Edward J. Weber, who wrote the book on Catholic Church Buildings, was the architect of this little building, part of the cathedral complex and now known as the St. Paul Cathedral Center. This building and Synod Hall behind it were built in 1914.
We have more pictures of the Chancery here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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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