Rendering by Zachary Beresh
It was a grandiose vision, and Chancellor John Bowman wasn’t shy about selling it.
The Cathedral of Learning, he wrote in a 1925 address to Pitt’s Board of Trustees, was “to be like a great symphony.” Everything from its height to its buttresses and ornaments would instill in the viewer a sense of awe and of grasping at the sublime, a monument to his ideals of education and the industriousness of Pittsburgh.
“That building, with its parallel lines reaching up and up, and with its harmonies of mass,” Bowman added, “has such fire of emotion in it that we must feel it take hold of us.”
Such feelings of reverence have taken hold of many of us when looking at the building or walking through its halls. Yes, the Cathedral is an icon and an embodiment of Bowman’s vision, but it’s also a physical thing: a 42-story giant, bones of steel and skin of limestone, searing steam running through its veins.
And every day, decisions are made that must consider both the building’s symbolic impact and the practical necessities of serving a campus that hosts more than 30,000 students, not to mention faculty, staff and visitors.
“We take pride in preserving the Cathedral, but we also need to meet modern teaching and operational needs,” says Pitt Vice Chancellor for Facilities Management Laura Zullo (ENGR ’88, ’93G). “We have the responsibility to preserve its identity and its integrity, and that can be challenging.”
Nuts and bolts, pipes and tanks
Zullo’s office has the charge of maintaining the Cathedral’s infrastructure, the systems that connect everything from the basement café to the 36th-floor David C. Frederick Honors College.
As Pitt looks back on the September 1926 groundbreaking of the Cathedral of Learning, check out additional stories, photos, a timeline and more from the now century-old history of the University’s campus in the sky.
Over the years, the building’s circulatory systems have evolved. Workers have updated the plumbing and electricity; chilled water now cools off the tower in the summer; and the steam that heats the building in the colder months is now supplied by both the long-running Bellefield Boiler Plant and the newer, more efficient plant on Carrillo Street.
Supplying water to the Cathedral used to mean pumping water up into huge tanks and letting gravity do the rest of the work. That system, too, was updated in the past few years. (Storing thousands of gallons of water on the 38th floor was a catastrophic leak waiting to happen.) And after the elevator system was modernized, the machines that made up the old lift system were so bulky that they needed to be cut into pieces to squeeze them out of the building.
[Learn about some who built the Cathedral — and their Pitt-connected descendants.]
When you’re keeping a century-old academic skyscraper in peak condition, even a mundane task becomes larger than life.
At its size and age, “the building obviously requires significant maintenance and investment,” Zullo says.
“It’s really not the run-of-the-mill assignment. Our people are truly proud to work here.”