{"id":292997,"date":"2026-09-24T14:04:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-24T14:04:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/292997\/"},"modified":"2026-09-24T14:04:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-24T14:04:09","slug":"this-pitt-team-keeps-the-cathedral-of-learning-in-tip-top-shape","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/292997\/","title":{"rendered":"This Pitt team keeps the Cathedral of Learning in tip-top shape"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"An
\nRendering by Zachary Beresh<\/p>\n

It was a grandiose vision, and Chancellor John Bowman wasn\u2019t shy about selling it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Cathedral of Learning, he wrote in a 1925 address to Pitt\u2019s Board of Trustees, was \u201cto be like a great symphony.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat building, with its parallel lines reaching up and up, and with its harmonies of mass,\u201d Bowman added, \u201chas such fire of emotion in it that we must feel it take hold of us.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s vision<\/a>, but it\u2019s also a physical thing: a 42-story giant, bones of steel and skin of limestone, searing steam running through its veins.<\/p>\n

And every day, decisions are made that must consider both the building\u2019s symbolic impact and the practical necessities of serving a campus that hosts more than 30,000 students, not to mention faculty, staff and visitors.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe take pride in preserving the Cathedral, but we also need to meet modern teaching and operational needs,\u201d says Pitt Vice Chancellor for Facilities Management Laura Zullo (ENGR \u201988, \u201993G). \u201cWe have the responsibility to preserve its identity and its integrity, and that can be challenging.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nuts and bolts, pipes and tanks<\/p>\n

Zullo\u2019s office has the charge of maintaining the Cathedral\u2019s infrastructure, the systems that connect everything from the basement caf\u00e9 to the 36th-floor David C. Frederick Honors College.<\/p>\n

\"The
\nAs Pitt looks back on the September 1926 groundbreaking of the Cathedral of Learning, check out additional stories, photos, a timeline and more<\/a> from the now century-old history of the University’s campus in the sky.<\/p>\n

Over the years, the building\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

[Learn about some who built the Cathedral \u2014 and their Pitt-connected descendants.<\/a>]<\/p>\n

When you\u2019re keeping a century-old academic skyscraper in peak condition, even a mundane task becomes larger than life.\u00a0<\/p>\n

At its size and age, \u201cthe building obviously requires significant maintenance and investment,\u201d Zullo says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s really not the run-of-the-mill assignment. Our people are truly proud to work here.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rendering by Zachary Beresh It was a grandiose vision, and Chancellor John Bowman wasn\u2019t shy about selling it.\u00a0…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":292998,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[73,75,74],"class_list":["post-292997","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pittsburgh","tag-pittsburgh","tag-pittsburgh-headlines","tag-pittsburgh-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292997","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=292997"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292997\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/292998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=292997"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=292997"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=292997"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}