Cathedral of Learning - History

History

In 1921, John Gabbert Bowman became the tenth chancellor of the University. At that time, the school consisted of a series of buildings constructed along Henry Hornbostel's plan for the campus and included "temporary" wooden structures built during World War I. He then began to envision a "tall building", that would be later termed the Cathedral of Learning, to provide a dramatic symbol of education for the city and alleviate overcrowding by adding much needed space in order to meet present and future needs of the University.

His reasoning is summarized in this quote:

The building was to be more than a schoolhouse; it was to be a symbol of the life that Pittsburgh through the years had wanted to live. It was to make visible something of the spirit that was in the hearts of pioneers as, long ago, they sat in their log cabins and thought by candlelight of the great city that would sometime spread out beyond their three rivers and that even they were starting to build.

Bowman looked at a 14-acre (57,000 m²) plot of land named Frick Acres. On November 26, 1921, with aid from the Mellon family, the University was gifted the $2.5 million plot, and began plans for a proper university building on the site.

One of the foremost Gothic architects of the time, Philadelphian Charles Klauder, was hired to design the tower. The design took two years to finish, with the final plan attempting to fuse the idea of a modern skyscraper with the tradition and ideals of Gothic architecture. The plans received strong resistance from the community and from some University officials, who felt it was too tall for the city.

Local legend states that to counteract this resistance Bowman ordered that the construction of the walls would start at the top floor and work its way down, so the project could not be canceled. This has been traced to an account in the November 21, 1943 issue of At Ease, a tabloid related to local military personnel on campus, which stated that "the masonry was started from the top downward." Construction photographs show that this was not the case, and that some stonework was done on the first floor before any other stonework was begun. One engineer with the company working on the Cathedral explained that the exterior walls of the Cathedral are not load-bearing. Because of this, many similar buildings would start construction at the third or fourth floors. Practically, this makes sense, as it allows easy movement of building materials and equipment into and out of the building. Instead, in the Cathedral's case, the issue was one of the stone that would be used in lower stories. In fact, the quarry was not prepared to deliver the stone on schedule, so construction was delayed, and work began on the higher stories.

...“in the literal sense of the word, Late Gothic Revival architecture culminated in the University of Pittsburgh's skyscraping Cathedral of Learning".

Marcus Whiffen, architecture historian

When construction started on the Cathedral of Learning in 1926, it was the tallest building in Pittsburgh, although the Gulf Tower (1932) was completed and surpassed it by the time the Cathedral of Learning was officially dedicated in June 1937. Today, it remains the tallest educational building in the Western hemisphere, the second tallest university building in the world behind the 36 story, 240 m (including a 57 m spire) Moscow State University main building completed in 1953, and the fourth tallest educational building in the world behind the Moscow State University and Mode Gakuen Cocoon (204 m) and Spiral Towers (170 m), both completed in 2008 and located in Japan.