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:
“For I choose that my remembrances of him should be pleasing, affecting, religious. I will love him as a glorified friend, after the free way of friendship, and not pay him a stiff sign of respect, as men do to those whom they fear. A passage read from his discourses, a moving provocation to works like his, any act or meeting which tends to awaken a pure thought, a flow of love, an original design of virtue, I call a worthy, a true commemoration.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“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)
“I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in providence, for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.”
—John Adams (1735–1826)