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!i5 Introduction THE WORK AND SIGNIFICANCE of architect Frederick G. Scheibler, Jr., were first noted in print in an article by reporter Penelope Redd published in the Pittsburgh Sunday Sun-Telegraph in 1934· She wrote: "The younger generation of American museum officials have spent much time and effort in tracing back the beginnings of contemporary art in the United States. A major share of the research has centered upon architecture. The name of Frank Lloyd Wright is pre-eminent since his work is regarded as being directly responsible for the 'International Style of Architecture.' Few persons, other than architects, know that Pittsburgh also has a forerunner in contemporary architecture in the person of Frederick Scheibler." These comments were made in reference to Modem Architecture: International Exhibition, the famous Museum of Modern Art exhibit of two years before.1 Having placed Scheibler among pretty lofty company, Redd ended her short discussion by saying, "In Frederick Scheibler , one finds an architect who tempered his intuitive intelligence for absolute functionalism with a concept of romantic beauty in detail. In any study of the sources of contemporary American architecture, Frederick Scheibler merits a monograph."2 In about 1948, John Knox Shear and Robert W. Schmertz, architecture professors at Carnegie Institute of Technology, visited and interviewed Scheibler and purposefully publicized his work. In an article published in Charette, the magazine of the Pittsburgh Architectural Club, they gave special praise to Scheibler's so-called group cottages, and singled out his Vilsack Row noting: "That the Vilsack Row was constructed in 191 2 is difficult to believe. The alternation of blank wall and great glass areas, the simple slab-form roofs, the slight canopy supports, and the clean lines of the well-proportioned forms are far in advance of their time.... When compared with its neighbors it is impossible to escape the conclusion that this man was alone here in his time." They remarked upon the architects "whose work in a time of general dissimulation, disguise, complexity and artificiality , stood out boldly contrasted in its frankness, simplicity and inventiveness," and asserted that Scheibler "must be nominated to the peerage of ereative pioneers."1 The Charette article caught the attention of two important figures on the architectural scene: Peter Blake, then curator of the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art, and Kenneth Stowell, editor of Architectural Record. Blake expressed an interest in collecting photographs of Scheibler's works for exhibition in New York, perhaps at MOMA itself, though this idea was apparently not pursued to fruition. Stowell requested permission to reprint the Charette article in Architect3 4 Introduction ural Record, where it appeared in I949 in an edited and annotated version under the title "Pittsburgh Rediscovers an Architect Pioneer."4 The editorial voice, perhaps Stowell's, remarked that Scheibler's Highland Towers apartment building was "quite an astonishing creation for the year I9 I3 ... an orderly and strongly plastic structure," and that "the whole is more convincing today than many an 'advanced ' building of the intervening years." Regarding Viisack Row, he agreed with Shear and Schmertz that the exterior elements were "far in advance of their time" and added that they "escape their time altogether as good architecture regardless of date. Such treatment would come as a fresh innovation again today ."i After Scheibler's death in I958, a photographic exhibition of Scheibler's work was held at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. James D. Van Trump curated the exhibition and published his own article on Scheibler in Charette. Van Trump stated that Scheibler "was undoubtedly the most important 'original' architect that Pittsburgh has produced, as well as a distinguished and unique pioneer of the modern architectural movement in Pennsylvania," and went on to assert that Scheibler's "best work can compare favorably with any thing of the same sort being produced in America at the time" and "should assure him a minor and not unmemorable place in the whole chronicle of American architecture."6 Frederick G. Scheibler, Jr. (I872-I958), never attained the heights of his profession. The big names in Pittsburgh architecture in the early twentieth century were Frederick J. Osterling, Alden and Harlow, Henry Hornbostel, and Benno Janssen. It was these architects that rode the architectural wave of regional industrialization and received the major commissions from Pittsburgh's leading institutions and nouveau riche industrialists. It was these architects who largely established the masculine and conservative norms of Pittsburgh architecture. It was these architects that received the few out-of...

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