Richard King Mellon Hall
- Architect
- Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
- Year
- 1968
- Style
- International Style
- City
- Pittsburgh, PA
- Collection
- modern pittsburgh
Richard King Mellon Hall of Science is a 1968 academic building on the Duquesne University campus, perched at the edge of a bluff over the Monongahela River. It's the only building in the Pittsburgh region by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, one of the most significant architects of twentieth-century modernism. The four-story building holds two large ground-floor lecture halls beneath three floors of laboratories, now serving Duquesne's Biological Sciences, Chemistry & Biochemistry, and Pharmacy departments.
the building
The wraparound colonnade. The ground floor is set back behind the building's perimeter columns on all four sides, forming an open colonnade at street level. The center bays of the north and south faces are floor-to-ceiling glass, while the end bays are solid buff-colored brick.
12 bays, split entry. Mies typically designed with an odd number of bays and a single focused entrance at the center. Mellon Hall breaks that pattern: it runs 12 structural bays along its long side and uses split entrances instead of one centered doorway.
Black steel and glass upper floors. Above the ground-floor colonnade, the top three levels are wrapped in a black steel and tinted grey glass facade, with a double-loaded internal loop corridor running past the laboratories on each floor.
the style
Mellon Hall's black steel and tinted grey glass upper floors, wrapped around a street-level colonnade of glass and buff brick, extend Mies van der Rohe's modernist vocabulary in his only building in the Pittsburgh region.
More on International Stylethe architect
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was one of the most significant architects of twentieth-century modernism; Richard King Mellon Hall, completed in 1968, is his only building in the Pittsburgh region.
More on Ludwig Mies van der Rohemore by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
nearby
- Chatham Center
- Old Allegheny County Jail
- Allegheny County Courthouse
- Pittsburgh City-County Building
- Grant Building
- BNY Mellon Center