Point Park Civic Center

The structure, containing an opera house, sports arena, three movie theaters, and a convention hall, was wrapped by a spiraling strip of road.

To make the design more palatable to its audience, Wright developed a radically different proposal for a monolithic tower supporting bridges across the Allegheny and Monongahela.

By 1945 the situation was even worse; during the Great Depression and World War II, urban decay had made substantial inroads.

At the point, rarely used railroad facilities included 15 acres (6.1 ha) of yards and half a mile (800 m) of elevated train tracks.

Edgar Kaufmann, a Pittsburgh department store owner, sat on the board of the Conference and became chair of the 28-member committee convened to look into the Point Park problem.

In particular, Kaufmann was a major supporter of Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera and wanted to provide that group with a permanent building.

The entire structure was wrapped by a spiraling roadway that Wright called the "Grand Auto Ramp", which accommodated traffic in both directions and would have been four and a half miles (7.2 km) long.

Inside are individual structures supported by pylons, containing the main facilities of the building: the theaters, opera house, arena, and planetarium.

[12] Wright's expressed philosophy for the scheme was to provide a "newly spacious means of entertainment for the citizen seated in his motor car Winter or Summer.

Open spaces on the site were occupied by parks, an outdoor concert area built to accommodate 15,000 people, and a zoo.

A second large circular building at the Point would have contained a restaurant, pools for swimming and wading, a dock for pleasure boats, and an aquarium.

Levine notes that "no previous megastructure in the history of modern architecture came close to this one in terms of size, contents, or coherence".

In a meeting with conference officials at Taliesin West, Wright seemed uninterested in how traffic access to the bridges would be handled, and when asked how much the project would cost, he answered that he did not care.

[17] The plan conflicted with existing plans—already confirmed by the state legislature—to build a park at the site that would preserve the historic structures and artifacts there, such as the Fort Pitt blockhouse dating back to 1764.

[21] The expertise for the innovative bridge concepts found in both schemes probably came from Czech engineer Jaroslav Polivka, whom Wright had hired to assist in calculations for the Guggenheim Museum.

In 1947–48, Polivka promoted, and was later joined by Wright in developing, an idea for a concrete bridge spanning San Francisco Bay.

"[26] Cleary says that Wright enjoyed "being an outsider occupying the moral high ground", a position that would cause his clients to grant him the mantle of "absolute authority and faith", permitting him to avoid "compromises which he was not prepared to endure".

Though Kaufmann was willing to grant Wright such a position, the city's other political leaders were seeking "team players who would fit into the system they had constructed rather than prophets who would shake its foundations.

[29] Cleary attests that there appears to be a contradiction between this vision and a proposal to create a building that could contain over 100,000 people in an exceedingly dense fashion.

For instance, the Gordon Strong Automobile Objective, designed by Wright in 1924, included as its main feature a spiraling ramp that wrapped around a domed planetarium, which was built on the top of a mountain.