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Architecture Review: Parking garages offer illuminating reinvention
Thursday, April 19, 2001 By Patricia Lowry, Post-Gazette Architecture Critic
Too often, parking garages are a pox on the modern city -- self-centered, brutal intrusions that thumb their noses at neighborhood context and contribute nothing to the life of the street. They don't have to be necessary evils, as two recently completed projects on opposite sides of the Allegheny River demonstrate.
At the urging of the Pittsburgh Riverlife Task Force, the new 940-car garage servicing PNC Park was designed by WTW Architects to respect and maintain the historic neighborhood's level of design detail. Inspired by nearby neo-classical commercial buildings, the North Shore Garage recalls the great urban department stores of the turn of the last century, from the size and rhythm of its windows to the patterning of the buff brick. More importantly, it acts like one, with retail storefronts along Gen. Robinson Street.
For all its virtues, it's a conservative building that takes no risks -- something that couldn't be said of the garage that opened in 1957 between Sixth Street and Fort Duquesne Boulevard.
Charette, the late, lamented journal of the Pittsburgh Architectural Club, hailed it as "Pittsburgh's gayest, most tasteful and sophisticated public parking garage," with "an exciting Mondrian exterior of tangerine, cream and Dutch blue pierced metal panels."
Sometime in the earth-toned 1970s, that bold, mid-century-Modern facade, designed by Kenneth Johnstone, was painted Safe Beige. And by the fall of 2000, it was looking not only drab but
Patricia Lowry is the Post-Gazette architecture critic. Her e-mail address is plowry@post-gazette.com
That's when it caught the attention of Mayor Tom Murphy, who realized, on a tour of PNC Park, that the L-shaped garage -- and a later one built in 1966 within the L -- would be in the foreground of the city's skyline when the ballpark opened.
And up against a redesigned Fort Duquesne Boulevard and other Cultural District improvements, "it really didn't match the quality of the neighborhood," said Pittsburgh Parking Authority director Ralph Horgan, who hired Downtown architect Rob Pfaffmann to redesign the garage facades.
Pfaffmann, however, didn't want to redesign them; he wanted to reinvent them.
"I almost lost the job because I liked the buildings too much," Pfaffmann said, half joking. "I was saying, 'These are cool buildings,' and everybody was saying, 'What?' "
But he found support in artist Robert Wilson and architect Richard Gluckman's proposal for light installations in the Cultural District; their 1996 plan endorsed the garages, saying they have "a discordance that adds to the visual vitality of the District. We see these structures as assets rather than liabilities."
"That gave me ammunition," Pfaffmann said.
And it didn't hurt that Horgan began to realize that with a $1.5 million budget, they had to work with what they had.
On a computer, "I did a series of Photoshop edits, from outrageous solutions to mundane ones." For one, "We said, let's treat the curtain wall like a literal curtain, and cut out some panels to reveal parking and fill in others with mesh and posters for the Cultural District. We felt that was too literal and departed from the Modernist roots of the facade.
"We also thought of a green building, growing ivy on it."
In the end, the one treatment everybody could agree on was paint, although no one wanted to go back to the orange and blue scheme. The Pfaffmann team, which included artist Chuck Biddle in the brainstorming sessions, did return to the original checkerboard pattern, this time using two shades of blue -- inspired by the dark blue steel of PNC Park.
When the 1957 garage opened, its lobby (which now serves both garages) had a "Florentine atmosphere," with "bright tiles, jungle flora, upholstered white iron furniture and rich wood paneling in a Hollywood setting," the Charette item reported.
The new materials are stainless steel, aluminum, glass and plaster; the new look is sleek and mildly industrial, clean but not antiseptic -- a brightly illuminated space warmed by the original rose-toned, checkerboard-patterned terrazzo floor. In function, it's straightforward and logical: A long, pleated stainless steel mesh screen -- Pfaffmann calls it an arbor -- softens the overhead fluorescent tubes and leads visitors directly to the pay station, announced in bold graphics.
The 1966 garage, designed by Avner and Slutsky to connect with the earlier one, hides the concrete parking decks behind a screen of folded aluminum panels. At night, the garage would glow like a lantern.
Pfaffmann popped out some of the panels in a diagonal pattern, replacing them with light boxes that, at night, become part of the abstract pattern of office windows on the Downtown skyline. This is, in both senses of the word, a brilliant solution -- with one reservation.
A random pattern would have allowed the light boxes to do a more animated, unpredictable dance across the Fort Duquesne facade. A chance-determined pattern -- the way John Cage was making music in the 1960s, influencing an entire generation of artists -- is also in step with the garage's Modern spirit.
The gap between the two garages, along Fort Duquesne Boulevard, is flanked by stair towers, in front of which Pfaffmann has floated translucent glass panels. Influenced by the Wilson and Gluckman proposals, Pfaffmann illuminated them from behind, subtly bleeding away the light toward the center of the towers. Within the gap, the sides of the concrete decks are transformed with bright triangles and rectangles of color.
Pfaffmann sees the stair towers as "mini-high-rises" that give scale to the buildings, help light the boulevard and orient visitors.
Still shrouded in darkness is their neighbor, the five-story steam plant that provides heat for 100 Downtown buildings.
The mayor and the Pittsburgh Riverlife Task Force have been mulling over what to do with this building and its rooftop stack, flanked by a pair of electrostatic precipitators that were used to remove fly ash when the plant burned coal.
Its unconventional facade is clad in terra cotta partition block, a structural material with ribs designed to hold plaster. Although the blocks aren't a traditional facade material, they resemble corrugated clay tiles, giving the steam plant a rich texture and variegated warm tones -- at close range. From across the river, it's a blank canvas, an invitation to play.
While there was never any intention to hide the great stack and precipitators, a scheme for covering the facade with metal panels and louvered awnings was devised by the Pittsburgh firm JSA Architects, but that is now on hold as the Task Force weighs other options -- and measures the impact of the Wilson/Gluckman light sculpture that will be activated atop Penn Avenue Place (the former Horne's building) in June.
In the meantime, why not experiment with dramatic lighting to see what it alone can do, keeping in mind how that has transformed the industrial structures in Germany's Emscher Park into dynamic, content-laden sculptures? Computer renderings could show how neon tubing might outline the building and its factory windows -- all in keeping with the Cultural Trust's vision of a City of Light.
One way or another, this rough, raw hunk of a building, so reminiscent of the mills that lined our rivers, should be played up for all it's worth.
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