The Industrial Pittsburgh, with its abundance of iron and coal, was a landscape of rolling mills powered by steam engines, glass factories, breweries, potteries, nail mills, and spin off industries around the three rivers. Raw materials, rivers and labor, local and immigrant. A market driven environment that expanded, peaked, and fell. The Bessemer process of producing steel, which was invented in the early 1870s solidified Pittsburgh's hold on the steel industry. Steel put the city on the map and people in the city. It is "the steel city."
The power and glory of the mills have been a source of visual fascination and inspiration to many artists and architects. This site in particular is the home of Carrie furnace, one of the last Steel furnaces in America, and the birth place of many American icons. Today it is a waste site in a city that long shed its industrial role, absent from Steel's global market economy where its shortage has led to remarkably high recycling.
This competition requires that a Museum of Steel be built of steel to highlight the uses, production, and history of steel that will also serve as a new focal point for the city of Pittsburgh. Instead of making a building with steel as a structure, we propose a Landscape and infrastructure of steel.