Designing Oakland
dal 21/6/2002 al 22/9/2002
Segnalato da
21/6/2002
Designing Oakland
Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh
An exhibition that explores a Pittsburgh neighborhood's built environment along with some of the recent plans and projects created to improve it. Designing Oakland documents the landmarks, urban planning ideas, and historical forces that have shaped this important civic and cultural center from the 19th century to the present.
Designing Oakland at Carnegie Museum of Art's Heinz Architectural Center
Exhibition chronicles landmarks and planning in
a Pittsburgh's cultural and civic center.
Designing Oakland, an exhibition that explores a Pittsburgh
neighborhood's built environment along with some of the recent plans and
projects created to improve it, will be on view at Carnegie Museum of Art's
Heinz Architectural Center June 22-September 22, 2002. Designing Oakland
documents the landmarks, urban planning ideas, and historical forces that
have shaped this important civic and cultural center from the 19th century
to the present with more than 200 objects, including architectural drawings
and models, planning documents, photographs, maps, paintings, and ephemera.
The exhibition also introduces concepts of urban design and master planning,
encouraging visitors to evaluate development in their communities more
critically.
Just three miles east of downtown Pittsburgh, the neighborhood of Oakland
became an enclave of wealthy Pittsburghers fleeing the city's pollution and
overcrowding in the 19th century. By the 1920s, the neighborhood had
impressive hospitals, places of worship, a large public park, and important
civic and cultural institutions, including two major universities and
Carnegie Institute, home to the region's preeminent museums and library.
Oakland continued to grow through the 20th century, becoming the
second-largest employment area in Southwestern Pennsylvania.
Today, Oakland's cosmopolitan character, intellectual capital, and cultural
resources make the community an important engine for the region's continuing
revitalization. Ironically, the same factors that contribute to Oakland's
vitality have also created congestion, sparked land-use squabbles, and
strained the housing market. Since the mid-1990s, organizations, ranging
from the local community development corporation to large institutions, have
created more than two dozen plans for remedying these problems and providing
a more orderly approach to future development.
Designing Oakland sheds light on a selection of plans, including the Oakland
Improvement Strategy, Carnegie Mellon University's master plan, and plans
for revitalizing Schenley Park, among others. Complementing and enriching
this focus are explorations of housing, industry, and recreation in Oakland,
including sections devoted to Forbes Field, the former home of the
Pittsburgh Pirates, the University of Pittsburgh, and the Pittsburgh
Technology Center.
The exhibition illustrates a number of important factors that
account for Oakland's appearance. One such factor is the City Beautiful, a
movement that guided city planning and urban design in the United States
from the mid-1890s through the first decade of the 20th century. Advocates
of the City Beautiful favored boulevards, parks, and formal civic buildings
in the beaux-arts style, as well as more modest improvements in the
streetscape, such as attractive streetlamps, well-maintained plantings, and
better paving of streets and sidewalks.
Pittsburgh's response to the City Beautiful movement was Franklin Nicola's
1905 plan for the Oakland Civic Center, which included civic, social,
residential, and educational zones along a boulevard that ran through the
heart of the neighborhood. The centerpiece of the proposal was a nucleus of
monumental buildings created in styles evoking ancient Greece and the
Italian Renaissance. A master plan for the University of Pittsburgh's
campus, just west of the core of the Civic Center, provided for 60 buildings
rising in terraces along a hillside site in an arrangement and architectural
style recalling the Acropolis. The residential component of the 1905 plan
was realized in Schenley Farms, a development of 135 homes with the most
advanced domestic amenities.
Although Nicola's plan was not fully implemented, it produced such
unmistakable neighborhood landmarks as the Allegheny County Soldiers and
Sailors Memorial Hall, the Masonic Temple (now the University of
Pittsburgh's Alumni Hall), and the Pittsburgh Athletic Association. The
exhibition includes photographs, vintage color postcards, and period
architectural journals that depict various elements of the plan.
Many photographs in the exhibition document housing, recreation, and
transportation in Oakland, and a number of them capture familiar and
lesser-known architectural landmarks during their construction. One series
of images shows the construction of the Cathedral of Learning, a 42-story
classroom and office building erected on the campus of the University of
Pittsburgh between 1926 and 1937. Photographed with only half its floors
sheathed in stone and the upper stories merely a skeleton of naked girders,
the structure already dominated the Oakland skyline.
In some instances objects in Designing Oakland show dramatic changes brought
to the community by construction projects. Several black-and-white
photographs from the 1950s document the construction of the Penn-Lincoln
Parkway, a highway on the southern edge of the neighborhood. The new
expressway, which in one photograph appears as a wide swath of exposed earth
on the flanks of the Jones & Laughlin steel works, formed a no-man's land,
divorcing the mill from the warren of houses and narrow streets in its
shadow.
Some planning artifacts attest to the tenuous existence of urban planning
ideas. For example, several models in the exhibition, built to illustrate a
University of Pittsburgh expansion project, reveal the important role
community approval plays in the planning process. In the late 1960's, when
the University of Pittsburgh became part of the Commonwealth of
Pennsylvania's system of colleges and universities, student enrollment was
expected to swell from 20,000 to 40,000 in less than a decade. To manage
this growth, the Commonwealth commissioned a coordinated expansion plan.
Angered by the university's failure to consult residents and alarmed that
the plan envisioned a campus physically larger by one-third, a number of
Oakland residents formed Peoples Oakland, a grassroots advocacy group
organized to marshal public opposition to the plan and propose alternatives
to it. Because of community pressure and a lack of financing, the
university's plan was never implemented, but the process established a
precedent for inviting public debate as a part of the planning process in
Oakland.
Tracy Myers, associate curator of architecture at Carnegie Museum of Art's
Heinz Architectural Center and organizer of Designing Oakland, believes that
Oakland deserves further study. "Oakland is fascinating in terms of its
historical evolution and the challenges it presents to planners and other
professionals who are attempting to direct its future sensitively and
intelligently," she said. "It is our hope that visitors will leave the
exhibition not only with a better understanding of urban design and urban
planning issues, but also with the conviction that these things matter in
their daily lives."
Designing Oakland is the second in the "Pittsburgh Neighborhoods Project"
series of exhibitions initiated by the Heinz Architectural Center in 1998.
Programs
Complementary public programs for Designing Oakland will be announced in an
upcoming news release. For more information, please call the Carnegie
Museum of Art Communications Office at 412.622.3316.
Tours
Groups can schedule guided tours of the exhibition by calling 412.622.3289.
Support
Support for this exhibition has been provided by the Juliet Lea Hillman
Simonds Foundation, Inc. and the Alexander C. & Tillie S. Speyer Foundation.
The programs of the Heinz Architectural Center are made possible through the
generosity of the Drue Heinz Trust.
Carnegie Museum of Art
Located at 4400 Forbes Avenue in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh and
founded by industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie in 1895,
Carnegie Museum of Art is nationally and internationally recognized for its
distinguished collection of American and European works from the sixteenth
century to the present. The Heinz Architectural Center, part of Carnegie
Museum of Art, is dedicated to the collection and exhibition of
architectural representations and to the study of all aspects of the built
environment.
For more information about Carnegie Museum of Art, call
412.622.3131 or visit our web site.
Carnegie Museum
4400 Forbes Avenue, PA 15213-4080
Pittsburgh