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.
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.
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.
The immediate vicinity of the Fine Arts Building is transforming as a new green space emerges from what had been a parking lot and reconnects the department to the civic and university life around it. A farmer’s market now operates a few blocks from the Fine Arts Building, one of the many markets and community gardens that have made Pittsburgh the top-ranked U.S. city for local food systems in a national survey.
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.