Symbol

For steel and stogies, for smoke-belching glass factories, for a fuliginous smoke pall, for soot and cinders and fabulous fortunes that the popular mind has pictured piled in spilling, golden mounds among dark mountains --for these things has Pittsburgh been famous since men forgot how she was once a frontier fort in the Red Indians' forest.

Last week, while steel stocks were rising, the giant became Spirit and cried out with a strong voice.

Vocalization. John Gabbert Bowman, Chancellor of Pittsburgh University, was the Spirit's mouthpiece. At a dinner of the Pitt trustees and a committee of citizens, he stood and told how a vast symbol would arise in an open place of the city called Frick Acres, a symbol of snowy limestone thrusting skyward for an eighth of a mile. He told how this shaft would be a habitation for the city's students, saying: "The building is to be a cathedral of learning, a great central symbol which makes the heart leap up and understand Pittsburgh. . . . The building and its contents will keep vivid the lives of those who have done good work for Pittsburgh; who, to some memorable degree, have produced music, for example, or built up industry, or extended our knowledge of truth, or interpreted the use and beauty of life or served in matters of government. . . . We must rise to the-highest attainable record. Nothing else is good enough. . . ."

Specifications. The architect's draft of this world's first educational skyscraper shows a great soaring edifice, Gothic in form but not in detail, rising tower above flanking tower, up and up along slender perpendicular lines to a blunt, shorn-off pinnacle 680 ft. above the rectangular base. The base is to be 360 by 260 ft., with four main arches, each 39 ft. high, opening into the heart of the pile. Batteries of high-speed elevators will be installed to race aloft through the tower to class rooms, laboratories, shops, libraries distributed on the building's 52 floors.*

Utility. Aside from its symbolism, high construction appealed to the Pittsburghers for the flexibility it affords in the use and arrangement of space. With the exception of the medical and dental schools, the entire University will be quartered in the pile, uncrowded even when its students number 12,000. Moreover, massing all schools and departments together in one building was felt to make for unity in the educational idea imparted to the students. A final, obvious consideration was economy of terrain.

Money. Architect Charles Z. Klauder of Philadelphia and Engineers Stone & Webster of Boston estimated that ten million dollars will be required to send up the Cathedral of Learning. That the millions would be promptly forthcoming and that the work would begin next year on schedule seemed likely when one scanned the list of Pitt's trustees and the personnel of the citizens' committee. Names : Andrew W. Mellon, U. S. Secretary of the Treasury ; Homer D. Williams (steel) ; John H. Nicholson (tubing) ; Robert B. Mellon (banks) ; Edward V. Babcock (lumber) ; George H. Clapp (aluminum) ; Howard Heinz (pickles) ; Marcus Aaron (china) ; Charles D. Armstrong (corks) ; Isaac W. Frank (foundries) ; Arthur L. Humphrey (air brakes) ; A. J. Kelly Jr. (realty) ; Hamilton Stewart (blast furnaces) ; T. H. B. McKnight (railroads).

Significance. At Babel, once a tower rose, heavenbound. But its build ers disputed, talked strange tongues, went unto the ends of the earth, con founded for blasphemy. Having accumulated humility and wisdom, and translated their tongues each into the others', the races are now come to gether again in new towers. They aspire not to Heaven, but to Knowledge.

* The Woolworth Building has 54 stories.