Pitt's Cathedral of Learning Turns 100: The Skyscraper That Redefined the Campus

By Elena Vasquez

Ground broke a century ago this year on the Cathedral of Learning, a 42-story neo-Gothic skyscraper at the University of Pittsburgh that remains the tallest educational structure in the Western Hemisphere.

Chancellor John G. Bowman, the tenth chancellor of Pitt and a former one-room schoolteacher from Iowa, unveiled the plan in November 1924. He gathered more than a hundred business leaders alongside, as the New York Times put it, "no easy board of trustees" at the University Club. The Times reported the scheme two months later as a "skyscraper university plan."

The original design called for 52 stories. The stock market crash forced a concession to economic reality: the finished tower rises 42 stories, encompasses more than half a million square feet and runs on 12 elevators.

How did a banker name the building?

An associate of architect Charles Zeller Klauder nicknamed it the "Cathedral of Learning." The appellation, as preposterous and glorious as the building itself, officially stuck. Bowman placed the tower at the almost exact geographical center of Allegheny County — a deliberate monument to the idea of education.

The site was an empty field recently purchased by banker and trustee Andrew W. Mellon, then the Secretary of the Treasury and later the founder of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Bowman gestured to it from the University Club's ballroom and promised the greatest academic building in the world.

What inspired the design?

Bowman's predecessors had wanted Pitt's campus to be a contemporary Acropolis snaking up the hillside. Reality until then delivered only a handful of neo-classical buildings and temporary structures built during the First World War.

After stints in New York and Chicago, Bowman concluded that the future was vertical rather than horizontal. He told the Times that from "times of antiquity … man's greatest monuments have pointed to the sky."

Legend holds that Klauder found his inspiration while listening to Richard Wagner's "Magic Fire Music" from Die Walküre. The two men then built the tower around John Ruskin's argument in The Stones of Venice (1851) that only Gothic architecture lets "fragments full of imperfection raise up a stately and unaccusable whole."

Bowman framed the ambition in plain terms. "Isn't it time that we should take seriously the idea that beauty is essential to life as truth?" he asked the Times. The building's purpose, he said, was to inculcate "wonder" — not to aggrandize corporate sponsors, whose names do not adorn the structure.

What does the tower mean to Pittsburgh today?

At its 1925 groundbreaking, the Cathedral of Learning would have been the third-tallest skyscraper in the world. Completed in 1937, it was the tallest educational structure on earth. Today it ranks only eighth tallest in Pittsburgh, yet it still stands apart.

The Oakland neighborhood that surrounds it had been newly developed into a cultural hub: the Carnegie Institute's museums, the Carnegie Music Hall where the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra first performed, Saint Paul's Cathedral, the Italianate Pittsburgh Athletic Association, the Beaux-Arts Soldiers and Sailors Memorial modeled after the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, and Forbes Field, where the Pirates played.

The Indiana limestone castle was once stained black by the smog of the steel mills whose wealth had made its construction possible. Architectural historian Martin Aurand told Arts & Voices 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.

That such a visionary investment in higher education was once possible seems virtually utopian today, and the tower's centenary invites the question of whether any American city would dare build its equal.