Design
The building was designed by Henry Hornbostel and opened in 1917. Its main hall is surrounded by gilded classical columns 47 feet high, supporting a vaulted ceiling of Gustavino terra cotta tile. Architectural sculpture on the building was created by Charles Keck.
Although massive in its own right, it is just the main structure in a complex of city/county service buildings in the neighboring blocks. The city/county annex is a block east of the structure "behind" it on Ross Street and it is also very large. The Allegheny County Courthouse and offices border the structure to the north. Up until the 1960s, the corrections department had its offices to the northeast of the structure. On the seventh floor of the building is a massive mural completed in 1940 entitled "Justice" by award winning artist Harry Scheuch.
Read more about this topic: Pittsburgh City-County Building
Famous quotes containing the word design:
“You can make as good a design out of an American turkey as a Japanese out of his native stork.”
—For the State of Illinois, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Nowadays the host does not admit you to his hearth, but has got the mason to build one for yourself somewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the art of keeping you at the greatest distance. There is as much secrecy about the cooking as if he had a design to poison you.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Humility is often only the putting on of a submissiveness by which men hope to bring other people to submit to them; it is a more calculated sort of pride, which debases itself with a design of being exalted; and though this vice transform itself into a thousand several shapes, yet the disguise is never more effectual nor more capable of deceiving the world than when concealed under a form of humility.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)