I’ve seen many amazing buildings and places in my lifetime, but for me nothing can match the steel mills in Pittsburgh, where I grew up. That’s because their architecture and iconic presence left an emotional imprint on my life.
In their heydey, the steel mills presented a massive collection of black buildings that belched fire and smoke day and night –– colossal. Though I never got to go inside, living in Pittsburgh at that time meant encountering them daily. They lined the river banks and stretched for miles. The sheer size and power of these structures captured my imagination.
In high school, I did an independent study project and photographed them and Pittsburgh’s bridges, of which there are hundreds. I didn’t know at the time that, at least regarding the steel mills, I was capturing them, much as they had captured me –– within the decade the mills that had operated for a century would shut down.
In many ways, those man-made forms made Pittsburgh stand out from other cities I visited later. In their day, they symbolized immense industrial might and wealth, but also, from an urban planning standpoint, cut the residents off from access to the rivers.
With a 21st century gaze back, I now see also that the steel mills symbolized exploitation of natural resources. The coal and rivers nearby made possible the transporting, making, sending off of the steel, yet the process also polluted the environment and depleted our resources.
With their closing, the mills became industrial archaeology — ruins. The massive sheds a mile long, rows of blast furnaces with all their piping, scaffolding, and tremendous steel structures. They came to have an aesthetic value that we wouldn’t have noticed in years gone by, the counterpoints of the long, low sheds and the vertical smokestacks. Yet they no longer served any purpose beyond that and eventually were torn down.
I hadn’t forgotten them, though, and so designed a steel-making museum for my graduate thesis. My desire was to memorialize Pittsburgh’s past as an industrial power, to tell the story of the people and the natural resources. These elements came together to create an industrial behemoth; in 100 years, it was all but gone.
The takeaway is that there are technological changes that are difficult to foresee. Everything goes in cycles. In one sense, say for the bridges, it was man forming, shaping and taming nature to his will, so you could cross a really wide river time and again.
For the mills, it was taking raw materials out of the earth and heating them to tremendous temperatures to make steel. In terms of worldview, my lesson learned was that there were tradeoffs and consequences. There was lots of economic devastation with the mills’ decline. Some of the mill towns have never recovered.
Similarly, the late-19th and early-20th century concept of a “company town” was an advantage for decades, but ultimately collapsed. And so we try to be nimble, to be aware of trends that can change our construction and design industry. The biggest change has been the advent of computer drafting during my 40-year career. As an industry, we’ve gone from 100% hand-drafting to 2% hand-drafting. In our office, we try to take advantage of the efficiency, speed, productivity, and visualization the computer offers. But at the same time, we recognize it is just a tool.
For me, there is a strong connection between hand-drawing and thinking, but I’m sure recent college grads have the same response to a screen. I definitely do more hand drafting than they do; my default is to draw up a sketch. When this happens, clients become very engaged in what we’re doing, because it’s a skill that most don’t possess; it’s our super power in a way.
It’s not just that we as architects are able to draw what we see, but also that we draw something that doesn’t exist yet. For clients, seeing their future new building for the first time in the form of a sketch drawn by hand leaves an emotional imprint on their lives. It’s far more difficult and time consuming to do that drawing with a computer, in CAD, and certainly seeing the finished product doesn’t have the same emotional pull. Drawing is instinctual, yet still adaptive, so I keep sketching structures where before there may have been open sky. We then use computer technology for preparing the drawings and the 3D models that have been such a tremendous boon to showing clients. There’s always something of value, I find, in the tools, the structures and the ways of the past that can enhance how we live and work today.
–JK