Pittsburgher John Kane captured the Westinghouse Bridge and the industrial floor of the Turtle Creek Valley in his 1932 painting. It's part of the Roland P. Murdock Collection at the Wichita Art Museum in Kansas.

Might as well come right out and say it: Martin Aurand's new book is one of the most eye-opening studies of Pittsburgh in a long time, and one of the most original.

		Listen In Hear an audio version of this column. Related content Chapter One of "The Spectator and the Topographical City"

"The Spectator and the Topographical City" (University of Pittsburgh Press, $29.95) is the first book to take as its subject the impact of topography on the city's built environment and the first to deeply examine the city from the spectator's point of view.

It is above all an appreciation of Pittsburgh, from a Philadelphia-bred man who takes its measure and finds a spectacular city in the truest sense of the word, a place full of spectacle.

Pittsburgh "was always and is today the quintessential topographical city," writes Aurand, who moved here in 1982 and is architecture librarian and archivist at Carnegie Mellon University. "The countless vantage points of the topographical city encourage an active perception of its visual qualities. In Pittsburgh, everyone is a spectator."

	Carnegie Mellon University Architecture Archives "The Complex Vista": Carnegie Mellon University's Hamerschlag Hall, the Cathedral of Learning and the remnants of Pitt's first Oakland campus. Click photo for larger image.

Indeed, in the book's three essays focusing on the Golden Triangle, the Turtle Creek Valley and Oakland, the spectator can be Andrew Carnegie on the campus of the college he founded, Richard King Mellon in his office above Mellon Square or everywoman looking down from a plane or becoming part of the view on one of Mount Washington's projecting overlooks. How the city reveals itself visually and symbolically to these spectators is the stuff of the book.

The primary spectator, of course, is Aurand himself, an amiable and erudite guide who summons other writers, artists and architects through Western history as he coolly builds his case for a new way of seeing and understanding the city. He channels Palladio and Corbusier but also serves up photographer Clyde Hare's line: Pittsburgh is a city that "stands up and looks you in the face." And Michael Chabon's description of Junction Hollow: "a diorama ... at the bottom of Pittsburgh."

In his search for the natural and man-made sublime and the places where the twain meet, Aurand sees the past as a transparent overlay on the present. "The Spectator" is a sort of intellectual counterpart to Doug Cooper's emotionally charged drawings of Pittsburgh, which also taught us to see the city in a new way, as a roiling, intricate, memory-laden landscape of exteriors and interiors, at once majestic and intimate in scale. Two of Cooper's drawings serve as reference points in this richly illustrated book, as do paintings by Aaron Gorson, John Kane, Johanna Woodwell Hailman and Henry Koerner, along with dozens of photographs, postcards and panoramic prints.

Skyline postcard from Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation The topography of the 1930s skyline: When the smoke cleared, you could see it from Mount Washington. Click photo for larger image.

Aurand takes us first to the Golden Triangle for a kind of lamentation for lost topography -- Grant's Hill, site of the 1758 defeat of James Grant's Highlanders by the French and the natives. Aurand interprets it as the city's sacred and civic mount, site of both an Adena burial mound and two successive county courthouses, and for two centuries the place to go for a fine prospect of the town.

But by the 1910s, what was left of a whittled-away Grant's Hill was an inconvenience known as "the Hump," and so the last of it went, leaving two of Pittsburgh's best buildings with their bottoms exposed -- H.H. Richardson's Courthouse and the Frick Building that upstaged it, walling it off from its city. Grant's Hill lives on in the rugged stones of the courthouse, Aurand writes, before moving on to the evolving topography of the skyline in the 1900s.

Much of what comes next is familiar stuff, but Aurand illuminates it from the spectator's point of view -- pointing out that the Keenan Building of 1907 and its distinctive dome still enjoy good visibility because the building (now the Midtown Towers) is located at the intersection of Downtown's two grids. But there are times in this chapter when I wanted Aurand to leave the Ivory Tower and tell us, for example, what he thinks of the recent branding of the skyline with corporate signs and logos. And when he takes us to the top of Pittsburgh's tallest building -- the "raw industrial artifact" that is the U.S. Steel Tower -- he tells how high we are but not what it feels like to be there, or how far we can see from it -- or could, alas, before its restaurant closed.

Next we're off to the Turtle Creek Valley, where Aurand weighs its transformation "From Braddock's Field to Bessemer," as it filled with a sprawling steel plant and its fiery blast furnaces, the snaking rail lines and the valley's masterwork, the concrete-arched Westinghouse Bridge.

"For the spectator passing through it, it is a "triumphal arch, a point of entry to greater Pittsburgh."

In the Oakland chapter, Aurand trots out the breakthrough discovery that inspired the book, building on Barry Hannegan's 1958 essay on Henry Hornbostel's original campus for Carnegie Mellon University. Hannegan interprets it as an 18th-century French stage set, framing the view with its perspectival sequence of buildings. What comes next is ... well, Aurand plays his hand so skillfully that I hesitate to show his cards. Consider this a spoiler alert and stop here if you'd rather savor the discovery in the book.

Aurand suggests that Hornbostel's terminal view from the College of Fine Arts Building was not simply the campus' Hamerschlag Hall, but Hornbostel's other Oakland campus, for the University of Pittsburgh, the hillside Acropolis begun in 1908 and for which only a few of its 30 classical buildings were ever realized. Aurand calls the view from hill to hill "the complex vista," informed by Hornbostel's travel to Rome.

"He knew its temples, villas and churches, and absorbed the lessons of its topography, architecture and urbanism," Aurand writes. "In his eyes and in his hands, Oakland's hills became Rome's hills."

That's a significant contribution to our understanding of Oakland's form and content.

Hornbostel was the most prominent of a handful of early 20th-century architects whose classical Beaux Arts training in Paris left Pittsburgh with a rich legacy of buildings with European antecedents. But as the architects who studied or worked with those early masters also recede into the past, those ties to Europe are fading from living memory.

We are indebted to Aurand for reminding us of them, and for giving us a fresh perspective of Pittsburgh.