When was allegheny county jail built

Time savings for the 1, cells was considerable. Reusable, reinforced room tunnel forms, rather than conventional load-bearing masonry walls, provided not only time and cost savings, but also added security due to masonry joints and grout voids elimination.

Day rooms were built using precast construction. The building exterior is of brick and glass curtain wall. At the same time, centralization of educational, religious, vocational, medical, and other services minimizes escorted inmate movement and increases security. Learn more about our Justice Solutions and other jail construction projects.

Allegheny County Jail Main Entrance. Tasso Katselas is an architect of universal ambitions who happened to build mainly in one place: Pittsburgh. Many of his great works await the respect they deserve.

The jail won a citation for design excellence in March from a joint committee of the American Institute of Architects and the American Correctional Association. Katselas was born to Greek immigrant parents in Pittsburgh in , and studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology now Carnegie Mellon University. She died before the project could be started. His early design work reshaped numerous neighborhoods in the area, particularly low-income housing, most of which has since been demolished like Penn Plaza in East Liberty.

For efficiency, daylighting, and observation, Richardson originally designed the jail cells into a cross plan of three double-loaded corridors that connected at an octagonal hub with a control desk. He wrapped the entire site with a high granite wall and then placed the three prison wings within this space, with the fourth arm of the cross planned to house all of the administrative space located directly across the street from the courthouse.

The exterior space that remained was used for exercise ground for the inmates. Instead, he chose to subtly change the height of the coursing in each story in an attempt to impart a sense of false perspective to the elevations. Gone too were the continuous sillcourses that in the past had articulated his stone masses into horizontal layers.

This includes Richardson trademarked Syrian-arched doorway with colossal voussoirs.