Pittsburgh: Discovering Urban Identity in the Steel City

When studying the material culture of cities, there is no better place to learn than in the city itself! This past April, Winterthur students in Dr. Catharine Dann Roeber’s Material Culture of Cities class spent several days exploring Pittsburgh. During our time there, we scrutinized factors unique to Pittsburgh’s identity and examined how a city’s history reflects the modern landscape.

View of the Pittsburgh skyline from the top of the Monongahela Incline.

We began our visit in the eighteenth century with a visit to Fort Ligonier and a discussion on Pittsburgh’s role as a contentious site in the French and Indian War. From there, we entered into the city where we spent the next several days visiting sites related to Pittsburgh’s nineteenth and twentieth century industrial boom, assessing how that impacted the modern urban identity.

We explored the evidence of wealth established by the top industrialists in the Duquesne Club and the Frick family’s Pittsburgh home of Clayton. At the same time, we were able to explore the evidence of still functioning industrial centers, and the duality of these economic gaps. We paid attention to areas where we saw efforts of revitalization in the past few decades and focused our assessment on how these efforts impacted Pittsburgh’s city identity.

Exploring the center of the Cathedral of Learning, built by Charles Klauder in 1926. Each classroom on the main floor is designed to represent a different country.

One of the things that struck us the most about Pittsburgh was the pride in the city’s particular urban identity and history. Walking down the street, secular buildings like the Cathedral of Learning dominate the skyline and represent a city rooted in industrial wealth. There was a pride in a dual identity of the laboring industrialist and former robber barons that we saw in the architecture and art of the sites we visited. Most strikingly, this was encapsulated in WPAMC alum, Rachel Delphia’s exhibit Silver to Steel: The Modern Designs of Peter Muller-Munk at the Carnegie, where we saw how one industrial designer could launch a citywide conceptualization of seemingly everyday objects as art.

Silver to Steel: The Modern Designs of Peter Muller-Munk, Carnegie Museum of Art, 21 November 2015 – 11 April 2016.

Our trip concluded with a stop at Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1936-1939 masterpiece, Fallingwater, where we examined how the urban identity and wealth of Pittsburgh impacted the surrounding region, such as the contemporary designs promoted by the Kauffman family in their weekend home.

Professor Catharine Dann Roeber and members of WPAMC 2016 and 2017 in front of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater.

From Fort Ligonier to Fallingwater, our class had a wonderful time exploring western Pennsylvania. Field studies like this trip provide us with an opportunity to explore the material culture of a region in situ and are truly valuable to our study of the world around us – both historically and in the present. Next time you go into a city, we hope that you take a look around and do the same!

 

By Michelle Fitzgerald, WPAMC Class of 2017