Cathedral of Learning
The Cathedral of Learning is a 42-story skyscraper that serves as the centerpiece of the University of Pittsburgh's main campus in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Standing at, the 42-story Late Gothic Revival structure is the tallest educational building in the Western Hemisphere and the second-tallest university building in the world, after the main building of Moscow State University. It is also the second-tallest gothic-styled building in the world, after the Woolworth Building in Manhattan. The Cathedral of Learning was commissioned in 1921 and ground was broken in 1926 under general contractor Stone & Webster. The first class was held in the building in 1931 and its exterior finished in October 1934, prior to its formal dedication in June 1937. It is a Pittsburgh landmark listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
Colloquially referred to as "Cathy" by Pitt students, the Cathedral of Learning is a steel-frame structure overlaid with Indiana limestone and contains more than 2,000 rooms and windows. It functions as a primary classroom and administrative center of the university, and is home to the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, the School of Social Work, and a number of its departments, as well as the Frederick Honors College. It houses multiple specialty spaces, including a studio theater, food court, study lounges, offices, computer and language labs, 31 Nationality Rooms, and a half-acre, 4-story-high, vaulted, gothic study and event hall. The building contains noted examples of stained glass, stone, wood, and iron work and is often used by the university in photographs, postcards, and other advertisements.
Use
The basement and floors up to floor 40 are used for educational purposes, although most floors above 36 house the building's mechanical equipment. These floors include theaters, computer laboratories, language laboratories, classrooms, and departmental offices. The basement contains a black box theater and the ground floor contains computer labs, language labs, classrooms, and the Cathedral Café food court. The lobby, comprising the first through third floors, contains a massive gothic Commons Room that is used as a general study area and for special events and is ringed by three floors of classrooms, including, on the first and third floors, the 31 Nationality Rooms designed by members of Pittsburgh's ethnic communities in the styles of different nations and ethnic groups. Twenty-nine of these serve as functional classrooms while more conventional classrooms are located on the second floor and elsewhere throughout the building. The first floor also serves as home to the offices of the Chancellor, Executive Vice Chancellor, and other administration offices, as well as the Nationality Rooms Gift Shop. The fourth floor, which was previously home to the main stacks of the university's library and the McCarl Center for Nontraditional Student Success, now houses a mix of interdisciplinary studies programs. The fifth floor originally housed the main borrowing, reference, and reading rooms of the university library, and now houses the Department of English. The Pitt Humanities Center is housed on the sixth floor. The University's Frederick Honors College is located on the 35th and 36th floors.The Cathedral of Learning houses the Department of Philosophy, as of 2009 considered one of the top five in the United States, and the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, consistently ranked at the top of the field. Other departments in the Cathedral include English, Religious Studies, Theatre Arts, and the School of Social Work which maintains the highest classrooms in the building located on the 23rd floor. Floors 38–40 are closed to the general public, as they contain electrical wiring for the building, as well as the Babcock Room, a large conference room on the 40th floor used for meetings, seminars, and special events and which provides a panoramic view of downtown Pittsburgh and the rest of the university. The 40th floor balcony also houses a nesting pair of Peregrine falcons. A view from the top is available via a webcam. Golden lights, dubbed "victory lights," surround the outside of the highest floors and are lit following Pitt football wins and other notable victories, giving the upper part of the cathedral an amber glow.
The top of the building serves as the site for the transmitter of the student-run radio station WPTS-FM as well as the amateur radio repeater W3YJ which is run by the Panther Amateur Radio club on a frequency of 443.45 MHz.
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:
Bowman looked at a plot of land named Frick Acres. On November 26, 1921, with aid from the Mellon family, the university was given 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 on 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, 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.
When construction started on the Cathedral of Learning in 1926, it was the tallest building in Pittsburgh, although the Gulf Tower 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 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 and Spiral Towers, both completed in 2008 and located in Japan.
World War II
On July 26, 1940, as World War II was starting, a bomb threat was made against the structure with extra guards being posted to secure it and the authorities not ruling out possible wartime sabotage.During the war effort, the cathedral was assigned to house, feed and instruct roughly 1,000 of the Army Air Corps as well as dozens of Army engineers. The building had at least 12 floors dedicated for military use from 1943 until 1945.
Funding
Fundraising for this project came in a number of forms, including donations from industries, corporations, individuals and foreign governments. To raise public views of the cathedral, and at the same time finance the construction, Bowman started a fundraising campaign in 1925.An important part of this campaign was a project reaching out to the children of the city entitled "Buy a Brick for Pitt". Each schoolchild sent a dime and a letter to the university, explaining how they earned the dime for the building. In exchange, the child received a certificate for one brick contained in the cathedral. A total of 97,000 certificates were issued to children.
Commons Room
The main part of the cathedral's first floor, the Commons Room, called one of the "great architectural fantasies of the twentieth century", is a fifteenth-century English perpendicular Gothic-style hall that covers half an acre and extends upward four stories, reaching tall. The room was a gift of Andrew Mellon. It is a piece of true Gothic architecture; no steel supports were used in the construction of its arches. Each arch is a true arch, and they support their own weight. Each base for the arches weighs five tons, and it is said that they are so firmly placed that each could hold a large truck. The large central piers act only as screens for the structural steel that holds up the upper floors of the building.Despite its heavy use, the Commons Room is kept quiet by the use of Guastavino acoustical tiles as the stones between the ribs of vaulting. This feature was insisted upon by Chancellor Bowman. The architect, Klauder, objected due to the increased costs of this construction method. Bowman responded with the comment: "You cannot build a great University with fraud in it."
Klauder considered the Commons Room to be his greatest achievement.
Joseph Gattoni designed the stonework, much of which depicts western Pennsylvanian plant life. The walls are made of Indiana limestone and the floor is green Vermont slate.
The wrought iron in the room, including the large gates leading to the elevators, was a gift from George Hubbard Clapp and was designed by the ironworker Samuel Yellin. Over the gates are two lines by Robert Bridges, from an untitled poem:
Here is eternal spring; for you the very stars of heaven are new.
Also located in the corridors surrounding the Commons Room are plaques featuring calligraphy designed and hand-cut in slate by Edward Catich, including one featuring a poem by Lawrence Lee titled "The Cathedral," as well as stained glass windows by Charles Connick.