Category Archive: Architecture & Architects
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Group notices architect’s gems
By Ellen James
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Thursday, January 15, 2004Pittsburgh architect Henry Hornbostel might be best known for designing the City-County Building, Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall and several buildings at Carnegie Mellon University.
But some of his last, and smallest, buildings have gotten attention recently.
In 1936, Hornbostel left his position as an architecture instructor at what then was Carnegie Tech to become director of parks for Allegheny County. There, he designed the golf course clubhouses at North and South parks. The clubhouses recently were designated historical buildings by the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation.
Walter Kidney, architectural historian for the foundation and author of a 2002 book about Hornbostel, said the South Park clubhouse overlooking the 18-hole course is particularly notable. The structure uses Yucatan and Mayan designs, which the architect never used elsewhere.
“I think it’s one of his most audacious works, but kept to one of his smallest buildings,” Kidney said.
Hornbostel traveled to Yucatan, in southern Mexico, in 1917, Kidney said.Hornbostel’s eclectic style relied on elements of modernism along with traditional Renaissance or Grecian influences.
The South Park clubhouse, built in 1938, is a two-story, flat-roofed red brick building with an arch through the middle. Most notable are the figures of golfers, captured mid-swing, built into the structure using layers of brick.
“It’s like a picture was taken of a golfer and frozen into the brick. It’s quite astonishing,” Kidney said.
The North Park clubhouse, built in 1937, is a one-story, brick structure.
“What I think is interesting are the Doric columns in front,” he said. “They are reinforced concrete on the outside, but the inside is sheet metal.
“I think that shows the mischievous side of his personality. When someone may tap on the columns, they’ll be surprised to hear a loud, metal clang.”
Hornbostel was a Brooklyn native who settled in Oakland in 1920, after working on local projects for more than a decade.
He designed 110 area buildings and homes, according to Kidney’s book, “Henry Hornbostel: An Architect’s Master Touch.”
Other projects included the Grant Building, Downtown; Webster Hall, in Oakland; and Rodef Shalom Temple, in Squirrel Hill.
In addition to the golf clubhouses, Hornbostel designed the boathouse at the North Park lake.
The park buildings were swan songs for Hornbostel. He retired to Connecticut in 1939 and died in 1961.
The foundation’s designation of the clubhouses as historical buildings marks them as significant parts of the region’s past, but offers them no special protection from change or demolition.
Jack Lehrman, assistant manager of the South Park clubhouse, said few patrons comment on the building.
“I don’t think many people notice. We’ll point out the figures to them, they think that’s interesting,” Lehrman said. “It’s a nice historical building. Very solid. I think if a bomb got dropped here, it would be the only structure standing.”
Ellen James can be reached at ejames@tribweb.com or (412) 380-5609.
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Hearth and Home: Ben Avon Heights house embodies practical, simple qualities of Craftsman style
By Gretchen McKay,
Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Saturday, October 25, 2003If visitors ask a local architecture buff where to find a Craftsman-style house in Pittsburgh, they may be sent to Thornburg, a western suburb founded in 1900 by two cousins enamored of California homes built in the American Arts & Crafts style.
But the truth is, you can find these simple yet intricately detailed homes in many of Pittsburgh’s older suburbs. By the late 1890s, a growing number of Americans had tired of the decorative excesses of the Victorian era, and many liked the idea of an informal home with practical built-ins, open living spaces warmed by a central fireplace and a deliberate lack of ornamentation.
“They made sense to young middle-class people who didn’t have servants but wanted something affordable and stylish,” says Al Tannler, historical collections director for the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation.
A prime example can be found at 17 New Brighton Road in Ben Avon Heights. Listed by Re/Max North for $279,900, this 2 1/2-story house features all the charming architectural details that make a Craftsman so appealing: exposed beams, built-in furniture and heavy use of stone, cedar and other natural materials.
Built sometime in the 1900s, the four-bedroom house was one of the first three houses constructed in Ben Avon Heights, a tiny, tight-knit community of about 110 homes just seven miles from Downtown. Only four families have called the place home, including Thomas Pomeroy, who moved in with his family in 1911. As an adult, he helped found the Pittsburgh law firm Kirkpatrick & Lockhart and served as a Pennsylvania Supreme Court judge in the 1960s and ’70s. The present owners have lived there for 37 years.
The tone is set at the front steps, where a large wrap-around stone porch, fronted by a long row of mature bushes, encourages residents to sit awhile. Chocolate-brown cedar shingles, a low-pitched, gabled roof and brackets under the gables add to the rustic feel.
The front door opens directly onto the core of the house: the 29- by 15-foot living room. Graced by an exposed-beamed ceiling and high, diamond-patterned windows, this free-flowing space feels intimate, yet is large enough to hold several different seating areas along with a grand piano. As in most Craftsman-style houses, the interior wood surfaces are stained instead of painted to emphasize the grain and integrity of the wood.
A large stone wood-burning fireplace flanked by oak built-ins anchors the end near the enclosed staircase; a cushioned window seat that runs the length of three windows adorns the opposite side. The living room is the heart of a Craftsman, says Ken Lonsinger of Dormont, whose Web site, www.craftsmanperspective.com, features dozens of Pittsburgh Craftsman-style homes.
“They’re very warm. To me, it conveys a real sense of home and hearth, where people congregate and spend their evenings together.”
The living room spills directly into the dining room through a pair of french doors. This appealing space features another cushioned window seat and green-and-white floral wallpaper. At 18- by 13 feet, it is large enough for even the longest dining-room table.
The kitchen, on the other hand, could use updating. Only 11- by 10 feet, it features a small built-in pantry and an adjoining powder room. It opens through a side door onto a small brick patio off the wraparound porch that empties onto a large backyard dotted with maples and oaks.
The second floor holds four bedrooms and the home’s only full bath. The 15- by 15-foot master bedroom has hardwood floors and spacious his-and-her closets on either side of a small built-in window seat that opens to provide additional storage for blankets or clothing. A second bedroom opens onto a small porch overlooking the back yard (careful, no rail!) while a third features a mirror-topped sink tucked inside one of the closets. A small fourth bedroom at the rear of the house would make a perfect nursery or home office.
The third floor has a large walk-in closet and two more bedrooms. Currently used for storage, this unfinished space — with slanted ceilings and original pine floors — would make a wonderful guest suite or children’s playroom. A sink in one of the rooms indicates it once had working plumbing and could probably accommodate another bathroom.
Shaded by an enormous maple and embraced on one side by a sprawling hydrangea, the house is less than a block from the Ben Avon Heights playground (once part of the long-defunct Ben Avon Golf Club). It is also within easy walking distance of Shannopin Country Club, the hub for many community events and recreational activities.
“It’s so private,” says listing agent Bonnie Stright. “And the architecture is so pretty.”
Gretchen McKay can be reached at 412-761-4670 or gmckay@post-gazette.com .
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Eclectic Pittsburgh architecture reflects industrial influence
By Sarah Billingsley,
Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 24, 2003Pittsburgh homes, grand to humble, are unique.
Picture a typical Pittsburgh basement. The floor is slightly pitched, usually licked with a weary shade of paint that was on sale by the gallon. The cold, damp slope bottoms at the drain. There’s a deep basin, with rusty fixtures. It appears old enough to belong to Blarney Castle, but this stone you don’t want to kiss; it’s limey, mineral-stained and cracked.
There’s the narrow, low-ceilinged room, maybe under the porch, with an earth floor and a closed-off coal chute. These features could be true of houses everywhere. Now picture the Pittsburgh toilet. It’s also in your basement, probably in the center of the room. If your house is well appointed, it’s enclosed. If your house is modest, it’s secreted under the stairs. It’s often yellowed with age, activated by an old-fashioned flushing mechanism.
You don’t find this everywhere. Nor do you find the Pittsburgh shower — which is a little tougher to spot in basements nowadays, since most homeowners removed it when they rolled out the indoor-outdoor carpeting, stuck a Ping-Pong table down there and called it a rec room.
It’s a showerhead, dangling from the pipes, right over the drain in the floor. Pittsburgh real estate agents agree that these idiosyncratic features had a purpose, and it’s not as a luxurious second bath. Decades ago, men who worked hard and got dirty at it would enter their homes through the basement door, scrub themselves at the basin, shower off the dirt and sweat, then head upstairs to the clean upper floors of the house.
The door leading into the basement, the basement toilet and the basement shower were courtesy features in a Pittsburgh home. Pittsburgh was one of the great industrial cities of America, and Pittsburgh residences, from the 19th century on, are tiny mirrors of the American industrial landscape. They are constructed to mimic the style (or deliberate lack of style) of those who ruled industry and this city. Homes were built to accommodate the lifestyles of those who worked in the mills.
“There’s a practical quality to the Pittsburgh house,” said architectural historian Al Tannler of the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation.
Tannler, who is mostly concerned with the outside of Pittsburgh buildings, not basement toilets, cites porches as a prevalent exterior feature particular to Pittsburgh houses. In the East End especially, Tannler notes, many homeowners have torn down their porches or left only a portion intact, creating odd facades.
Tannler says a 1911 survey of Pittsburgh houses by architectural historian and critic Montgomery Schuyler, “The Building of Pittsburgh,” pinpoints Pittsburgh’s style as residential architecture, “unquestionably artistic but impossible to classify under any historical style.”
“We can call it eclecticism,” said Tannler. “You’re staring at a Colonial Revival from the outside, but once indoors you’re inside of a Mission, or the other way around.”
A healthy irreverence toward building styles and a lack of uniformity classify Pittsburgh homes. No one architectural style dominates.
Margaret Henderson Floyd, author of “Architecture After Richardson,” attributes the diversity of styles to the fact that Pittsburgh never developed a school of architecture like the Prairie School in Chicago, though architects of note practiced here and added their work to the mix of buildings.
Tannler dubs the state of Pittsburgh politics in the 19th and 20th centuries a “Scotch-Irish-Presbyterian oligarchy.” These influential men — Carnegie, Frick and Schwab — were fixed on English residential architecture. Many houses were built in a manner similar to Carnegie’s Scottish summer home, Skibo Castle, in what Floyd calls “a mostly conservative tradition, domestic rather than palatial.” This style was copied for smaller homes.
Tannler points out an additional feature of these domestic mansions: Unlike in other cities, all the grand houses of Pittsburgh were built with libraries. All of these domestic idiosyncrasies make Pittsburgh homes original and link us daily to a rich industrial past.
Sarah Billingsley can be reached at sbillingsley@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1661.
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. © Pittsburgh Post Gazette
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Project’s cost included gutting of landmark
By Ron DaParma
TRIBUNE-REVIEW REAL ESTATE WRITER
Thursday, July 31, 2003Amid the optimism that greeted plans for a new Lord & Taylor department store in Downtown Pittsburgh in 1998 came voices of concern about the chain’s plan to gut the interior of the once richly marbled former Mellon Bank headquarters at 514 Smithfield St.
Now, with word Wednesday that the May Department Stores Co., parent of Lord & Taylor, will sell or close the Pittsburgh store, there appears to be vindication for those who raised doubts about renovations to the grand stone building once known as the “Cathedral of Earning.”
“We are disappointed that the interior was lost, and we feel it was a high price to pay,” said Cathy McCollom, director of operations and marketing for the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation.
The foundation was among those that urged Lord & Taylor officials to proceed with caution on renovations to the historic structure that opened in 1924 with ceremonies attended by government and business dignitaries led by U.S. Treasury Secretary Andrew W. Mellon.
The bank interior featured a large open area ringed by 20 massive marble columns. Only four of those columns were left after the May renovation work, which included the installation of an escalator to carry shoppers to four floors built in what was once an impressive open interior space overlooked by a glass skylight 62 feet above the floor.
“Of course, we are very disappointed that a major retailer (will close) in the city’s Downtown area,” McCollum said. “But as preservationists, we think it was an extremely high cost that a unique interior has been lost forever.”
“Philosophically, what this means to me is validation that when you make a decision to renovate a building like that, you have to think well beyond the immediate tenant that is going to occupy it,” said Rob Pfaffmann, architect with Pfaffmann & Associates, a Pittsburgh-based architectural firm. “These buildings live well beyond their immediate (uses).
“Now we have lost a lot of the architectural fabric in that building, and it turned out that we didn’t have to lose it.”
Nonetheless, Pfaffmann said, Lord & Taylor’s departure could bring a new opportunity for the 79-year-old building, possibly another retailer or law office or financial firm, but with a new approach to the design.
“Let’s see if we can do better,” he said. “I think there still is enough left to bring in another high-end tenant that may be able to create something unique there.”
Ron DaParma can be reached at rdaparma@tribweb.com or 412-320-7907.
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Tribune Review © Pittsburgh Tribune Review
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Homeowner wants to make sure Heathside Cottage will outlive her
By Gretchen McKay,
Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Saturday, July 12, 2003Anyone who’s ever fixed up a neglected old house knows it takes more than time and money. It takes some of your soul.
Judith Harvey in the “urban garden” at her Fineview home. She restored the dilapidated Gothic Revival cottage then bought the abandoned house next door, had it torn down and created the garden. (Robin Rombach, Post-Gazette)
Just ask Judith Harvey. She spent close to five years restoring Heathside Cottage, a six-room Gothic Revival cottage in the North Side’s Fineview neighborhood. Snow White herself would feel at home within its rounded walls and fanciful gingerbread trim.
“Some houses talk to you,” says Harvey with a delicate shrug of her shoulders. “I knew the moment I saw its chimney from the street up above that I had to have it.”
What one person loves, however, another might surrender to the wrecking ball. So soon after the meticulous restoration was complete, the former librarian began worrying about her tiny house’s future. What would happen when she was gone?
“It really troubled me,” she recalls. “It was important that I find a way to protect it.”
A member of the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation, Harvey said her first thought was to simply leave it in her will to the historic preservation group. It didn’t matter if it used it as an art gallery or a study; all she wanted was peace of mind that her 165-year-old house — which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and bears a Landmarks plaque — would survive intact for years to come.
But while gifts of property provide Landmarks with much-needed cash to support its mission, “we’re not in the real estate business,” says Jack Miller, director of gift planning. Besides, even though Landmarks would get the proceeds from the eventual sale of the house, buyers would be able to do anything they wanted with the property. So he suggested protecting it first, then making a “retained life estate” gift.
Here’s how it works: Harvey granted a facade easement to Landmarks that guarantees no one could ever change the exterior of the house. She then deeded the house to the foundation but retained the right to live in or rent it for the rest of her life. She would also be responsible for property taxes and maintenance.
Heathside Cottage sits on Caroma Street in Fineview. Owner Judith Harvey is making sure that the house and all the work she put into restoring it will outlive her by making a “retained life estate gift” of the property to Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation. (Robin Rombach, Post-Gazette)
“Nothing changes until the day she dies,” Miller says.
But what about taxes? Harvey is entitled to a charitable income tax deduction. Also, the property is no longer part of an estate that could be attached — by a nursing home, for instance — if Harvey could no longer care for herself. The best part, however, is that Harvey’s home and handiwork will be preserved for future generations.
Built around 1855 by bridge engineer James Andrews, the brick cottage is so unusual that it was featured in Rick Sebak’s 1997 documentary “North Side Story.” It is a model of Early Victorian design, with lacy bargeboard, a steeply pitched roof and diamond-paned sash windows. And its location on a hilly outcrop gives it a mighty fine view of Downtown, hence the neighborhood’s name.
Harvey bought the dilapidated house in 1992 as a weekend “playhouse,” then moved in permanently after her husband died in 1996. She also purchased the abandoned house next door and then had it torn down to create an urban garden (the stone foundation serves as a wall).
The largest rooms in the two-story cottage measure just 14 feet square, though the 11 1/2-foot ceilings on the first floor –many with beautiful wallpaper — lend an airy feel. Antiques and collectibles reflect Harvey’s love for anything old.
But there are some modern touches, as well. A large mirror above the mantel in the “futon” room is an inspired background for several smaller mirrors; Harvey herself designed the dining room’s enormous rosewood sideboard, which was handmade in Pakistan.
A narrow staircase leads to the light-filled second floor. Here, slanted walls and a whimsical diamond-shaped window in the bedroom (it’s held up by a chain attached to a hook) add to the cottage’s storybook feel. A slender, pointed “lancet” window in the bedroom-turned-closet room reminds visitors of the home’s Gothic roots. Harvey couldn’t bear to think of it in ruins.
“It’s protected as much as it can be,” she says. “It’s where people can see history and be a part of it.”
“Judith obviously cared very much about the property, so it worked out well,” says Miller.
Many people are not aware that they can give their house or farm — or in the case of one donor, a pizza manufacturing plant — to a charitable organization.
Miller says such “planned gifts” work best for people who want to do something for the community and, in some cases, receive income from an asset that is not normally an income-producing property. With a planned gift, donors find that they are able to contribute more than they thought possible while still providing for their family. Miller is quick to note that no one should enter into one of these agreements without the advice of a lawyer and/or financial consultant or accountant.
Harvey’s retained life estate gift of Heathside Cottage, the first gift of its kind to Landmarks, is only one way to go, Miller says. A charitable gift annuity, for instance, allows someone to give a gift of property in exchange for fixed income payments for life that are based on the age and number of beneficiaries. An added benefit is an upfront tax deduction.
A charitable remainder trust, by way of contrast, permits someone to transfer a property to a trust, avoid capital-gains tax and receive a fixed or variable payment each year for up to 20 years or the lifetime of the income beneficiary. Like the annuity, the gift also carries a federal income tax deduction for the donor.
Lucille Tooke chose the charitable remainder trust option when she donated her historic property, Hidden Valley Farm in Pine, to Landmarks in 2001.
Tooke and her husband, Jack, bought the farm in 1954 and spent the next 40 years raising their three daughters on its 64 acres. After Jack died in 1993, it became increasingly difficult for Tooke to take care of it on her own.
“It got to be more than I could handle,” says Tooke, a longtime Landmarks member who now lives in Chambersburg, Franklin County.
So in 2000, she asked Landmarks officials if they knew anyone who might be interested in buying and preserving the property. Most of the land surrounding the farm, which was built in 1835 by Lewis Ross and his wife, Temperance, had already been developed. The thought that it, too, might one day become part of the ‘burbs “made me shudder,” says Tooke.
Unlike Harvey, Tooke was ready to sell the house so she could move closer to her daughters. However, she also needed an income to meet living expenses. Landmarks helped her work out a plan.
She avoided capital-gains tax by turning the farm over to the trust and received a charitable deduction for a portion of the property’s value and a percentage of the trust’s value each year.
When the trust put the farm up for sale, Landmarks had the right to match the highest bid and ended up buying it.
Before reselling it, Landmarks added deed restrictions that required owners to get prior approval from Landmarks before altering the house’s exterior. They also stipulated that the land could not be subdivided or used for non-agricultural commercial purposes.
Even though the restrictions lowered the selling price and made it more difficult to find a buyer, it helped preserve a historic landmark.
“The land and building will be there forever,” says Miller. “And one day, when urban sprawl takes over, the public will be able to see what an early 19th-century farm looked like.”
OK, you’re thinking, a property has to be of historical or architectural significance for Landmarks to be interested in it. Not so. Mary Ann and Tony Kopczynski recently donated the buildings that housed their pizza manufacturing business in McKees Rocks in the form of a charitable gift annuity. In exchange for the 5,000-square-foot warehouse and adjoining office building, the couple receive fixed annual payments for as long as they live.
They also got a sizable federal charitable income tax deduction for the gift portion of the property transfer.
“It gave them an opportunity to retire without having to worry about selling the property,” says Miller.
For more information on the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation’s Planned Giving Program, visit http://plannedgifts.phlf.org/or call Jack Miller at 412-471-5808, ext. 538.
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New book assesses Henry Hornbostel’s influence on Pittsburgh
By Patricia Lowry,
Post-Gazette Architecture Critic
Tuesday, November 19, 2002Walter Kidney begins his new book on the work of Henry Hornbostel not with the buildings but with the man himself.
The hardback book, published by Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation and Roberts Rinehart Publishers, costs $49.95 and is available through PHLF (412-471-5808) and local bookstores.
A wise decision, not because the buildings are lacking, but because the man was larger than life even before he was fully a man. By 17 he had ridden some 400 miles from his native Brooklyn to Niagara Falls on a bicycle — the kind with a big, 6-foot wheel in the front. By his senior year at Columbia University, he was the champion one-mile racer of the United States. By his 70s, after a long, fruitful and varied career, Hornbostel, a friend recalled, still could “out-dance, out-drink and out-eat anyone 40 years old.”
And by page 2, the reader is hooked.
Then there are the buildings. Hornbostel was of that heroic, city-building generation of architects born just after the Civil War, whose careers began with Classical training at Paris’ Ecole des Beaux-Arts and ended as modernism was dawning. They shaped the urban American landscape with orderly plans and monumental buildings that communicated power, stability and faith in God and government.
What would Pittsburgh be today without HH? Imagine the city without Carnegie Mellon’s School of Architecture, which he founded, and without the City-County Building, Smithfield United Church and its lacy aluminum spire, Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall and Rodef Shalom synagogue, all of which he designed.
He was architect, too, of the original CMU and Pitt campuses, the Grant Building, B’Nai Israel synagogue, Westinghouse Memorial in Schenley Park and many structures in North and South parks — including the South Park Golf Clubhouse, with its exotic, Yucatan-inspired entrance and motifs in bas-relief red brick.
But Pittsburgh wasn’t his only canvas, and architecture wasn’t his only career. Hornbostel’s buildings and bridges can be found in New York, Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa and California, where he designed the Oakland city hall. And in the 1930s, when the Depression caused a nationwide building slump, Hornbostel became a well-known and colorful public figure as Allegheny County’s director of parks.
For years Hornbostel personified architecture in Pittsburgh, and the human face he gave to the profession was, as one writer described him in 1954, “lovable, unpredictable, flamboyant.” A prankster and a character, Hornbostel had a Vandyke beard, wore red silk bow ties and carried a cane, probably more out of affectation than need. His friends knew him as “Horny,” but he also answered to Major, a title he earned in the Army during World War I.
For decades Hornbostel has been a book waiting to happen. Kidney, architectural historian with Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation, took him up in 1991 and, with contributions from architectural historian Charles Rosenblum and architect David Vater, gives the man his due in “Henry Hornbostel: An Architect’s Master Touch,” a revealing and generously illustrated monograph.
While it includes an overview of Hornbostel’s work around the country — competition entries, college campuses, public buildings and homes — much of the book is devoted to a catalog or survey of the Pittsburgh work.
In his preface, Rosenblum, who is writing his Yale dissertation on Hornbostel, puts the work in the broader context of American and European architectural history. He begins by asking if HH was truly a Pittsburgh architect, given that he was Brooklyn-born and educated at Columbia and the Ecole and had maintained a New York residence for more than 50 years.
The answer, Rosenblum concludes, is yes, partly because he designed more projects here than anywhere — 110 of 228 total. But more importantly, Hornbostel “captured and enhanced the essential character of the place in truly individual fashion,” with “a talent for deriving architectural poetry from the otherwise inconveniently sloping sites of which the city has so many.”
Two such buildings spring to mind, both associated with CMU’s first president, Arthur Hamershlag: “Ledge House,” his rubble-walled home of about 1909 on a prominent corner in Schenley Farms, and Hamershlag Hall, a sort of classical, institutional version of the vernacular South Side Slopes house, which takes advantage of the hillside to create a much bigger building than is apparent from the facade.
Rosenblum also separates Hornbostel from many of his Beaux-Arts contemporaries, establishing his interest in its problem-solving approach rather than its mimicking of historical styles. As at CMU, Hornbostel’s college campus plans, which include Emory University and the Evanston campus of Northwestern, are formal and symmetrical, with long, axial views and buildings grouped around quadrangles.
In 1908, Hornbostel adapted Beaux-Arts rationality to a steep, irregular site in his competition-winning design for the Pitt campus — an acropolis of Classical buildings that stepped down the hillside. Unfortunately, only five were built, and only two of those remain.
Rosenblum suggests that American Beaux-Arts architects “could be at least reasonably progressive,” working in a more abstract style known then and now as the “Modern French.”
But as both Rosenblum and Kidney underscore, Hornbostel’s imagination didn’t allow him to limit himself to a single mode of expression. He was an eclectic who “used his schooling and acquaintance with historic architecture in a creative, innovative and bold manner,” Kidney writes.
That claim is borne out by the inventiveness of the work. William Rydberg’s color photographs take us inside private buildings and allow Pittsburghers to see the public ones with fresh eyes.
And what an eyeful. Here we see up close the sensational painted ceiling of CMU’s College of Fine Arts building, one of the wonders of the Pittsburgh architectural world. As medieval stained glass was a bible for the illiterate, Hornbostel must have seen the murals of his vaulted ceiling, painted on canvas by James Hewlett, as an introduction to the pantheon of the arts. Among the world’s great buildings, Hornbostel, a man with no small ego, wasn’t shy about including his Hell Gate Bridge, completed in 1917 in New York — a pair of triumphal, granite arches framing what was then the world’s largest steel-arch span.
Hornbostel could transform an earthly material like clay into something extraordinary and spectacular. He designed much of his own terra cotta ornament, layering it with great decorative effect, and his use of Guastavino tile in the winding staircase of CMU’s Baker Hall is magical, considering it uses almost no structural steel.
Hornbostel gave East Liberty one of its major landmarks, the late, lamented Liberty Theatre with white, glazed terra cotta tiles framing an American flag composed of red, white and blue light bulbs. In its day, it was a vibrant gateway to the Penn Avenue commercial district.
As head of CMU’s school of architecture and its most prominent and beloved teacher, Hornbostel was held in high esteem by “his boys.” The book touches only lightly on this legacy and on Hornbostel’s influence on at least one generation of Pittsburgh architects.
And some of the building descriptions are too thin: Hornbostel’s last work here, a fortress-like stone house of 1939, is kissed off in three sentences. Certainly the book captures the astonishing breadth, if not always the depth, of Hornbostel’s work and presents it in a smart, inviting design.
Vater has compiled the list of all known works, built and unbuilt, beginning with an 1891 student drawing in Paris. Twenty-two are on the National Register of Historic Places.
At the end, HH, who had been born in 1867 and seen almost a century of change and evolution, was ready to start all over again in a modern vocabulary. He told a friend at his 88th birthday that if he were 25, “these young fellows of today, who think they’re so progressive, would look like stuffy conservatives.”
After reading “Henry Hornbostel,” it’s hard to disagree.
Patricia Lowry can be reached at plowry@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1590.
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. © Pittsburgh Post Gazette -
Author recalls greatness of forgotten Pittsburgh designer
By Bob Karlovits
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Saturday, October 19, 2002Henry Hornbostel’s legacy climbs along the hills of the Carnegie Mellon University campus in Oakland to the peak of the Grant Building, Downtown.
It provides a theater for politics at the City-County Building, a resting spot for tired visitors at the Webster Hall hotel in Oakland and a home for families from Squirrel Hill to Monroeville.
“Henry Hornbostel is a man you don’t want to forget,” says Walter C. Kidney, architectural historian from the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation, and author of the first book on the architect (1867-1961).
He is the author of the new “Henry Hornbostel: An Architect’s Master Touch” (published by the foundation in cooperation with Roberts Rinehart Publishers, $49.95).
The 272-page volume is the impetus for tours and book signings that will draw attention to the work of an architect whose buildings are Pittsburgh landmarks. It contains 470 illustrations, including 200 color photographs.
Although Hornbostel created buildings and other architectural works throughout the United States, no other city has the same “critical mass” of works by him, says Martin Aurand, architectural archivist at Carnegie Mellon.
His 110 works in this area are about half of his total output, Kidney says in the book.
The Carnegie Mellon archives, which includes 17,000 drawings, has the largest collection of Hornbostel documentation because of his work in designing the Oakland campus, Aurand says.
It has 560 of the Brooklyn native’s drawings, along with sketch pads from before his education in at Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. It also has an unfinished autobiography, “which I’m sure everybody wishes would go a lot further,” Aurand says.
David J. Vater, a Mt. Washington architect, author and collaborator on the book, says he regrets that Hornbostel isn’t as well known as artists such as H.H. Richardson, known for the Allegheny County Courthouse.
“People don’t know Hornbostel or even know he was a Pittsburgh architect,” he says of the craftsman who settled in Oakland in 1920 after working on local projects for more than a decade.
He lived here until he retired to Connecticut in 1939.
“Hornbostel is an architect who was well liked in his day, but since then has seemed to have fallen through the cracks,” says Charles L. Rosenblum, architectural historian and adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon.
He, Kidney and Vater all agree the reason for that is the rise of modernism in the 1940s and ?50s.
“Modernists did not want to deal with anyone who was not part of their movement,” Rosenblum says.
“It was only in the ?70s, when post-modernism came into play that there was renewed interest in Hornbostel’s life,” Vater says.
Eclectic for the ages
While the name Hornbostel might not carry the weight of Frank Lloyd Wright’s, his work carries a style that establishes itself.
Kidney points out how Hornbostel is “eclectic” in his use of styles, using elements that hint sometimes at modernism as well as shades of Renaissance or Grecian influences.
In Pittsburgh, that mixture creates its own image in buildings such as Oakland’s Webster Hall, the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial, the Carnegie Mellon campus and Rodef Shalom Temple, Downtown’s Grant Building or additions to the Allegheny County Airport in West Mifflin.
He also designed homes that bear gabled ornateness in Squirrel Hill or a chateau-like rural nature in Monroeville.
From 1936 to ?39, he was Allegheny County’s Director of Parks and contributed commonly used buildings such as the Boathouse in North Park and the Golf Clubhouse in South Park.
As for Hornbostel’s works in other areas of the United States, one can note that:
He designed the Williamsburg and Queensborough bridges in New York City.
Twenty-two of his structures are on the National Registry of Historic Places.
He also designed city halls in Oakland, Calif., and Hartford, Conn.
He contributed a large number of buildings to what is now Emery University in Atlanta.
His work on Carnegie Mellon University’s campus gives the school an appearance that has, more or less, been upkept over the years, Vater and Aurand say.When he was commissioned by Andrew Carnegie to design the school in 1904, it was at a time that was rather interesting ? a time when “universities were being designed from scratch.”
Although there are buildings at Carnegie Mellon that are modern and unlike Hornbostel’s work, the university frequently as tried to maintain his theme, Vater says.
Wean Hall, for instance, is a modern-looking, angular building, but is similar to Hornbostel’s work in its color and even the slope of his roof, he points out.
Vater also mention the blends of artistry and practicality in Hornbostel’s designs. In Baker Hall, for example, a cantilevered, circular staircase is a striking bit of design at the center of the building.
Yet, Hornbostel also incorporated a sloping, stone hallway through the building so pieces of heavy equipment could be moved from room to room in the building that was being used for technical study.
Vater also points out that his use of light-colored brick at the campus creates “variations on a theme of white” that differ greatly from the red-brick buildings of Ivy League schools.
Kidney says he became interested in Hornbostel almost as soon as he became curious about architecture, when he was 14. Not only did he appreciate the work of the designer, he liked the name.
“It seemed like the right name for the grand gesture,” he says with a faint smile.
He also has an appreciation for the character Hornbostel was. When he was a teenager, Kidney writes, he rode a high-wheeled bicycle from New York City to Buffalo ? and back again.
He also was well known for being able to eat or drink with anyone, he says.
Aurand points out a Hornbostel-designed rental brochure for the Grant Building. On it, the building is a behemoth towering over a city of buildings ? all designed by Hornbostel.
“Only he would have the ego to pull that off,” Aurand says.
While Hornbostel’s eclecticism can carry his works different ways, Kidney points out, the “Hornsbostelian” elements show up in forms that are like one another. For instance, he says, the sweeping arches of the City-County Building are strikingly close to those of the Hartford City Hall.
Those elements sometimes can be “pompous and rhetorical,” he says, far different from the modern styles of Wright or Walter Gropius.
Yet, few other architects have contributed as much to the image of this city as Hornbostel, says Kidney. D.H. Burnham (1842-1912), designer of the Oliver and Frick buildings, Frederick G. Scheibler Jr. (1872-1959) or Benno Janssen (1874-1964) come close, but don’t rival him ? if only in numbers.
That is why Kidney decided, in 1991, to write a book about Hornbostel.
Rosenblum sees that as a step that was much needed.
“There is a lot more that can be said than in one volume,” he says, “but this is a way to begin the discussion.”
Tours
Henry Hornbostel’s works spread across the Pittsburgh area like autumn leaves on a tree-filled lawn.
The Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation has scheduled three tours to examine the variety of the architect’s buildings and homes.
Walter C. Kidney will be present at all three tours, and copies of his biography “Henry Hornbostel: An Architect’s Master Touch” will be available for autograph and purchase. Light refreshments will be served at each.
Carnegie Mellon University’s Original Campus
2 to 5 p.m. Sunday, beginning at Hunt Library, Oakland.
Tour leaders: Martin Aurand, archivist of Carnegie Mellon’s Architectural Archives; Charles L. Rosenblum, architectural historian and adjunct professor at the university; Paul Tellers, university architect.
The tour will look at the buildings as well as some of Hornbostel’s original drawings. Tellers will discuss recent building at Carnegie Mellon.
$15; $10 for foundation members, university faculty or alumni; $7 for students.
Hornbostel in Downtown PittsburghNoon to 1:30 p.m. Friday, beginning at City-County Building.
Tour leaders: Lu Donnelly, architectural historian; Rosenblum; David J. Vater, author and architect.
The tour will look at executed and unexecuted works Downtown, including the City-County Building and the Grant Building.
$10, $8 for foundation members and Smithfield United Church members; $5 for students.
Hornbostel in the East End2 to 6 p.m. Oct. 27, main lobby of the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ National Military Museum and Memorial, Oakland.
Tour leaders: Ronald S. Gancas, vice president of Soldiers’ and Sailors’; Donnelly; Rosenblum; Vater.
The tour will travel by bus to places such as Thaw Hall at the University of Pittsburgh and Webster Hall in Oakland to two private homes.
Fee: $55, $45 for foundation members and University Club members; $40 for students.
In addition, a reception and tour will be at the Hornbostel-designed Rodef Shalom Temple, Oakland, 7 to 9 p.m. Tuesday.Besides tours of the temple, the event will included remarks by Phillip B. Hallen, chairman, and Louise Sturgess, executive director of the foundation.
Arthur Ziegler, president of History and Landmarks, will unveil a plaque honoring the temple and Hornbostel.
Cost: $10 for landmark members and temple members; $15 for nonmembers.
Reservations for each event: (412) 471-5808, ext. 527.
? Bob Karlovits
Bob Karlovits can be reached at bkarlovits@tribweb.com or (412) 320 7852.This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Tribune Review. © The Tribune-Review Publishing Co
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Author documents Henry Hornbostel’s architectural legacy
Friday, October 18, 2002
Henry Hornbostel’s legacy climbs along the hills of the Carnegie Mellon University campus in Oakland to the peak of the Grant Building, Downtown. It provides a theater for politics at the City-County Building, a resting spot for tired visitors at the Webster Hall hotel in Oakland and a home for families from Squirrel Hill to Monroeville.
“Henry Hornbostel is a man you don’t want to forget,” says Walter C. Kidney, architectural historian from the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation, and author of the first book on the architect (1867-1961), titled “Henry Hornbostel: An Architect’s Master Touch” (published by the foundation in cooperation with Roberts Rinehart Publishers, $49.95).
The 272-page volume is the impetus for tours and book signings that will draw attention to the work of an architect whose buildings are Pittsburgh landmarks. It contains 470 illustrations, including 200 color photographs.
Although Hornbostel created buildings and other architectural works throughout the United States, no other city has the same “critical mass” of works by him, says Martin Aurand, architectural archivist at Carnegie Mellon.
According to Kidney, Hornbostel’s 110 works in this area are about half of his total output.
This article appeared in the Pittsburgh Tribune Review. © The Tribune-Review Publishing Co