A son of the Iowa prairies, John G. Bowman didn’t take the dramatic hills and rugged valleys of western Pennsylvania for granted after he became the tenth chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh. This may explain how he was able to view the city as a site for one of the most audacious projects in the history of American higher education. Gathering over a hundred business leaders alongside “no easy board of trustees” at the elegant University Club in November of 1924, as the New York Times put it two months later, Bowman unveiled his audacious plan to construct a 52-story neo-Gothic academic skyscraper at the center of Pitt’s growing campus.
At that time, the Oakland neighborhood had newly been developed into a cultural hub. It included the museums of the Carnegie Institute; the Carnegie Music Hall, where the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra first performed; the new diocesan seat of Saint Paul’s Cathedral; the Italianate Pittsburgh Athletic Association; the Grand Army of the Republic’s Beaux-Arts Soldiers and Sailors Memorial (modeled after the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus); and, of course, Forbes Field, where the Pirates played. Now, the former one-room schoolteacher from Iowa envisioned placing, at the almost exact geographical center of Allegheny County, a veritable monument to the idea of education. An associate of architect Charles Zeller Klauder nicknamed it the “Cathedral of Learning,” an appellation as preposterous and glorious as the building itself, which officially stuck. That such a visionary investment in higher education was once possible — and not entirely for the purpose of aggrandizing corporate sponsors, whose names don’t adorn the building, but rather to inculcate “wonder,” as Bowman put it — seems virtually utopian today.
Looking out from the University Club’s ballroom, Bowman would have gestured to the empty field recently purchased by banker and trustee Andrew W. Mellon — then the Secretary of the Treasury and later the founder of Washington, DC’s National Gallery of Art — as being the site on which he would construct the greatest academic building in the world. Bowman’s predecessors had wanted Pitt’s campus to be a kind of contemporary Acropolis snaking up the hillside, but so far, the reality only included a handful of neo-classical buildings and temporary structures built during the First World War. After stints in both New York and Chicago, where Bowman came to understand that the future was vertical rather than horizontal, he envisioned fusing the function of the college with the form of a skyscraper, albeit an unusual one, telling the Times reporter that from “times of antiquity … man’s greatest monuments have pointed to the sky.”
When the ground was broken a century ago this year, the Cathedral of Learning would have been the third-tallest skyscraper in the world. When it was completed in 1937, it was the tallest educational structure on earth (and remains the tallest in the Western Hemisphere). According to the legend, when the ever-involved Bowman was trying to conceptualize his vision with Klauder, the latter was finally struck by inspiration when he put on Richard Wagner’s “Magic Fire Music” from Die Walküre. The two were inspired to construct a tower embodying John Ruskin’s argument from The Stones of Venice (1851) that only in the Gothic schools of architecture does one find a way for “fragments full of imperfection [to] raise up a stately and unaccusable whole.” As Bowman put it to the aforementioned interviewer for the New York Times: “Isn’t it time that we should take seriously the idea that beauty is essential to life as truth?”
For Pittsburghers, who’ve lived with the idea of the Cathedral of Learning for a century now (if its reality for a little less), the familiar alabaster castle of Indiana limestone — which was once stained black with the relentless smog of the steel mills that created the wealth that made the construction of such monuments possible — can be easily overlooked for its strange magnificence. Forty-two stories tall (the shortened height a concession to economic reality, after the stock market crashed), encompassing more than half a million square feet and equipped with 12 elevators, the Cathedral looms golem-like over Oakland. Today, it’s not only not the third-tallest building in the world, but only the eighth tallest in Pittsburgh, yet the Cathedral still stands alone. While the Oakland skyline has grown over the intervening century, architectural historian Martin Aurand told me that aesthetically, the Cathedral “retains its architectural distinction because it dominates its urban setting …. It stands free of other buildings on a grassy plot of land, and it towers above its neighbors,” unlike similarly high skyscrapers in other cities.