Places Around Pittsburgh: How to Terminate a Tall Building

Go to Forbes Avenue behind Warner Centre on a bright morning around 10 o’clock, and look toward Fourth Avenue: splendid architecture rises before you, the upper flourishes of tall buildings as these were conceived in the 1900s. Here is a variety of capitals in the old base-shaft-capital formula of tall-building design—the ultimate bit of fantasy on a tall building that still encloses workaday space for the most part but that in addition concludes the composition and announces the building from afar. Here, to the far right, the bright metal muntins and reflective glass of PPG Place suggest an alternative means: tracery that pierces, and seems to be penetrated by the sky.

—Walter C. Kidney