Pennsylvania’s Architectural Heritage: The Preservation Movement in the Keystone State, 1950-1981

Posted by on Nov 30, 2013 in | Comments Off on Pennsylvania’s Architectural Heritage: The Preservation Movement in the Keystone State, 1950-1981 As the last in a four-part series about Pennsylvania s architecture, this conclusion focuses on the develop­ments which have occurred in the field of preservation over the past thirty years. Although this temporal division may seem disproportionate when com­pared with the one hundred fifty years covered in rite preceding article. it has been dictated by both the incentives and challenges to...
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Benno Janssen Collection of the Carnegie Mellon University Architecture Archives

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Benno Janssen Collection of the Carnegie Mellon University Architecture Archives Pittsburgh architect Benno Janssen (1874-1964) purveyed im­peccable taste and elegance with his many commissions during the early decades of this century. He is best remembered for such monumental landmarks as the Pittsburgh Athletic Association (1911), the William Penn Hotel (1914-1916 and 1927-1928), and the Mellon Institute (1931-1937), now part of Carnegie Mellon University. He partnered...
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Romancing the Stone: Benno Janssen, Architect of Elegance

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Romancing the Stone: Benno Janssen, Architect of Elegance Every community has its coming of age, when the style of its best buildings, both commercial and residential, speaks clearly, “This is the way it is going to be here for a long time.” Although Pittsburgh, the first American city to rejuvenate itself out of its dusky past – of steel and soot and smoke and smog – has employed many notable architects) from Henry H....
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Out and About

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Out and About Shooting Modernism Luke Swank (1890-1944) was one of the pioneers of Modernism in photography. He was born in Johnstown, Cambria County, just eight months after the Flood of 1889 roared down South Creek Fork to the Little Cone­maugh River. The thundering wall of water, which reached a height of forty feet, destroyed everything in its path, including the Swank family’s hardware store. The...
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Bookshelf

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Bookshelf Kentuck Knob: Frank Lloyd Wright’s House for I. N. and Bernardine Hagan By Bernardine Hagan The Local History Company, 2005 (220 pages, cloth, $39.95) “This is not a treatise on architecture,” writes Bernardine Hagan in her introduction to Kentuck Knob: Frank Lloyd Wright’s House for I. N. and Bernardine Hagan. “That I will leave to more professional writers. What I...
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Along the Pennsylvania Trails of History

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on Along the Pennsylvania Trails of History Fallingwater, designed in 1935 by Frank Lloyd Wright for the Edgar J. Kaufmann family of Pittsburgh, is an American icon, acknowledged worldwide as an architectural masterpiece. Situated above a waterfall on Bear Run, a mountain stream the Kaufmanns loved, at Mill Run in Fayette County, Fallingwater helped define twentieth-century modernism. Upon its completion, the Kaufmann commission became...
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The Architect, The Icon, and The Artist: Welcome to a Visual Celebration of Vision

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on The Architect, The Icon, and The Artist: Welcome to a Visual Celebration of Vision Shortly after its completion in 1937, Fallingwater, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for Edgar J. and Liliane S. Kaufmann above a mountain stream loved by the Pittsburgh couple and their son Edgar Jr., was lauded by critics as an icon of modern American architecture. Perched precariously over a waterfall on Bear Run, near Mill Run in Fayette County, in rural southwestern Pennsylvania, it was...
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