The Frick Fine Arts Building and Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh was once the industrial city par excellence, with its curious combination of huge, smoky steel mills and spectacular civic art and architecture. The profits from iron and steel were mere dross, Andrew Carnegie once said, until they were transmuted into "the higher things of the moral, intellectual, and esthetic life." Pittsburgh lives with this complicated legacy even as it has undergone its own transmutation. Thoroughly deindustrialized and retooled economically, the city is reinventing its relationship to the region, nation, and globe. Photo tour »
The department’s Frick Fine Arts Building (1965) is a late blooming flower from the last phase of the industrial era. Financed by an industrial heiress, the building stands across from the Carnegie Museum at the entrance to the grandly picturesque Schenley Park. Surrounding it are numerous public monuments and cultural institutions.
The Fine Arts Building houses the department offices, an art gallery, a research library, a 200-seat auditorium, a visual resource collection, several classrooms, and an interior cloister and courtyard garden.
In front of the Fine Arts Building, Schenley Plaza has been redeveloped as a new green space and outdoor performance center. In between the building and the plaza, the recently restored fountain Song to Nature (Victor Brenner, 1918), originally conceived as the gateway to Schenley Park, still allegorizes the nature-culture relationship to bemused passersby. Much of the immediate environs is about that evolving relationship. The glorious Phipps Conservatory just to the east is now the most sophisticated LEED-certified greenhouse in the U.S. Two regular farmers markets take place within a few blocks of the Fine Arts Building, just some of the many local food markets and community gardens that have made Pittsburgh one of the top cities in the nation for local food systems.
Similar transformations are happening across the city. Local artists have played an important part in the ecological renewal of Pittsburgh, as the city reconnects to its streams and rivers and local agriculture. Arts institutions too are transforming with the emergence of dynamic new centers of contemporary art, such as the Mattress Factory and the Andy Warhol Museum, and the revitalization of established museums, such as the Carnegie and the Frick Art and Historical Center.
The History of Art and Architecture Department is not responsible for scheduling outside events and room reservations in the Frick Fine Arts Building. Questions should be addressed to the Office of the University Registrar's Classroom Scheduling at
412-624-7640.