PITTSBURGH -- This round piece of stained glass, recessed into a ceiling on the third floor of Baker Hall, depicts the original logo that stained-glass master Louis Comfort Tiffany designed for Carnegie Mellon University.The logo includes the year the university was founded and a famous statement Andrew Carnegie made in a letter to city leaders about his plans to start the school.The gale-force winds of modernism swept America in the 1970s, fanning an overwhelming desire to build anew and modify old buildings."New is better. Let's update everything and make it modern," was the attitude, said Noel Zahler, dean of the music school in the university's College of Fine Arts.So, inside the school's Kresge Theater, where more than 300 concerts and recitals are hosted annually, a large skylit leaded-glass ceiling was removed. That allowed workers to build a state-of-the-art suspension grid from which new lighting was hung.Then, 35 years passed.While contemplating another renovation of the 250-seat theater this year, fine arts dean Hilary Robinson urged Zahler to find out what happened to the glass ceiling. She thought Tiffany had made it and that it could serve as the centerpiece of a fund-raising campaign to update the theater again.Zahler's deputy at the music school, Ross Garin, "literally put on a hard hat and crawled through the bowels of this building," the music dean said.He found it, broken in some sections, in the basement of the fine arts building. Laid on a piece of red cloth and covered with straw, it was hidden from view by duct work installed around it when a percussion studio was built.While the school has no confirmation that the glass ceiling is a Tiffany, its discovery has prompted officials to consider all sorts of ideas on how the theater may be restored and prompted a quest to try to authenticate the ceiling."Now that we found the skylight we have a decision to make about how we might restore that or what we're going to do with it," Robinson said.Zahler estimated that improving the theater would cost roughly $3 million.As for the ceiling, authenticating it as a Tiffany will be challenging, experts say.Tiffany's New York studios produced decorative windows for many southwestern Pennsylvania churches during the 19th and 20th centuries. His firm used opalescent glass, an American invention popular between 1880 and 1920 and used by virtually all U.S. glass artisans."Tiffany's studios produced numerous skylights for private homes and public buildings," said Nina Gray, a Manhattan-based independent scholar of 19th- and 20th-century decorative arts who is curating a "Tiffany by Design" exhibit in Nashville, Tenn.The fact that vines and flowers appear to have been used on the university's ceiling, Gray said, "is a good sign. It sounds as if it has distinctive ornament that is often seen in Tiffany work."But authenticating the work will be difficult because Tiffany's studio was sold in a series of bankruptcies and many records were destroyed, said Arlie Sulka, owner of Lillian Nassau LLC, a New York gallery specializing in Tiffany's works.Benford, the university archivist, theorizes that the story of Tiffany making the Kresge Theater ceiling arose because his studio designed the university's original logo, which features thistles, the date 1900 and founder Andrew Carnegie's famous words, "My heart is in the work."Charles L. Rosenblum, who teaches a course at the university on architect Henry Hornbostel, does not think the leaded-glass ceiling was Tiffany's work. Hornbostel won the commission to design the campus and served as the first dean of the College of Fine Arts.Rosenblum, who is writing a doctoral dissertation on Hornbostel, has reviewed College of Fine Arts course catalogs that boasted about the theater's J. Monroe Hewlett murals and Achille Martini's early work on the building's outdoor niches that showcase different facets of the arts."There's no mention of Tiffany in these course catalogs," Rosenblum said.Unless a researcher discovers some old record by chance, "I don't think we're ever going to know who was the fabricator" of the skylit ceiling, Rosenblum said.Reach Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter Marylynne Pitz at mpitz(at)post-gazette.com.(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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