Imagining the Modern

Imagining the Modern: Architecture and Urbanism of the Pittsburgh Renaissance
Chris Grimley, Michael Kubo, Rami el Samahy
The Monacelli Press, May 2019



Hardcover | 7 x 9 inches | 368 pages | English | ISBN: 978-1580935234 | $50.00

Publisher Description:

In the 1950s and ’60s an ambitious program of urban revitalization transformed Pittsburgh and became a model for other American cities. Billed as the Pittsburgh Renaissance, this era of superlatives–the city claimed the tallest aluminum clad building, the world’s largest retractable dome, the tallest steel structure–developed through visionary mayors and business leaders, powerful urban planning authorities, and architects and urban designers of international renown, including Frank Lloyd Wright, I.M. Pei, Mies van der Rohe, SOM, and Harrison & Abramovitz. These leaders, civic groups, and architects worked together to reconceive the city through local and federal initiatives that aimed to address the problems that confronted Pittsburgh’s postwar development.

Initiated as an award-winning exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art in 2014, Imagining the Modern untangles this complicated relationship with modern architecture and planning through a history of Pittsburgh’s major sites, protagonists, and voices of intervention. Through original documentation, photographs and drawings, as well as essays, analytical drawings, and interviews with participants, this book provides a nuanced view of this crucial moment in Pittsburgh’s evolution. Addressing both positive and negative impacts of the era, Imagining the Modern examines what took place during the city’s urban renewal era, what was gained and lost, and what these histories might suggest for the city’s future.

dDAB Commentary:

Ten years ago, on my first and so far only visit to Boston, I managed to stop by pinkcomma, the gallery of OverUnder, and see The Heroic Project, an exhibition on mid-century buildings in Boston that was turned into a prized book, Heroic: Concrete Architecture of the New Boston, six years later. The passion of the authors toward what they call heroic architecture, but most people call Brutalism, is balanced by deep research and thorough documentation, resulting in a book that captures something universal but also unique to a particular place. Two-thirds of the Heroic team, Chris Grimley and Michael Kubo, joined by OverUnder's Rami el Samahy, do a similar thing to Pittsburgh, first as an exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art's Heinz Architecture Center in late 2015 and early 2016 and as a book a few years later. Both called Imagining the Modern, the book and exhibition focus on the so-called Pittsburgh Renaissance, the Steel City's redevelopment of its downtown ⁠— aka the "Golden Triangle" ⁠— and a few other areas after World War II. Like many people outside of the Rust Belt, I didn't know much about Pittsburgh's three-decade-long Renaissance, but my inclusion of Mellon Square (Simonds and Simonds, 1955) in 100 Years, 100 Landscapes led me a few years ago to learn a bit about it, particularly in terms of creating open spaces in the long-congested area.

If Imagining the Modern, the book, were around when I was writing my book, it would have made an excellent reference for Mellon Square, though it also might have been a distraction, given how much archival information and new insight is presented on the Pittsburgh Renaissance. Whereas Heroic spends most of its pages focusing on the buildings of "heroic" Boston, Imagining the Modern's biggest chapter is Media, which presents just that: newspaper clippings, promotional booklets, architectural drawings, and other documents used to imagine a modern Steel City and convince the public of the need to do so. Other chapters include Positions, scholarly essays on the Renaissance (Caroline Constant's contribution on Simonds and Simonds is right up my alley); Sites, maps and descriptions of built and unbuilt projects from the 1950s to the 1970s; and Perspectives, interviews with some players at the time and with contemporary voices. The last chapter, and hence the book, ends with transcripts of four "salons" held at the Heinz Architecture Center alongside Imagining the Modern in 2016. These conversations illustrate how the exhibition was more than just an exhibition, and how new insights were gleaned from developments a half-century old — thanks to the voluminous research of the curators/authors.

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Author Bio:

Chris Grimley is an architect and designer at OverUnder, an architecture and design firm in Boston, Massachusetts. Michael Kubo is Assistant Professor in the History and Theory of Architecture at the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design, University of Houston. Rami el Samahy is a founding principal at OverUnder and a Visiting Professor at MIT.

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