Cathedral of Learning - Posted by the Mrs.

Bobby and I (and Duncan of course) have been trying to really take advantage of our time here and see/do something new at least every other week. This was during the 4th of July weekend that we ventured to the Cathedral of Learning.

The Cathedral of Learning is the 4th tallest education building in the world (tallest in the western hemisphere). The cool thing about this building is that there are 27 "themed" rooms which represent the cultures that have influenced Pittsburgh's growth. Each of these rooms cost between $300,000 -500,000 USD and took 3 - 10 years to complete. The committees who were made up of the different nationalities were in charge of doing the designing, fundraising, labor, and materials (although foreign governments aided some of the efforts).

It's amazing to see these rooms and think that people actually have class in them. I think I would have a hard time sitting a whole class period in most of the chairs. I would know because I tried most of them out :)

This is the outside of the building. Pretty cool structure...reminds me of...a Cathedral!

Bob took this picture of Duncan and I in the Hungarian room.

Bob snuck this picture of Duncan and I in the Hungarian room.

This is the view from the top of the Cathedral...well as high as we were allowed to go. I think there were about ten more floors above us. Our apartment is somewhere out there over to the left.

I believe this is the Polish room.

Irish room

Lithuanian room

This picture reminded me of the picture in Tangled where Rapunzal sees the mosiac of the King, Queen, and their baby daughter. Anyone, anyone?

Chinese room.

This is the view of the ceiling, two lights were working two lights were not.

This is the main hall of the building. There are lots of study tables and chairs to hang out in. Not my idea of the best studying atmosphere...pretty echo-y but nonetheless cool.

The Austrian room, seen here, was probably one of my favorites. It was so elegant and fancy. Maybe it was just the chandeliers, I do have a thing for those.

This was the Israeli-an room and those inscriptions on the door are the Ten Commandments in Hebrew.

This was also another interesting room, it is the Indian room. It was cool but at the same time it felt like a room that a cult would meet in. I don't really know what kind of rooms cults meet in but if I could guess which kind, this would be it. It's not dark feeling but the way the chairs were situated, etc was kind of weird. The End, I won't keep going.

This is the African room, pretty cool looking but again, those chairs are severely uncomfortable.

There were lots of other rooms: French, Welsh, Armenian, Norweigian (shout out to Anna), Scottish, Russian, Romanian, etc. but this post would be too long if I featured everything we saw. It was super neat to see the rooms and learn that every detail and part of the room was used intentionally and had meaning.

We pretty much traveled the world in an hour and a half, sort of.