Places Around Pittsburgh: Architecture in Spite of Everything

Frank Lloyd Wright and an admirer, Bruno Zevi, were in front of Santa Maria delle Salute in Venice. Wright said, “Bruno that’s a good church.” It had a wooden dome with fake wooden buttresses, it had pediments, it had pilasters. “But Mr. Wright, you don’t like things like this!” “Bruno: that’s a good church!” The old Shady Avenue Presbyterian Church mixes Romanesque of the homeliest description with Queen Anne, and has a marquee suitable for an apartment house on a rather clumsy wing, but the whole complicated composition somehow muddles through to a charm that could never have been attained in cold blood or with inhibiting clarity of thought.

—Walter C. Kidney