Photo of the Day: Margaret Morrison Carnegie Hall, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA

I took the attached photo last month, while being driven through Pittsburgh. I never attended Carnegie Mellon University and have not toured the campus, but I was much taken by the façade of this building and resolved to learn more about it when I got home.

The industrialist Andrew Carnegie regarded his mother, Margaret Morrison Carnegie, as the person “to whom [he] owes everything,” according to a letter he wrote to the Board of Trustees of a major educational institution he endowed, Carnegie Technical Schools. He honored her in concrete fashion by founding the Margaret Morrison Carnegie School for Women in 1906. 

Six years after the 1967 merger of the Carnegie Institute of Technology and Mellon Institute, Margaret Morrison Carnegie College was closed. Since then, Margaret Morrison Carnegie Hall has housed students and faculty in the Public Policy, Drama, Architecture, Music schools and now is home to the School of Design. It is also recognized as the campus women’s building.

 

I’m not sure even the most skilled biographer can sort out all the complications in Andrew Carnegie’s character. But I can’t think of many better ways of honoring the legacy of a mother than what he did with this building and the curricula associated with it for more than a century.