Great New Film on Iconic Pittsburgh Architect, Henry Hornbostel

OK, Hornbostel did works all over the country, but taught at Carnegie Tech, and designed so many loved buildings (110 building in the Pittsburgh area) here he is closely identified with the city.

The original Carnegie Mellon campus including

Hamerschlag Hall
CMU College of Fine Arts Building
 Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall
University of Pittsburgh's Thaw Hall
Pittsburgh City-County Building
 Rodef Shalom Temple
The Schenley Apartments (In Oakland)
Hamburg Hall (Originally the U.S. Breau of Mines Building)
Congregation B'nai Israel (Now, The Urban League Pittsburgh Charter school)


Henry Hornbostel Biography Pitch Video from New Perspective Productions on Vimeo.




The film contains great film footage of the building and extensive interviews with local architectural scholars & historians and tries to connect his buildings to his affable, constantly curious nature.

Long ignored as a stodgy architect trapped in the past, Hornbostel is now recognised  for designs filled with beauty, sensitivity, invention and lots of amazing engineering.

He also created one of my favorite NYC bridges- The Hell Gate.



Keep your eyes out for a repeat of the film on PBS.

Should We Have A Panther Hollow Design Competition?

New York's High Line project took a space that was already there but that was rarely noticed or thought about and used it to transform and add to the way people thought about a whole part of Manhattan.

So, does Pittsburgh have a single space which with potentially small amount of effort and rethinking could be transformed in a huge way? An obvious concept is extending the waterfront parks--but this is already being thought about. Fixing and Allegheny Center is also a transformative project but no easy task.

However, the deep ravine in the center of Oakland is a place where the creation of a few amazing buildings which creatively use the rim, or a series of interesting paths or well who knows--could change the entire way we think about Oakland and all the neighborhoods that border the Hollow. Should Pittsburgh really try to ignore and evade some of the most interesting parts of it's geography in the way it's design does now?

As you can see from these images, soil erosion along large chunks of the rim is creating issues that must be dealt with anyway and soon.

What I have in mind is to hold some kind of design competition allowing an open ended contemplation of any and all ideas people might have for buildings, paths, ecological designs for any and all parts of The Hollow.

My personal guess is that many students at CMU, Pitt or the other schools in Oakland have drawn up an idea or two. Needless to say, this could easily then be tied to an exhibition at The Carnegie Museum Of Art and or The Miller Gallery. The Carnegie and area museums also have many paintings and historic objects that relate to this iconic yet mostly ignored urban space which could provide context.

No guarantee of executing or using any of the designs would be implied but most likely some type of cash prizes would be granted. Public voting on designs might also be considered. Using any of these ideas--would be a separate issue. The goal would be to invite all Pittsburghers and designers from around the world to publicly meditate on this unique space we should think about more.

Some Images Of Pittsburgh's Panther Hollow

So many things going on and a dozen posts I need to do.

Here are some images of Panther Hollow which I am partly posting because they relate to an idea I have in my head. Without a little context,I could have tried to tell you this was West Virginia. Such a weirdly magical and strangely isolated place in the heart of the city. Pittsburgh often doesn't play this up and make the best us of it's strange geography.

Why Pittsburgh Should Consider A Comprehensive City Plan Like Youngstown 2010

Anyone who digs deep enough into this blog's history will know that my personal views lean Libertarian and I'm deeply doubtful of conventional urban planning. This being said, perhaps what might be worse is the hodgepodge of disconnected--non planning I see in Pittsburgh today-in which the city and authorities like the URA seek to "engage the public" or more often reveal their already made plans.

A few weeks ago, I told you about a sudden series of meetings (or at least sudden to me) open to Oakland residents about neighborhood design--meetings that did not involve people from surrounding neighborhoods like The Upper Hill, East Liberty, Squirrel Hill or Shadyside. Not long before, East Liberty did something similar--again without input from surrounding areas. Likewise, those interested could attend meetings about Pittsburgh transit which were also completely detached from zoning, development and other topics.

Now it's Homewood's turn and as is not unusual, the process starts with a press release handed down from top city officials.

Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl and Councilman Ricky Burgess today announced a new collaborative designed to bring East Liberty-style growth to the struggling Homewood neighborhood.

Mr. Burgess announced that the city Planning Department will provide $150,000 to the Homewood-Brushton Community Coalition Organization to hire one or more economic development specialists. He said additional funding announcements by the city and Urban Redevelopment Authority will be made in the next week or so.

How exactly, any of these places or plans are supposed to understand issues like service needs, transit planning or parking and traffic without carefully looking at and coordinating on a wider level is never explained. Often, this job is left to a well paid out of town consultant who flies in and dumps off some advice. The end result is a public confused and unaware of the potential and development options that might be available, who rightly feels the process is a waste of their time.

Interestingly, Pittsburgh's nearby although much smaller neighbor, Youngstown has done things very differently by creating a process that got a broad section of the public, to think about the city's past and future.

"In the infant years of the new millennium, the city realized it urgently needed a new vision. Jay Williams was working as the city’s director of community development in 2001 when the planning department sought out the expertise of Youngstown State University (YSU), the leading employer for the city and Williams’s alma mater. YSU had plans in mind for its own growth, but ended up nurturing a rehabilitative partnership with the city. Williams, along with D’Avignon and Anthony Kobak, the current chief city planner, teamed with YSU academics piqued by the research of new urbanists such as Stephen Graham and Ann Markusen. Youngstown came to recognize itself, in the words of Markusen’s theoretical work, not as a “sticky” place —an urban center that continuously draws people (Los Angeles, Atlanta, New York City) — but as “slippery” — one where it’s easy for, say, a YSU student to slip into the city, and then slip out due to lack of jobs or housing.

“Our right-sizing plan came out of talks we were having internally acknowledging that although our population wouldn’t be going back to the hundreds of thousands, but that smaller didn’t mean inferior,” says Mayor Williams. “The question we asked was, because we were once so much larger how can we take the remnants of what made us large and build upon that?”

The planning team began to consider a counterintuitive approach to development: rather than grow the city, it should clean and “green” up the unoccupied real estate. They conceived and presented a basic “right-sizing” formula to the Youngstown public, who fleshed out the plan with their ideas and expectations. Or, depending on whom you ask, the planners consulted the public first and then drew up a blueprint for Youngstown 2010.

No matter its genesis, the eventual plan reflected three years of public surveys and town hall meetings aimed at understanding the city’s needs. “Overwhelmingly, people said they wanted the city shrunken, and they were for cleaning up the blighted situations that were causing different variations of decay, crime and abandonment,” Kidd says. Thousands of citizens were consulted, and hundreds of students and professionals logged the process. The plan went into high gear after Williams was elected mayor in 2005. At 34, he was the youngest mayor Youngstown ever elected, and also the first African American — two identity aspects that resonated with college students and the emerging black majority."

Now again, I'm not an expert on what Youngstown did. Some might say, this long series of meetings was useless and didn't get down to specifics. It did however get a large percentage of people to support several general themes--that the city in the short run would have to shrink and that resources should be focused on key areas like the downtown. In the few years, since, the relative lack of acrimony and trouble likely came from these early meetings, where a broad base of people came to understand and buy into a certain way of looking at the city.

In my opinion a process like this in which people could meet, study, talk and speak with experts about major issues on something beyond just a neighborhood level would pay huge dividends over time.

Youngstown 2010

Important Oakland Community Planning Meetings Kick Off Tomorrow Night

"The kickoff event this Thursday will introduce a series of five dialogue sessions that will take place between March 24 and the first week in May. Each session will include eight to ten community members discussing the issues they're passionate about in Oakland, and the changes they would like to see over the next fifteen years. These events, lead by a facilitator, will build upon each other in order to identify the most pressing concerns about the neighborhood, likely covering future development strategies, green initiatives, new multi-modal transportation opportunities, and public education enhancement."

As I recall, Lawrenceville went through this process-resulting in very few significant changes.

I have a pretty significant gripe here. We all know that Oakland, as the core area holding the bulk of the city's major educational and medical institutions, is critical to the city's future. We also, know that the major players already have major ideas which they likely will ram down our throats anyway-through eminent domain.

The problem here is that the major issues and thinking has to be done on a larger level--and at a minimum involve the major surrounding areas--South Oakland, Shadyside, Squirrel Hill, East Liberty and the Hill District. In the absence of this, no significant progress is likely and the self destructive trend towards traffic, sprawl and poor quality urban design will continue.

For a good example of how a broad planning process that might help shape major infrastructure in the city one has to go no further than Youngstown, Ohio.

Go See Pittsburgh Visionary Arts Festival

No time to do a better post but YOU Really, Really, Really are missing out on a lot if you dont experience the Visionary Arts Festival at Schenly Plaza in Oakland.


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Easter Egg Hunt @the Carnegie Museum

So, there are flyers up around Oakland, near the Carnegie Museum.

Where are the names of notable women on the facade of the Carnegie Museum?
Some suggestions for inclusion are written on Easter eggs and hidden in and
around the museum. How many can you find?

Good Luck
E. Bunny

We at Digging Pitt have received further explanation from E. Bunny, in the form of the following statement...

March 29, 2007
One of the first interesting things I came across when I returned to
Pittsburgh two years ago was the list of notable women posted on the skinny
building in commemoration of Women's History month - women who might be
candidates for inclusion in the all-male frieze of names carved into the
facade of the Carnegie Museum. A self-addressed stamped envelope is not what it
used to be and my request for a copy of the list that LUPEC compiled went astray. I thought it would
be fun to write the names on the bottom of those plastic ducks they use in
carnival games and dump them in the fountain in front of the museum. I bought a
dozen ducks from a novelty store on the strip and finally found someone who
would download the names for me. Wouldn't you know it, the fountain has been
shut off for a month now because of some sort of repairs or construction. So I
bought two bags of those plastic eggs, wrote names and dates from the list on
the outside and scissored apart the biographic material and folded it inside the
egg: Then I posted flyers at the bus stops announcing the Easter egg
hunt after I hid them in, on and around the museum.

Another idea I had for using the names (which any other like-minded
feminist is welcome and encouraged to copy) was to write them on smooth stones
and leave them at the base of the statues of the four white guys outside, the
way that Jews leave stones at a gravesite, on a headstone, to commemorate a visit to
a dead family member. Or attach the name, with paper and string, as one would
tie a message to a stone about to be hurled through a window.

I had some questions about the list itself - it was unnecessarily long and
I found myself clipping a group of three or four and making them share an
egg.There was someone named"Roger" with no biographical or explanatory material
provided. Artemsia Gentileschi's name is
misspelled. And why isn't Elizabeth Barrett Browning's name included? I
also wish that it had mentioned that one of my favorites, Hypatia, had been stoned to
death by a mob of Christians.

Your Friend
E. Bunny

Happy hunting everybody. And thank you, E. Bunny.