The Early Architecture of Western Pennsylvania (May/Jun 1996)

by Paul Rosenblatt
Most architects I know prize their collections
of books. Some books are assemblages of buildings designed by revered predecessors
or favorite contemporaries; others are long-forgotten texts that were read as students-countless
miscellaneous pages which inspired, recalled, refreshed, clarified, explained, described.
Some books have special significance, perhaps acquired at a moment of particular openness
or fingered in a memorable locale. These occupy a conspicuous shelf, or grace a prominent
surface-an object of obscure desire, understood only by the owner of the book, and
maybe his family.
Witnessing the explosion of electronic communications, I wonder what place books
will have in our lives tomorrow.
With this question in mind, I opened a new addition to my collection, an old-timer
in a fresh suit. Instantly transported, I moved from page to page as if in a dream.
Crisp cloudless photographic views of vaguely familiar-looking places. Precisely measured
fine black line drawings tracing windows, shutters, porticos, columns-an encyclopedia
of architectural tradition. The steady, clear-eyed gaze of an intent reporter. Enviable
clarity.
Published during the depths of the Depression in 1936, and recently republished
by the University of Pittsburgh Press with an excellent introduction by historian
Dell Upton, The Early Architecture of Western Pennsylvania, by Charles Morse Stotz,
greeted me with a well-scrubbed, confident smile. Shining through these pages are
415 new prints from the original large- format negatives and one print from an early
small-format 35-millimeter negative. Their fine grain and incidental detail seem to
exist out of time, as classic compositions in wood, stone, brick, landscape. Stotz’s
photographer was the gifted local Luke Swank, who would later distinguish himself
at Life magazine. Clothing and hairstyles are not permitted to mark the years in which
these views were recorded; this omission contributes to the dreamlike quality which
they possess, as well as to their timelessness.
And then there are the measured drawings carefully crafted by legendary local architectural
figures like Robert Schmertz, the Celli brothers and Stewart L. Brown. Using a clear
and concise graphic code which layman and architect alike can decipher, the drawings
invite interaction. My eyes intently traced thick stone walls, elaborately carved
baluster rails, plaster pilasters.
“There are valued times in almost everyone’s experience,” architect Michael Benedikt
has written in his book, For an Architecture of Reality, “when the world is perceived
afresh: perhaps after a rain as the sun glistens on the streets and windows catch
a departing cloud, or alone, when one sees again the roundness of an apple. At these
times, our perceptions are not at all sentimental. They are, rather, matter of fact,
neutral and undesiring-yet suffused with unreasoned joy at the simple correspondence
of appearance and reality, at the evident rightness of things as they are. It is as
though the sound and feel of a new car door closing with a kerchunk! were magnified
and extended to dwell in the look, sound, smell and feel of all things.”
Reading and studying The Early Architecture of Western Pennsylvania has had precisely
this effect on me. It is a simple tonic for our complex times.
Paul Rosenblatt is associate professor of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University.