Hamerschlag Hall

Through trips to the Carnegie Library and Museums, most Pittsburghers are familiar with the backside of  Carnegie Mellon University’s Hamerschlag Hall. Here is the side that faces the CMU campus. Photos by Perry

Handed the assignment of designing a building to house workshops and a boiler room at Carnegie Technical School, which became Carnegie Institute of Technology, then Carnegie Mellon University, architect Henry Hornbostel certainly made the most of it.

The exteriors of this and the original campus buildings are made of Kittanning brick, a cream-colored brick that normally was used for industrial purposes, which showed the world this would be a practical and modern institution instead of a red-brick Ivy League school.

Right: This is a copy of the piece that graced the bow of the cruiser U.S.S. Pittsburgh. The original once rested at Hamerschlag Hall.

The great arch at the entrance, as at the other campus buildings Hornbostel designed, employs Guastavino tile, which is a patented system that allows tiles to follow the curve of a roof.

Here’s how Franklin Toker, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, described Hornbostel’s handiwork in his book “Buildings of Pittsburgh”:

"Machinery Hall, renamed Hamerschlag for the school's first director, is an architectural silk purse made from a sow’s ear. The building program demanded little more than a boiler plant below and workshops above, but Hornbostel decked it out in the guise of Leon Battista Alberti’s St. Andrea at Mantua, with a high temple pediment surmounting an enormous ceremonial entrance arch.

"The crowing touch was the most poetic (and risqué) smokestack in the nation: an industrial-brick cylindrical Temple of Venus penetrated by a circular brick chimney, the whole further enriched by helical stairs recalling the spiral minaret of the Great Mosque of Samarra."

Modernist architect Philip Johnson once called it "the most beautiful smokestack in the world."

Left: "The most beautiful smokestack in the world."

While I’m certainly not in the league of Johnson or Toker when it comes to critiquing architecture, I call Hamerschlag Hall a delight.

I think it’s delightful because of Hornbostel is talent evident and because no expense was spared to create a fantastic structure to serve such a down-to-earth purpose.

The  building now houses the CMU Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and laboratories for the Department of Mechanical Engineering

Hornbostel left his mark in Oakland and other parts of Pittsburgh, and his work will turn up often in this blog. For the basics on Hornbostel, see Wikipedia.

Hamerschlag Hall looms over Junction Hollow.