Described by some as a wonder of Gothic Revival architecture, by others as a 'pseudo-Gothic monstrosity', the University of Pittsburgh's 42-storey Cathedral of Learning is the tallest educational building in the western hemisphere; the world's tallest belongs to Moscow State University.
The Building
The University of Pittsburgh, itself one of the oldest universities in the United States (founded in 1787), grew out of a log cabin built at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers.
In the 1920s, then-Chancellor JG Bowman commissioned the architect Charles Klauder to design a grandiose new building to replace the temporary structures in which so much of the university was housed. The building, to be erected on a 14-acre site in the Oakland section of the city, was to be, in Bowman's words, 'a symbol of the life that Pittsburgh through the years had wanted to live'.
Why the architect, a Philadelphian, believed that Pittsburghers had always wanted to live in a Gothic skyscraper has never been adequately explained.
