The University of Pittsburgh celebrates a hundred years of the Cathedral of Learning in 2026. The University celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Cathedral of Learning in 1987; I know, because I attended a celebratory exhibition and I own a copy of the exhibition catalogue: The Cathedral of Learning: Concept, Design, Construction (1987). How time flies. There is a logical explanation for the passage of fifty years in thirty-nine years that has to do with the exact moments that are chosen to commemorate. However, the current celebration feels like a slippage in the facts, a warp in local time and space, a sleight of hand. I have questions…
What’s in a name—Cathedral of Learning? The Cathedral of Learning is not a cathedral. It is not ecclesiastical; it is not the seat of a bishop. What’s more, it overshadows Pittsburgh’s legitimate St. Paul’s Cathedral. To be fair, the East Liberty Presbyterian Church, the Cathedral of Learning’s skyscraping counterpart and contemporary in Pittsburgh, is sometimes called the Cathedral of Hope though there are no proper Presbyterian cathedrals. The Cathedral of Learning shares its distinctly secular appropriation of cathedral identity with the earlier Woolworth Building in New York City, a skyscraper often called the Cathedral of Commerce. Is it enough to be tall and Gothic and academically inclined?
Is the Cathedral of Learning’s origin story credible? How Chancellor John G. Bowman and architect Charles Z. Klauder met to consider the design of the Cathedral of Learning, which was already improbably envisioned as a university in a skyscraper. How they made scant progress over an evening. How Klauder finally cued up a recording of Richard Wagner’s “Magic Fire Music” from Die Walküre. How the music, building climax after climax, precipitated a breakthrough in the architectural design. How Klauder’s subsequent sketches featured Gothic buttress after Gothic buttress, architectural climax after architectural climax. How the process teased out a design that was already a figment of Bowman’s imagination; the breakthrough came with the match. Or so the fantastical story goes.
What does the Cathedral of Learning look like? Even with a breakthrough, the project was repeatedly redrawn to explore and refine design options and to pursue alternative solutions for evolving circumstances, an iterative process that is common in architectural design. Less expectedly, the proposed height of the Cathedral of Learning fluctuated from 52 to 31 to 42 stories even as the project’s overall look changed in comparatively modest ways. Consequently, it is not easy to pick the final version out of a lineup of preliminary designs without counting stories. As the University pursued funding, and publicized the project over an extended period, images of the Cathedral of Learning were widely disseminated. These eye-catching images became figments—or rather one indistinct composite figment—in the public imagination.
Is the Cathedral of Learning finished? Numerous photographs show the Cathedral of Learning under construction. The building campaign would have taken a number of years in the best of times; in a depression, when funding repeatedly fell short, it took much longer. In renderings—and the public imagination—the Cathedral of Learning is a stone monolith, but instead it is a kit of parts. Steel framing climbed into the sky and then stood open and exposed. Workers installed stone cladding incrementally beginning partway up the tower. Finishing the Cathedral of Learning (1934), a painting by Harry W Scheuch at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, posits an ongoing project; it shows industrious workers and construction vignettes even as it reveals the unfinished state and enormous scale of the task.
Where is the Cathedral of Learning? John Kane, the acclaimed self-taught Pittsburgh artist, depicted the Cathedral of Learning in at least four paintings. Kane presumably gathered information on his newfound muse from published reports and the visible uncompleted structure. Each painting shows the Cathedral of Learning truncated from below, as if the appearance of the base was uncertain (which it was). Kane’s Pietà (1933), at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art, closely modeled after the Pietà of Villeneuve-lès-Avignon (ca. 1455), depicts the post-crucifixion scene on a hilltop; St. Paul’s Cathedral and the top of the Cathedral of Learning provide a Gothic backdrop. The Cathedral of Learning, painted here like a figment of Kane’s imagination, is located simultaneously in twentieth-century Pittsburgh, fifteenth-century Europe, and first-century Jerusalem.
Why is the Cathedral of Learning missing in action? Life magazine photographer George Silk shot a famous feature photograph of the Cathedral of Learning during the epic 1960 World Series between the New York Yankees and the Pittsburgh Pirates. The photograph combines an aerial view of the teams playing at Forbes Field with a close-up view of cheering fans at a sky-high elevation. In addition, the photograph shows a few linear feet of an anonymous architectural parapet. The Cathedral of Learning is, it seems, missing.
Is the Cathedral of Learning mythical? In 1982, photographer Duane Michal created a photograph series Six Views of the Cathedral of Learning in the Manner of Hiroshige (1982). With this project, he evoked the Japanese artist Utagawa Hiroshige who repeatedly depicted the omnipresent but often-distant Mount Fuji in woodblock prints. Michal’s black-and-white photographs, which are murky in spots, indicative of distance and cloudy days, call out little more than a figment of imagination, an upright form, a ghostly figure instead of a mountain; as if the Cathedral of Learning is on the loose, a sasquatch caught by camera traps.
Is the Cathedral of Learning replicable? In 1999, Felix de la Concha created an analogous but more expansive series, One a Day: 365 Views of the Cathedral of Learning. This series of paintings is now on permanent display in the University of Pittsburgh’s Alumni Hall. The artist sharpened the focus: De la Concha’s paintings are clearer and more purposeful than Michal’s photographs. Yet the paintings’ numerous and diverse viewpoints and settings suggest the existence of a near infinite number of Cathedral of Learning surrogates or replicas (Cathedrals of Learning? Cathedral of Learnings?).
Is the Cathedral of Learning fully present? I previously wrote about the Cathedral of Learning in The Spectator and the Topographical City (2006). At first I focused on the Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon University) campus and noted that the Cathedral of Learning “wreaked havoc” on a preexisting vista. At my request, Clayton Merrell painted an illustration of this vista without the Cathedral of Learning. However, I went on to write more than expected about the Cathedral of Learning (how it commands its topographical setting, how it is a statement of “personal giantism”), so I asked Merrell to add it to the illustration, which he did expertly with editing software. Yet, to my eye, the Cathedral of Learning looks both superfluous (perhaps a Carnegie Mellon bias) and insubstantial (pixels not paint).
Does the Cathedral of Learning merit this year’s celebration? The peregrine falcons that nest at the Cathedral of Learning likely experience it as a cliff and a ledge, no more, no less. Somehow, the Cathedral of Learning is everything and nothing, everywhere and nowhere. It is hard to pin down. The slippage is inherent and pervasive. Yet, after a hundred years—plus or minus—the Cathedral of Learning persists as a compelling figment of our collective imagination. Reason enough.
Image detail from Finishing the Cathedral of Learning (1934), by Harry W Scheuch.
