{"id":458761,"date":"2026-09-10T00:18:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-10T00:18:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/458761\/"},"modified":"2026-09-10T00:18:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-10T00:18:12","slug":"down-in-the-pitt-cal-alumni-association","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/458761\/","title":{"rendered":"Down in The Pitt – Cal Alumni Association"},"content":{"rendered":"

Each episode of HBO Max\u2019s The Pitt represents one hour of a 15-hour shift at the Pittsburg Emergency Department. Its rawness, sharp-edged dialogue, and convincingly real set have made it a critical darling: The Pitt cinched five Emmys last year and has been nominated in a whopping 25 categories this year, including for Outstanding Production Design For A Narrative Contemporary Program<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Behind that design is Berkeley alum Nina Ruscio \u201981, who recently joined California for\u00a0an interview on Zoom.<\/p>\n

Straight out of a meeting on set, she wore black scrubs, which all crew members wear in case they mistakenly appear on camera.\u00a0 On the wall behind her are layouts of the set where every episode is filmed.<\/p>\n

Ruscio studied English at Berkeley, and, outside of class,\u00a0immersed herself in the theater department. Though she is now known for creating hyper-realistic worlds for film, at Cal she constructed magical-realistic sets for the stage.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe high level of the mind of everyone in those times at Berkeley was thrilling to be a part of. We just couldn\u2019t stop creating,\u201d she said. \u201cYou couldn\u2019t resist it. Everything had value. Everything was a possible experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n

\"ANina Ruscio on the set of The Pitt (Johanna Coelho)<\/p>\n

How did you start working on The Pitt?<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve had the pleasure and honor of working with [Director] John Wells on a lot of the productions that I\u2019ve done in the last 15 or more years. I met him when I was working on the television show Shameless and worked on another television series with him called Animal Kingdom.
John Wells, Noah Wiley, Scott Gimmel, and Michael Histrick approached me to design the layout of the emergency department [of The Pitt] before they wrote a single word.<\/p>\n

Run us through how a set comes to life. Do you usually start production design before a script is written?<\/p>\n

No, it\u2019s usually the opposite. The common way to create a show would be by looking at the written word and coming up with a design that\u2019s based upon that intention. It was extremely prescient for the crew [of The Pitt] to realize that if they were to set multiple writers on a fictitious geography that would be individual to everyone\u2019s minds, I would end up needing to re-engineer and re-jigger everything after it was written. Instead, John wanted to put the same geography in everyone\u2019s minds so they were all writing to the same space.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wouldn\u2019t drive to the ER that was five miles away, I would drive to the one that\u2019s 50 miles away.\u201d<\/p>\n

Your research included visiting various hospitals and emergency departments. Did you have any unexpected moments on these visits?<\/p>\n

One time, I had this very infected bee sting, so I used it as a calling card to visit as many emergency departments as I could. I wouldn\u2019t drive to the ER that was five miles away, I would drive to one that\u2019s 50 miles away so that I could have the experience of going through different emergency departments, because it\u2019s a very, very different experience in each physical space.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For me, the core question is \u201chow does this space make you feel?\u201d How does it provide support for the story in terms of how it makes people feel? So, there is a natural sterility and triggering thing that happens when you go to these emergency departments. I wanted it to feel like everyone could take ownership of it, and everyone could take agency with it, and imagine that The Pitt\u2019s emergency department was also in their town.<\/p>\n

What makes The Pitt\u2019s set different from other medical dramas?<\/p>\n

There are a lot of tropes and traps that people get into when they\u2019re designing hospitals. They\u2019re overdesigned. They\u2019re overly colored. The lighting is too good. All of these things we wanted to strip away to make the experience more universal and more tangible for people that really are in these spaces all day long. They\u2019re blanched. The palate is very spare. It\u2019s very sterile, the lighting is top lit. It\u2019s very awkward and not necessarily flattering. There aren\u2019t beautiful colors everywhere. Over-art-direction in hospital design was something that was very important for me to avoid because it wasn\u2019t going to serve the story.\u00a0<\/p>\n

You say that The Pitt is not like a traditional set, but instead a fully immersive imitation of an emergency department. What techniques did you use\u00a0to achieve that?<\/p>\n

Because the set has a lot of doors and windows with reflective surfaces, none of those could\u00a0be mirrors. You couldn\u2019t see the camera during filming. That\u2019s one of the reasons why the entire crew, not just the cast, wears scrubs while we\u2019re working because if you happen to be seen on camera, you really need to look like you fit in.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe owl is a symbol of passing from life to death, and it\u2019s a symbol of wisdom.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the things about traditional set design in film is that there\u2019s a lot of physical supportive equipment off-camera that bounces light back up into people\u2019s faces and brings some light in. We made the choice to have everything lit by the troffers and the cans in the ceiling, which isn\u2019t necessarily a very full way of lighting people. So we embedded 689 lights in the set, all the way throughout, that would function like traditional grip equipment, which would bounce light back up. The selection of the coloring of the flooring was really critical. The countertop surfaces are all camera-tested to be able to reflect light back up to the face. So, there are all of the functions of traditional grip and lighting equipment, but they\u2019re designed into the actual furnishing elements, like the pods and the workstations.<\/p>\n

And then the architectural elements\u2014\u201cthe architectural kisses\u201d I call them\u2014that are nods to a slightly more European look of the historical architecture in Pittsburgh. Not like Chicago or New York. It\u2019s really different. The exterior that we use now is shot in Pittsburgh. I\u2019ve incorporated columns inside of the hospital to give you the feeling that you\u2019re in the basement and\u00a0 that the hospital is a hundred years old\u2014 that the main emergency department had been remodeled, and underneath that remodel was the original architecture of the physical space that wasn\u2019t an emergency department before. If you look closely, there are these carved capitals on top of the columns. In one of the carvings, there\u2019s this owl. And the owl is a symbol of passing from life to death, and it\u2019s a symbol of wisdom.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve described the set as having a boundless quality. How did you achieve this?<\/p>\n

There are all these subtle techniques I\u2019ve used, which you can see by walking through the set. The curves in the floor design and the curves in the ceiling design lead your eye to make it seem as if you could continue on and around the corner even though it would really just take you around the corner and then you could come back again. So these curves have this effect of making the set feel endless, because it is continuous motion. To reflect the emotional experience of being there\u2014that time never stops, that there\u2019s never an end to anything, like you\u2019ve got to just keep on going, keep on going.<\/p>\n

Where do you find inspiration for your work?<\/p>\n

What I love about my job is that there\u2019s not a minute that\u2019s not a design inspiration for me. I mean, genuinely not a minute. I can go into the diviest gas station bathroom and be soaking up all of what I see, because when you really look at the world\u2014whether you\u2019re looking at the crappiest little edge of some convenience store, or you\u2019re looking at the beautiful, Norwegian landscape, or you\u2019re out in the desert, or you\u2019re in an architectural masterpiece, or you\u2019re in a crappy suburban apartment\u2014all of these things are inspirations to me because all of it is part of the library of my mind.<\/p>\n

What I\u2019ve learned the most about my life is that even the ugly is beautiful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Each episode of HBO Max\u2019s The Pitt represents one hour of a 15-hour shift at the Pittsburg Emergency…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":458762,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[143,145,144],"class_list":["post-458761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=458761"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458761\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/458762"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=458761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=458761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=458761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}