLPIX P100.
    704 Amberson Avenue
    Louis Brown house

  • St. Mark’s School, McKees Rocks Bottoms

    St. Mark’s School

    This is a Catholic school with more than the usual touch of whimsy. Old Pa Pitt does not yet know the architect, but whoever it was decided to make a school that would strike its pupils as something out of a fairy tale. [Update: We have found that the architects were the well-known Link, Weber & Bowers, “Link” being A. F. Link and “Weber” being Edward Weber.1] It is sadly vacant and decaying right now, although at least the grounds are kept. The cornerstone tells us that the building was begun in 1928:

    Cornerstone

    Since old Pa Pitt considers this school endangered, he has many pictures to show you, so the rest will be behind a “read more” link to avoid cluttering the front page for a week.

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  • Central Catholic High School

    Central Catholic

    A kind of cartoon castle, the main building of Central Catholic is technically in Squirrel Hill, though most Pittsburghers would probably say “Oakland.” The building was put up in 1927; the architect was Edward J. Weber.

  • Turrets at Central Catholic

    Central Catholic High School in Oakland is a fantasy medieval castle out of a German fairy tale. This is a view from the east side of some of the odd turrets and projections.