This Pitt team keeps the Cathedral of Learning in tip-top shape
It was a grandiose vision, and Chancellor John Bowman wasn’t shy about selling it.
The Cathedral of Learning, he wrote in a 1925 address to Pitt’s Board of Trustees, was “to be like a great symphony.” Everything from its height to its buttresses and ornaments would instill in the viewer a sense of awe and of grasping at the sublime, a monument to his ideals of education and the industriousness of Pittsburgh.
“That building, with its parallel lines reaching up and up, and with its harmonies of mass,” Bowman added, “has such fire of emotion in it that we must feel it take hold of us.”
Such feelings of reverence have taken hold of many of us when looking at the building or walking through its halls. Yes, the Cathedral is an icon and an embodiment of Bowman’s vision, but it’s also a physical thing: a 42-story giant, bones of steel and skin of limestone, searing steam running through its veins. And every day, decisions are made that must consider both the building’s symbolic impact and the practical necessities of serving a campus that hosts more than 30,000 students, not to mention faculty, staff and visitors.
“We take pride in preserving the Cathedral, but we also need to meet modern teaching and operational needs,” says Pitt Vice Chancellor for Facilities Management Laura Zullo (ENGR ’88, ’93G). “We have the responsibility to preserve its identity and its integrity, and that can be challenging.”
Nuts and bolts, pipes and tanks
Zullo’s office has the charge of maintaining the Cathedral’s infrastructure, the systems that connect everything from the basement café to the 36th-floor David C. Frederick Honors College.
Over the years, the building’s circulatory systems have evolved. Workers have updated the plumbing and electricity; chilled water now cools off the tower in the summer; and the steam that heats the building in the colder months is now supplied by both the long-running Bellefield Boiler Plant and the newer, more efficient plant on Carrillo Street.
Supplying water to the Cathedral used to mean pumping water up into huge tanks and letting gravity do the rest of the work. That system, too, was updated in the past few years. (Storing thousands of gallons of water on the 38th floor was a catastrophic leak waiting to happen.) And after the elevator system was modernized, the machines that made up the old lift system were so bulky that they needed to be cut into pieces to squeeze them out of the building.
[Learn about some who built the Cathedral — and their Pitt-connected descendants.]
When you’re keeping a century-old academic skyscraper in peak condition, even a mundane task becomes larger than life.
At its size and age, “the building obviously requires significant maintenance and investment,” Zullo says.
“It’s really not the run-of-the-mill assignment. Our people are truly proud to work here.”
One might assume that the march of time and technology takes the Cathedral’s appearance further from the vision of Bowman and architect Charles Klauder, but it’s not so simple.
An expensive and laborious project in 2007, for instance, revealed the original Indiana limestone by stripping decades of soot from the building. Painters and carpenters have painstakingly restored the Commons Room furniture to keep it looking as it should. And then there’s the case of the window units.
“Twenty-five or 30 years ago, you would have seen hundreds of window air conditioners on the outside of the building,” says Zullo. “Most of those are gone.”
Thus, the Cathedral took a step closer to its original neo-Gothic silhouette through the modern marvel of central air. Sometimes, though, strict historical accuracy takes a back seat to convenience. Walk by the Commons Room’s two massive fireplaces in the summer and you might feel a chill. It turns out that they’re an unobtrusive delivery system for air conditioning.
The ‘perpendicular university’
Infrastructure is only one facet of maintaining an academic building. There’s also managing how people interact with the structure and how they come together within and around it. That’s where the architects come in.
“Having space to make those interactions possible is super important in higher ed. That’s why I exist,” says Gina Bleck, vice chancellor for planning, design and construction.
Those interactions, in fact, were one stated reason why Bowman wanted a skyscraper in the first place. He laid out his case in a 1924 interview with The New York Times in which he extolled the virtues of what the article called the “perpendicular university”: more exchange among departments and therefore a more united school spirit.
Yet it’s exactly that trait that makes the Cathedral a unique challenge for architects today. It’s tough to create community when departments are stacked atop one another without quads or courtyards to connect them. The building’s taper also makes for limited space for student-focused areas particularly on the upper floors.
Bleck’s architectural eye therefore gets drawn to the areas that surround the building — how the expansive lawn creates particular spaces for visitors and connects the Cathedral to its surroundings.
While overseeing the Cathedral “re-stack” project of renovating the building floor by floor, Bleck’s office also manages aspects of the shared spaces like the Commons Room — everything from signage down to the color of the lighting, which helps visitors to visually distinguish between historical areas and those updated for more modern educational use.
In all of this work, she says, there’s a balance to be struck between the building’s history and the way people engage with it now.
“I think that you need to honor the past while living with the present and creating a future,” Bleck says. “And that’s true of anywhere, but it’s particularly true when you have such a magnificent structure and such a history to pay homage to.”
Take part in the once-in-a-century celebration
Cathedral of Learning Cinematic Light Show: Join us on the Cathedral Lawn near Heinz Chapel for a memorable cinematic, film, light and sound experience — where a century of Pitt history meets what’s next. Watch our most iconic University landmark come alive over three extraordinary nights starting on Friday, Sept. 25.
Cathy-Palooza: A Cathedral Centennial Celebration: Come one, come all for a birthday bash commemorating the groundbreaking of our University's favorite building on Sunday, Sept. 27 from 1 to 4 p.m.
As for planned projects, they’re never-ending: HVAC improvements, individual floor renovations, a hammock grove for the lawn, a shop for the Nationality Rooms — the list goes on. One of the most ambitious such projects is under study now: a mission to repair or replace the building’s more than 2,400 windows for energy efficiency and longevity.
But how much longer can Chancellor Bowman’s 535-foot-tall vision in limestone survive? A century in, is the Cathedral of Learning an aging giant or in the prime of its life? That question, Bleck says, is really a question of what society values and chooses to preserve.
“For me, the places most worthy of saving are the places that are beloved,” Bleck says.
So, is the Cathedral beloved? Of course it is — just ask the students who study in the Commons Room, the holiday visitors to the Nationality Rooms, those whose grandparents donated a dime to its construction or the Pittsburgh lifers who feel pride when they see the Victory Lights. They’ll all give the same answer.
“I would say that means it’s going to be here for another century and then some,” says Bleck. “There’s no reason why it couldn’t last for centuries."
