Look up at one of the most extraordinary academic buildings in the world. The Cathedral of Learning rises 535 feet, 42 stories, in the Gothic Revival style in the middle of the University of Pittsburgh campus. It is the tallest educational building in the western hemisphere.
Designed by Charles Klauder and built between 1926 and 1937, it was financed in part by a community fundraising campaign in which Pittsburgh schoolchildren donated dimes to purchase bricks. More than 97,000 children participated; their donations funded 2,500 bricks, each bearing a paper nameplate of its contributor. The building's most distinctive feature is the Nationality Rooms: twenty-nine rooms on the ground and third floors designed and furnished by different national and ethnic groups to represent the cultures that built Pittsburgh.
Polish, Slovak, Ukrainian, Greek, Italian, German, Russian, Israeli, African, Chinese, and more — each room is a working classroom and a monument to the immigrant identity of the city. The rooms were conceived during the Depression as an affirmation of Pittsburgh's diversity at a time when nativism was ascendant in America. Look up at the tower from here.
It is meant to be overwhelming. It succeeds completely.