BNY Mellon Center Pittsburgh Building

The BNY Mellon Center Pittsburgh Building is a Postmodernist skyscraper designed by Welton Becket and Associates, and built between 1980 and 1984, for a reported $100 million dollars, in Pittsburgh, PA.

BNY Mellon Center Pittsburgh Building is not the only name you might know this building by though. It is common for companies to want to attach their names to iconic buildings when they move in, or for the general public to come up with nicknames, and this one is no exception. The building has changed names several times over the years, and is also known as:

• Dravo Tower.
• One Mellon Center between 1984 and 2008 .
• One Mellon Bank Center from 2008 until this day.

Its precise street address is 500 Grant St, Pittsburgh, PA. You can also find it on the map here.

In 2012 the BNY Mellon Center Pittsburgh Building was awarded with the MBA Building Excellence Award.

The building underwent a major restoration between 2010 and 2013. The architect commissioned to undertake this restoration was H.F. Lenz.

Welton Becket and Associates was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

That being said, architecture is a complex discipline involving many professionals from different fields, without whom this building would have not been possible. We will surely be leaving out a lot of names here, but here is a list of the people we do know also played their part in making the BNY Mellon Center Pittsburgh Building a reality:

• Thornton Tomasetti in charge of Structural Engineering
• Turner Construction Company as the Main Contractor
• U.S. Steel as the Main Developer

The BNY Mellon Center Pittsburgh Building can be categorized as a Postmodernist building.

The BNY Mellon Center Pittsburgh Building was completed in 1984. At that time Postmodernism was the prevailing style. Fresh, bold and daring, architects were exploring the freedom of designing without having to follow the strict, sometimes arbitrary rules of a specific architectural movement (which ironically became a movement itself). The BNY Mellon Center Pittsburgh Building was therefore every much in line with what the architecture community, and the people liked and wanted at the time.

The BNY Mellon Center Pittsburgh Building uses a frame structure made of steel columns and concrete slabs.

A frame structure uses a combination of beams and columns to sustain the building's weight. The walls in this case are non-load bearing, which allows for more flexibility when distributing the interior spaces.

The facade of the building however, is load bearing. This doesn't imply that it is a traditional load-bearing wall. Rather, it means that the structure's exterior pillars have been pushed to the very edges, becoming integrated with the facade, and therefore, technically, a part of it.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features precast concrete panels and reflective-glass windows, with 2 technical floors along the way. This is not the original facade, which was replaced in 2010.

The composition of the facade is organized in several bays, set by the structural pillars that are present on the facade, and which are also clad in the same material.