Places: Function dictates form at new Mellon Bank center

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Places: Function dictates form at new Mellon Bank center

Monday, February 19, 2001

By Patricia Lowry

With its new, $150-million Client Service Center, Mellon Bank got exactly what it wanted: a functional, efficient building that gathers all of its processing operations under one roof. It's a smart building -- one that monitors and controls individual systems from a central location -- and a green one, up to a point, embracing some energy-efficient technologies and recyclable materials.

The new Mellon Bank Client Service Center, seen from Sixth Avenue. (Andy Starnes, Post-Gazette)

What Mellon didn't get was what it didn't ask for: a building that is as forward-looking in concept and artful in its details as it is efficient.

"They did not want to build a monument to themselves, but an appropriate building given the function it was to house," said Anton Germishuizen, principal in charge for Burt Hill Kosar Rittelmann, the building's architect. "The strategy that we tried to push was not to be very loud. It was always the intention of the project to be a background building. It's a secondary site."

True, it's not prime Grant Street real estate, but the site is something of a gateway if you're approaching town from Centre Avenue or Bigelow Boulevard, and the building could have made more of that.

While neither is adventurous in design concept, for the most part the Client Service Center and its new front lawn (dubbed Mellon Green, pun intended, and planted with European hornbeams) are positive additions to the neighborhood in urban design terms, making much-needed pedestrian connections at the site's northern end.

The building is the new home of Mellon Global Cash Management, which designs cash management services for corporations, government agencies, nonprofits and other financial institutions. It also houses Mellon's mailroom, print shop, retail operations, check processing and storage areas.

Built on a long-vacant, 4.2-acre parcel of land bounded by Grant Street, Fifth and Sixth avenues and the elevated Crosstown Expressway, the new building occupies a difficult site -- not only because it's oddly shaped, a transitional space between Downtown and Uptown and bisected by a four-lane street, but also because it has two venerable neighbors in the Allegheny County Courthouse and Jail.

Patricia Lowry is the Post-Gazette architecture critic. Her e-mail address is plowry@post-gazette.com

The new building sits on land that historically is where the Hill District's Webster-Wylie street grid came in on the diagonal to meet Downtown's Fifth-Grant grid. Lower Webster and Wylie avenues were wiped out decades ago and replaced with a curving continuation of Sixth Avenue, which the building straddles.

The program requirements were daunting, calling for a 625-car garage (in its own wing adjacent to the Crosstown Expressway), a 10-bay loading dock (tucked inside the building), 1,200 miles of optical fiber cable (in pathways bored through solid bedrock 55 feet below Fifth Avenue), 33,000 communications ports and tight security.

To get the 80,000-square-foot floorplates Mellon needed, the building had to bridge Sixth Avenue. The architects minimized the tunnel effect by spanning the street at the fourth floor, to capture more light. Don't try this at home: Planners agreed to this strategy because they wanted the Mellon building (which, as the bank reminds us in press materials, could have been built anywhere) Downtown. There is, of course, economic and prestige advantage to Mellon in consolidating its headquarters operations in four adjacent blocks -- all just down the hill from Mellon Arena, which it considers an extension of its corporate campus.

The new building is an assemblage of glass-and-aluminum-curtain-wall boxes above a base of granite and precast concrete. Its welcome, stepped-down massing -- heights range from two to 14 stories -- was partly determined by pre-existing conditions. The western portion of the site is compromised by the location of the subway beneath it: Its load-bearing columns could only support a six-story structure, limiting the building's height on that side.

Grafted onto that is a two-story entrance atrium, an airy but visually icy room with polished black and white terrazzo floors and white and precast concrete walls. It leads to a 14-story corner tower, which houses employee break rooms and terminates in an exaggerated stainless steel cornice and a finial that points skyward.

"It's an abstract gesture paying homage to the metal cornice you see on some of the traditional Pittsburgh buildings," Germishuizen said. "The void below [the dark, open area just under the cornice] was to offset it and have the cornice float."

At the southern end of the site, at Fifth and Ross, the building backs away from the corner for a bit of place-making, creating a small sitting area with three granite benches and three gingko trees -- with views of the courthouse and jail just across the street. As a backdrop to the benches and trees, the architects designed a severe granite wall in an attempt to "dialogue" with Richardson's rusticated granite jail tower on the opposite corner. A glass wall would have ensured a livelier conversation, allowing views of the Richardson buildings for employees on the inside stair well, as well as reflecting the historic buildings in the glass.

For many of the building's 3,000-plus employees, much of what happens there is pretty boring stuff, involving long hours of routine work, often in front of a computer. To make up for it, some of them do have impressive views of the surrounding city: worker bee desks are on the perimeter, with managers assigned to windowless offices in the center of the building. There are break rooms and kitchenettes on every floor.

But Mellon's operations center never works as hard to pamper its employees as PNC's new operations center does, just down the street. For all new Downtown office buildings, PNC Firstside Center will be a hard act to follow, with its day-care center, penthouse cafeteria with expansive riverfront views and the ambiance of a toney restaurant, lactation room for nursing mothers and sophisticated, expressive sculpture throughout the building.

Mellon's idea of art, on the other hand, is installing an abstract version of its logo as a wall relief at the top of the atrium staircase. Its first-floor cafeteria is outfitted with standard-issue equipment and a busily patterned carpet that assaults the eyes.

On warm days, employees are sure to prefer the sloping lawn, designed by Burt Hill's Sara Moore, edged with a stainless steel trellis planted with purple wisteria and outfitted with a small bandstand that will host Mellon Jazz Festival performances. In the lower park, water will mist from or spill over columns in a fountain now under construction.