Geometrically German-American

Partnerships are not always equal. The Pittsburgh architectural firm of Kiehnel & Elliott had two partners, but Richard Kiehnel dominated. He and John B. Elliott worked together for 20 years, but it was Kiehnel who had the university degree; who was active in the Pittsburgh Architectural Club, serving several times as chairman of its exhibition committee; who was the principal designer as well as the ''social'' member of the firm; and whose death merited an obituary in The New York Times. I have no doubt that Elliott's contribution to his firm was substantial, but his role appears to have been supportive and his passing unmarked.

It was the senior partner who had been born and educated in Germany, and it was in Pittsburgh's Germanic communities that the firm found its clients - not exclusively, but largely; clients named Bauer and Schaffer, Teufel and Schmitt; German Reformed and Lutheran churches; and organizations such as the German Club and the Central Turnverein.

The German Club

In 1905, members of the Pittsburgh chapter of the German-American Technical Society, an organization composed primarily of graduates from engineering programs at German universities, organized the German Club. ''Its membership,'' we read in a newspaper account of the founding, ''included many of the most distinguished engineers in the country ... (who) ... wanted a society which should be devoted less to shop talk and afforded better opportunities of a social intercourse.'' A large house at 222 Craft Ave. in Oakland was purchased, and an adjacent social hall/auditorium was built.

About 1910, sections of the clubhouse were renovated; one of the members, Kiehnel, got the job. (A member of the board of directors, George H. Stengel, hired Kiehnel & Elliott to design his house in 1913).

Currently, our knowledge of the renovation is limited to a single photograph, ''Screen in German Club, Pittsburgh,'' displayed at the 1911 Pittsburgh Architectural Club exhibit. The photograph shows a hallway leading to a set of double doors. To the left, a wooden screen forms a wall open at the top. Art glass panels fill the upper sections. The entryway is framed by dramatic square columns, girded with geometric bands and carved foliage; a wide square cap with a globe in the center terminates each column.

The designs of the glass panels in the screen and in the nearby double doors and transom window are patterns of triangles and squares extending from a central diamond - abstract forms, a symmetrical and formal pattern, yet a sense of movement within the pattern.

In 1918, the club changed its name to the Lincoln Club. The clubhouse was eventually sold, and the auditorium became the Hamlet Theatre. Today, together with the former Tree of Life synagogue next door, the buildings are home to The Playhouse of Point Park College. Nothing remains of the Kiehnel & Elliott renovation.

The Central Turnverein

There was so much new construction in and near the Oakland Civic Center in 1911 - Soldiers' and Sailors' Memorial Hall, the Pittsburgh Athletic Association, The First Baptist Church, many new houses in Schenley Farms - that readers of The Oaklander might have overlooked a brief article on June 29, 1911, noting that the Central Turnverein had purchased property at O'Hara and Thackeray streets and planned to erect a new clubhouse.

A 'turner' in German is a gymnast (the English word has some of that meaning) and a 'turnverein' is a gymnastics club. A program of physical education based on group gymnastics - an ancestor, if you will, of calisthenics and aerobic exercise - developed in Germany and Switzerland in the 19th century, and immigrants from those countries brought it to America. Physical education was the centerpiece of an organization that included a choral society and various social activities.

Construction of the gymnastics clubhouse began in November 1911. The building, designed by Kiehnel & Elliott, was to be two stories, constructed of brick, terra cotta and stone, and cost $75,000. It was completed 11 months later at a cost of $100,000.

The Central Turnverein was dedicated Sunday, October 20, 1912. The Chronicle Telegraph reported, ''The new building, which is of the modern progressive school of architecture, is one of the best equipped halls in the state.''

The Oaklander took readers through the interior: The clubhouse is a beautiful structure. On the first floor are a superbly equipped gymnasium, grill room, dining room, library and dancing hall. Pool, billiard and card rooms, a ladies' parlor and retiring room are on the second floor. In the basement are bowling alleys, shower-baths, lockers and a banquet room and kitchen.

From the outside, the clubhouse is a compact buff-brick building covered by a low-hipped roof with wide overhanging eaves. The building at first appears to be a rectangle, but is in fact L-shaped. On three sides of the long arm of the L, large two-story arched windows (six overlook O'Hara Street) evoke the firm's 1909 Marshalsea medical center and 1910 Pitcairn bank and provide maximum light to what was probably the gymnasium.

The first floor, set on a raised basement on the sloping corner site, is the taller of the two stories, its spare horizontal brick work given contrasting texture by five bands of ''soldiers'' - vertical bricks laid at approximately 3-foot intervals - that wrap around the facade.

The entrances - two on Thackeray and one on O'Hara - are imposing. They are as grand as the entrance of the Marshalsea medical center, but the arch and the curve have been rigorously replaced by the straight line and the cubic form. A chisel-shaped terra cotta pattern, a ''quotation'' of a pattern that Viennese-trained architect Josef Plecnik created for his Zacherl building in Vienna (1903-05), runs along the edge of the lintel across the top of the tall door frame. The lintel is supported with rectilinear brackets, another version of the layered geometric patterned brackets that first appeared on the Pitcairn bank, adapted from a design by Chicago architect Irving Pond. Wisps of the luxuriant foliage that decorated the 1909 medical center adhere to a centerpiece of interlocking blocks; below, laurel leaves border a long, narrow geometric pendant. Double doors and a transom window filled with art glass faced Thackeray Street, while the O'Hara doorway appears solid (now as then) beneath a tall plate glass transom.

The upper story is covered with an array of two-dimensional geometric patterning unique in Pittsburgh and rare indeed in the United States at this time. The basic pattern at its simplest consists of two sizes of two-dimensional blocks that alternate - one large block, two small blocks on a diagonal, etc. One variation consists of the pattern arranged in parallel rows. Another variation turns the pattern on its side and expands it. A different design appears over the Thackeray Street doorways, marking them as the main entrances. This pattern is a narrow flat column marked at the base by incised lines and topped with an abstract ''bouquet'' that trails a pendant of ribbons.

A dramatic projecting band of molding encircles the building and separates the two floors. This richly conceived belt of diamonds, triangles and three-sided cubes frames the bottom edge of the second story. Another bold geometric band originally decorated the face of the eaves above, but that (like an eyebrow window on the roof) is gone.

The art glass transom windows remain (the doors are gone). Like the glass in the German Club, these designs are composed of geometric forms that spread outward in a symmetrical pattern. The pattern may depict, abstractly, a pair of candelabra.

Sources and Significance

In 1898, Austrian architects began to cover building facades with bold geometric patterns, sometimes flat and sometimes two-dimensional. Indeed, historian Iain Whyte has written that geometric facade decoration, primarily, ''dots, circles, and checkerboard patterns,'' became ''the dominant motif'' in Austrian architecture after 1901.

The work of these architects, many of whom went to Vienna from eastern and central Europe to study with Otto Wagner, became known in the United States most readily via architectural journals such as Der Architekt (Vienna, 1895-1910) and The Architecture of the 20th Century (Berlin, 1901-1914; English text 1901 to 1909). The Zacherl building in Vienna, for example, was discussed and illustrated in both journals in 1906. Leading European and American architectural journals and books were available at the Carnegie Library, thanks to the Bernd collection established in 1895.

In 1904, the first major American exhibition of Austrian and German architecture was held at the St. Louis World's Fair. The exhibits were widely publicized, and many American architects visited the fair.

In Pittsburgh, Frederick G. Scheibler Jr. adapted Austro-Germanic design as early as 1905 in his Old Heidelberg apartment building and a year later in the Linwood Apartments, where two-dimensional checkerboard patterns are a prominent decorative element. (There is no evidence that Scheibler or Kiehnel visited the St. Louis fair).

Architectural exhibitions were held in Pittsburgh biannually from 1898 to 1910 and annually thereafter until 1916. Richard Kiehnel headed the committee for the 1907 exhibition. It was international in scope and, as The Western Architect reports, ''one of the most important ever held in the United States.'' Among the Chicago architects who displayed their designs were several who had visited the St. Louis Fair: Walter Burley Griffin, George Maher and Irving Pond, who had participated in earlier Pittsburgh shows, and Frank Lloyd Wright, who exhibited for the first time in 1907. Wright used exterior geometric designs very sparingly prior to 1914. His boldest designs - two-dimensional geometric column ornament on Unity Temple (1905-08) - appear to have been prompted by Austro-Germanic design in St. Louis; both buildings were exhibited in Pittsburgh. Bruno Moehring, who designed the German exhibition space in St. Louis, and one of the exhibitors, Fritz Schumacher, were also represented in Pittsburgh in 1907.

Geometry was in the air when the Central Turnverein was designed, visible most emphatically in Austro-Germanic design, but also in the work of American architects who were intrigued and stimulated by the artistic expression of their European counterparts.

To what extent is the Turnverein an American design• Some have seen in its low horizontal massing a kinship with contemporary midwestern design; certainly, the simple yet visually sophisticated treatment of the building's first-story brick work places it within a family of buildings that can be traced back to H.H. Richardson.

Few American buildings before 1911 exhibit such a forceful display of exterior geometric ornament. The Turnverein is a German-American architectural masterpiece - most appropriate given its client, its purpose and its architect. It is one of Pittsburgh's three most important early 20th-century ''progressive'' architectural designs, together with Frederick Scheibler's Highland Towers (1913) and Kiehnel & Elliott's Greenfield School (1916).

Like the German Club, the Central Turnverein became an organizational casualty of World War I. In 1920 - eight years after it opened - the University of Pittsburgh purchased the facility and transformed it into a dental clinic. Today, the building serves as the university's Gardner Steel Conference Center. Only a few interior elements - the two transom windows, metal newel posts and dramatic molding between the windows in what is now the computer center (possibly the original ''dancing hall'') - remain.

Our final article on Kiehnel & Elliott will visit a house designed in 1914.

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