Review: HACLab Pittsburgh: Imagining the Modern

Entering the exhibition HACLab Pittsburgh: Imagining the Modern, visitors were caught between two black-and-white photographs by Edward Massery. To the right was a photograph of the Civic Arena—the Igloo, as it was nicknamed by Pittsburghers—before it was torn down, rising in a luminous dome, its perfect curvature made even more beautiful by the stubborn verticality of other modernist buildings behind it (Figure 1). To the left was a photo of the Civic Arena halfway through demolition (Figure 2). Here the Igloo is reduced to a mere quadrant, which, while still rising majestically, now looks like a single fin of the Sydney Opera House...