Liberty Avenue as Temporary Landscape
2025-2026
Vernacular Architecture Research
Undergraduate Honors Thesis | Individual Work
Faculty Sponsor: Sahar Hosseini
The majority of the built environment in Pittsburgh’s Bloomfield neighborhood was developed in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Despite various socio-economic and cultural changes, this architectural and urban fabric has sparsely changed up until today. Since Bloomfield’s historic physical landscape has been preserved, it is not by itself a sufficient lens into the neighborhood’s contemporary social life. This project extends traditional focuses on built forms and foregrounds processes of change, studying recent adaptations that inhabitants make to the built environment.
Shop owners on Liberty Avenue, Bloomfield’s main street, deploy a formal logic by placing temporary objects and recomposing shop interiors. They commonly leave objects displayed on the sidewalk in front of their building, extending their display window and making an impression on the exterior. In this way, the window no longer functions as a screen to the inside but a spatial extrusion of the interior activity and program onto the sidewalk. For example, The Big Idea Bookstore commonly leaves a table, seating, a rack of unpriced books, and a communal box of free items in front of their display window which is covered with political posters. Without any serious construction or renovation of the building’s form, these objects create a spatial environment on the sidewalk.
Just as the ornamentation and architectural details of the original vernacular builders of Bloomfield reflect their social aspirations, recent interventions and traces of change reveal the intentions and ambitions of the neighborhood’s contemporary inhabitants. This project combines architectural drawing and archival research with field observation and personal interviews, shaping a methodology that frames the study site as a constantly changing cultural landscape rather than a finished artifact.
