Architecture with a dash of paprika: Titus de Bobula in Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh has among its architects one who is devoted to the propagation of the style of art nouveau, of the Secessionist style, as it is known in Vienna. Titus de Bobula has outgrown the traditions and styles of former periods and is industriously endeavoring to develop a new style which he thinks is more American and reasonable than the copying of historic styles.

At the beginning of the 20th century, architecture students throughout Central and Eastern Europe avidly sought admission to the design classes and studio of Otto Wagner (1841-1918) at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. The “Wagner School” formed the core of the “Secessionist” movement – the term commemorates the 1897 withdrawal of a group of prominent Viennese designers led by Wagner and painter Gustav Klimt from the official exhibition society. Secessionist buildings and designs were published in European and American journals and displayed in the Austrian and German pavilions at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis.

Three architects in Pittsburgh found their primary inspiration in contemporary Austro-Germanic Secessionist architecture: Frederick G. Scheibler Jr. (1872-1958), a second-generation Pittsburgh-born and trained architect of German ancestry; Richard Kiehnel (1870-1944), born and trained in Breslau, Germany; and Titus de Bobula (1878-1961), born and trained in Budapest, Hungary.

Martin Aurand discussed both Kiehnel and de Bobula in 1994 in "The Progressive Architecture of Frederick G. Scheibler, Jr.," noting that de Bobula “was but a fleeting figure on the Pittsburgh architectural scene.” Unlike Scheibler, who spent his life in Pittsburgh, or Kiehnel, whose firm prospered in the city for 20 years, de Bobula's Pittsburgh buildings were created during a “fleeting” four-year period. Martin has generously shared his research on this intriguing and elusive architect, making this article possible.

From Budapest to Pittsburgh

Titus was the second son of János Bobula Sr. (1844-1903), a prominent Budapest architect, businessman, writer, editor, and politician. Both Titus and his brother, János Jr. (1871-1922), who became a successful architect and editor, studied architecture at their father's alma mater, Budapest Technological University. In contrast to his father's and brother's settled existence, Titus adopted a peripatetic life (and the honorific “de”).

In 1897 de Bobula was working in New York City. Three years later, however, his design for a “Commercial, Office, and Apartment Building” was published in the prestigious Viennese journal, Der Architekt, and his place of residence identified as Stuttgart, Germany.

This 1900 design embellishes the symmetrical massing and Classical details of what Otto Wagner would have called a “free Renaissance” building with a thicket of Art Nouveau curvilinear, intertwining vines. The rectilinear piers on the second, fourth and fifth floors that then rise dramatically into the attic story, the asymmetrical attic window, the filigreed domes atop the extended piers, and the circle-and-ribbon ornament (used as a border on the right of the drawing) are typical Secessionist geometric forms and abstractions of plantlike Art Nouveau patterns. An incomplete motto in English on the facade, “There came to the land of Japan to the seaport of …,” adds an exotic note.

A year later, de Bobula was in Marietta, Ohio, remaining there through 1902. Designs for a Roman Catholic church and a department store-office building in Marietta were later exhibited in Pittsburgh.

Pittsburgh 1903-1910

Titus de Bobula was 25 when he arrived in Pittsburgh in 1903. He is listed in Pittsburgh city directories through 1910. This eight-year period, brief as it is, is misleading, since de Bobula's last documented building in the Pittsburgh area was erected in 1906, when he was 28. De Bobula's Pittsburgh buildings are the work of a young architect.

Although he lived primarily in Oakland and rented a downtown office, the buildings de Bobula designed for his Central and Eastern European clients were erected in Allegheny City, Braddock, Carnegie, Greenfield, Hazelwood and Homestead.

No vignettes of de Bobula in Pittsburgh have surfaced. Stanley L. Roush (1885-1946), later Allegheny County Architect who designed the County Office Building and some wonderful bridges, worked in de Bobula's office from July 1903 to March 1905, but left no recollections. A photograph, published in 1905 when de Bobula was 27, shows a very young face beneath a very large bowler hat.

1903

On Dec. 27, 1903, de Bobula's St. John the Baptist Greek Catholic Church and neighboring Rectory at 10th Avenue and Dickson Street in Homestead were dedicated. (Today, the church is St. John's Eastern European Cultural Center in Munhall.) The dramatic twin towers of the church, composed of white brick in a Greek cruciform pattern set into sandstone, rise 125 feet. They are joined by a central layered facade: A rough stone arch supports the Classical columns of a loggia that supports a recessed rough stone arch set with a stained-glass window that yields to a stucco covered wall pierced with small square windows that supports a grand Classical colonnade. A similar colonnade frames the porch of the brick and sandstone rectory (now a private residence) whose cubic forms and Art Nouveau stained-glass windows recall Central European town houses.

Also begun in 1903 was the First Hungarian Reformed Church and Parsonage, 221 Johnston St., in Hazelwood. The Classical elements of the Greek church are replaced by forms that evoke medieval Romanesque and Gothic architecture but in an abstract manner. Nonetheless, both churches have shared characteristics; we recognize the roughly carved stone arches that here surround the entrance and the window above. The use of related but contrasting materials – sandstone cut both rough and smooth, tan and red brick side by side – is striking, as are the molded geometric shapes such as the sculptural buttresses, the stepped gable, and the cubic corner piers of the tower. The wonderfully preserved interior is notable for its opalescent glass windows. The distinctively shaped facade windows – “rampant arches, as if the sheer mass of the tower had exerted a gravitational pull on their crowns,” in Walter Kidney's words – combine Reformed (Calvinist), Hungarian, and American imagery. The parsonage, now the parish house, survives minus its columned porch and original siding.

Around this time de Bobula designed an apartment house at the corner of Gertrude and Elizabeth streets behind the Hungarian Reformed Church parsonage. The three-story brick building with a stone base retains a bit of elegance despite disfiguring alterations.

1904

The Hungarian Reformed Church and the apartment building were finished in 1904 (a second apartment building planned for the site was never built). In May 1904, de Bobula completed plans for a Greek Roman Catholic Church in Duquesne (not built). By the end of the year, de Bobula, now something of a specialist in ecclesiastical architecture, erected a parochial school, convent, and parish house for St. Michael's Roman Catholic congregation in Braddock. The convent is gone, but the parish house and the much-altered school building remain at 1135 Braddock Ave.

1905

De Bobula's professional visibility increased in 1905 when he was asked to address the sixth annual Convention of the Architectural League of America, held in Pittsburgh, April 17-18, 1905. The slogan of the league, founded as an alternative to the more traditional American Institute of Architects (which eventually absorbed it), was “Progress before Precedent.”

De Bobula's paper, “American Style,” was later published in the Chicago-based Inland Architect & Building News. He said in part:

"(The) national styles of Europe all contain the common base of the antique … all have the most important buildings built in a style of which the classical is the base, yet characterized by specialty nationalistic treatments. Only we poor North Americans … must copy, copy, I repeat, our buildings either conscientiously after the antique or after art nouveau, beaux art, modern English, Knickerbocker, etc., etc., styles."

He advised his listeners:

“Go back to our own archeological excavations of Yucatan and Mexico. Take the architecture of the 18th and 19th centuries of Central America, and the New England States, use them as only conditional assistance; use our fauna and flora and textile art of the Indians … for the creation of decorative elements; use the spirit of the Aztec buildings, the receding terraces, for instances, as a healthy and appropriate example of monumentality … Never forgetting the requirements of today (and) using all the materials according to their nature; applying symmetry, proportion and direction, creating a decorative style of our characteristic conditions, being all the time intensely chauvinistic; sooner or later we must become the rightful representatives of an international style which, although American in its lines, will nevertheless contain the fundamental principles of a cosmopolitan art …"

The following month, on May 22, the Pittsburgh Architectural Club opened its Third Exhibition at the Carnegie Art Gallery. De Bobula exhibited designs for 12 buildings, seven in metropolitan Pittsburgh: St. John the Baptist Church, the Greek Catholic Church in Allegheny, St. Michael's parish house and school, the Greek Catholic Church in Duquesne, and an auditorium, “Montefiore Hall” and the Alpha Apartment Hotel in Pittsburgh. The latter four are illustrated in the catalog, but the Duquesne church, Montefiore Hall, and Alpha Apartment Hotel were never built. They are extraordinary designs, combining elements found in executed buildings with bold forms never realized. The Allegheny City church was built but has been demolished; a surviving photograph shows its unique circular tower.

Architect John Comes' review of the exhibition, quoted from earlier, was published locally and in the national magazine House & Garden.

Other 1905 commissions include a house and garage for A.P. Shumaker, apparently never built, and six row houses in Greenfield for developer E.M. O'Neil. They survive, although altered, at 4129-4137 Frank Ave.

The architect's photograph, as noted earlier, appeared in Palmer's Pictorial Pittsburgh and Prominent Pittsburghers, Past and Present.

1906

In 1906 de Bobula was invited to submit a design for the Tree of Life Synagogue on Craft Avenue, but his entry was not chosen. A six-story terra cotta and glazed tile apartment building on Forbes Avenue near Craig Street in Oakland (the Alpha Apartment Hotel?) and St. Mary Our Lady of Sorrows Roman Catholic Church in McKees Rocks were not built.

De Bobula's last recorded building was St. Peter and St. Paul Russian Greek Catholic (now Ukrainian Orthodox Greek Catholic) Church, 220 Mansfield Blvd. in Carnegie. The church appears to float beneath the great onion domes, its stepped roofline, vertical panels and angled geometric buttresses typical de Bobula forms.

No additional buildings have been identified between 1907 and 1910, although de Bobula's name is listed during those years in city directories.

After Pittsburgh

In 1910 de Bobula married Eurania Dinkey Mock of Bethlehem, Pa., a niece of the wife of Charles M. Schwab, founder of Bethlehem Steel. The de Bobulas, who did not have children, settled in New York City.

During World War I, de Bobula designed a home at 2521 Palisade Ave. in the Spuyten Duyvil section of the Bronx. The house was featured in a 1920 issue of American Architect. It is a stucco and stone-trimmed suburban villa, its rectilinearity softened by arched windows and curved terrace walls. The street entrance is a Classical portico decorated with stylized Secessionist floral ornament.

De Bobula's post-Pittsburgh years were marked by controversy. In 1919 he unsuccessfully sued Charles M. Schwab for defamation of character. He returned to Hungary in the early 1920s and became a political activist and propagandist. On Nov. 10, 1923, the front page of the New York Times read: “Titus De Bobula Jailed in Budapest: Husband of Mrs. C. M. Schwab's Niece Arrested for Plot to Overthrow (Hungarian) Government.” In the 1930s he renewed ties to the brilliant and eccentric Serbian-born inventor Nicola Tesla and, in the words of Tesla biographer Marc Seifer, “was hired to design the tower, power plant, and housing for the inventor's ‘impenetrable shield between nations'” – a futuristic electronic weapons system. Seifer refers to de Bobula as “the notorious architect and arms merchant.” The FBI took notice of his activities and kept a dossier. De Bobula moved to Washington, D.C., about 1936 and died there in 1961 at the age of 83. His Washington Post obituary identified him as a retired consulting architect best known for designing churches in Ohio and Pennsylvania. He and his wife are buried in Bethlehem, Pa.

This year is the 100th anniversary of Titus de Bobula's arrival in Pittsburgh, and the buildings of his youth are now centenarians and nonagenarians. Nine buildings (counting the six O'Neil row houses as one) of the 11 he is known to have erected here survive. In addition, we have a visual record of the Allegheny Greek Catholic Church and three not-built designs of extraordinary quality. Additional buildings may yet be discovered.

Secessionist design straightened the curves of Art Nouveau and explored the aesthetic possibilities of geometric form. Replicating past architectural styles was condemned, but earlier styles could be drawn upon to forge a new visual language. In Vienna and Central Europe for example, as Iain Boyd Whyte and Edward Ford have shown, the language of Classicism remained a productive resource for contemporary design. De Bobula envisioned an American style rooted in the older architecture of New England and South America, Native American crafts and indigenous natural forms.

What sets Titus de Bobula apart from Frederick Scheibler and Richard Kiehnel, whose Pittsburgh careers began as his was fading, is his Hungarian exuberance and his use of Classical forms. Despite the brevity of his stay in Pittsburgh, his youthful buildings have not only added piquancy to our environment – they may be his finest achievement as an architect.

Albert M. Tannler is the historical collections director of the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation and a freelance writer for the Tribune-Review.