PPG Place

PPG Industries, a paint and glass manufacturer since 1883, asked Johnson and Burgee for a downtown Pittsburgh headquarters that would double as an advertisement for its own product, and the six-building complex they delivered in 1984 is clad almost entirely in the company's own reflective glass, cut into 19,750 panes and gathered into 231 crystalline spires that quote the silhouette of a Gothic cathedral in glass rather than stone. The tallest tower's own spire runs to 25 metres above its roofline, more steeple than crown, and the lower buildings step down around a granite plaza that Pittsburgh's downtown had lacked. Completed as part of Renaissance II, the city's second post-industrial redevelopment push, at a moment when the regional steel industry PPG had long supplied was collapsing, the complex became one of Pittsburgh's clearest arguments that the city's future lay outside heavy manufacturing. The plaza itself was rebuilt in 2001 around a fountain and a seasonal ice rink larger than the one at Rockefeller Center, and the complex remains PPG Industries' corporate headquarters today.