Abraam Steinberg House

This house for physician Abraam Steinberg is one of several Pittsburgh homes built from the 1940s through the 1960s by two designers who met and trained at Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin Fellowship. Peter Berndtson designed most of them, and his wife and partner, Cornelia Brierly, collaborated on several and designed others on her own. Certainly the close fit of a house and its surroundings is a textbook definition of organic architecture. The brick, redwood, glass, and concrete house stands on the edge of a long, narrow and steeply sloped lot. Two exterior walls of the house form a right angle to conform to the street grid, the rounded rear wall echoes an inner circular garden that is open to the sky. This garden, visible from all the major rooms, provides the true facade for the house. Interior spaces flow visually from one to the next, analogous to the ramps that physically unite its three levels. The organic theme is carried through in the house furnishings, built-in where possible, and in the same redwood that provides structure for the house. Invariably but unfairly compared to their teacher Wright, Berndtson and Brierly were an important force in the adoption of modern architecture in postwar Pittsburgh.