Jaime Viens, 11 December 2017
While our exhibition, Narratives of the Nationality Rooms, has primarily focused on the social and cultural significance of the Nationality Rooms, I find it just as important to understand their history and how it has affected, and continues to change, the Rooms’ meanings. The Nationality Rooms are a series of 30 classrooms within the Cathedral of Learning at Pitt. Each pertains to a specific cultural or ethnic community that contributes to Pittsburgh’s population. Each room is designed and funded by individuals within that community who form a Nationality Room Committee, and the University only becomes responsible for the Room’s maintenance in perpetuity after its completion.
The program was started by Ruth Crawford Mitchell in 1926, the same year the construction of the Cathedral of Learning began, at the request of Chancellor John Bowman. Chancellor Bowman wanted the campus’ surrounding community to have as much of a say in the development of the Cathedral as possible, while still providing a foundation rooted in creativity and education. The Great Depression hit the U.S. just four years after the first of the Nationality Room Committees were formed, delivering a serious blow to their fundraising efforts. When World War II began, conflicts abroad further complicated fundraising efforts and the advancement of new Rooms.
As the project continued, some rules were established as a baseline in the committees’ development of each Room. All of the Rooms should represent a nation accorded diplomatic recognition by the U.S. government; the content of each Room should be exclusively cultural with political reference only permitted in one position, carved in stone above the room’s entrance; no living person could be portrayed; and finally, the Room’s design must represent a period of time pre-dating Pitt’s official founding date of 1787. Committees for each Room were also formed abroad to serve as counterparts to the ones in Pittsburgh. Their main tasks were to assist in consulting on design, recommending architects, and selecting materials and artists for space. However, it eventually became clear that the requirement for “nations” to be recognized by the U.S. government denied many ethnic groups the opportunity to create their own Rooms and define their own identities. A less restrictive definition of “nationality” allowed for the creation of new Rooms that would display the cultural history of populations whose traditions don’t align with political or geographical borders such as the African Heritage Room or the Welsh Room.
Various fundraising efforts eventually provided the amounts necessary to build nineteen Rooms by 1957. The first four to be dedicated were the Scottish, Russian, German and Swedish Rooms, which all opened in 1938. The most recently dedicated rooms are the Welsh (2008), Turkish (2012), Swiss (2012) and Korean (2015) Rooms. Plans for a future Filipino Room are in development, while Finnish and Iranian Rooms are both in fundraising stages. The history of the Nationality Rooms shows how World War II, the Great Depression, and other historical events, on both the national and international stage, have greatly influenced the creation, meaning and growth of the Nationality Rooms — and will continue to do so in the future.