Henry Hornbostel and CIT Building Bureau
Baker Hall, east elevation
drawing (1914)
Henry Hornbostel, who had attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, was the design architect for Palmer & Hornbostel. A few years earlier Hornbostel had won second place in a design competition for the University of California (when working with Howells and Stokes); and he went on to design other campuses including Emory University. He revised the campus plan for Carnegie Tech in 1906 and 1911; and the three Hornbostel plans, though imperfectly realized, have shaped the campus to the present.
In the 1900s the Beaux Arts system of design and planning (developed at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts...) was being implemented into the design of many of the American campuses...The Beaux-Arts principle is of monumental organization--orderly planning on a grand scale. It was capable of incorporating many buildings or parts within a unified overall pattern. Over the years the Beaux-Arts system had created and refined many such patterns--or partis--which constituted a repertoire of solutions to complex problems of planning...[Hornbostel] handle[d] with ease and elegance the standard Beaux-Arts formulae of his time. The master plan for Carnegie Mellon University is a modification of the [Thomas] Jefferson pattern [at the University of Virginia] with the Beaux-Arts device of creating secondary axes and subsidiary groupings of buildings...Throughout the campus Hornbostel made use of Renaissance pavilions, with their tall round arched windows and low pitched roofs. They [were almost] a cliché among architects of the Beaux-Arts persuasion, useful for everything from hospitals to pumping stations. (Keating 1986)
Henry Hornbostel, the architect of Carnegie Tech, expressed the highest ideals of the school in his master plan and his architecture. Baker Hall...is an outstanding example of his achievement. Although it is constructed of common materials, brick, fireproofing tiles, iron pipe railings and corner plates, these are handled with an extraordinary sense of craftsmanship...Hornbostel did not use industrial imagery to displace artistic tradition, [for] he employed the classical language of pilasters and pediments to organize and embellish the building's exterior. Hornbostel's architecture inspires the students and faculty of Carnegie Mellon University to create a world where art and technology are recognized as the foundations of civilization. (Cleary 1985)