View from Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh is now striving energetically to reinvent itself as a model for the post-industrial city of the twenty-first century.

The moment visitors to Pittsburgh exit the Liberty Tunnel and access the high-level Liberty Bridge, they enjoy an instant iconic panorama of Downtown and the confluence of Pittsburgh's three defining rivers. Displayed below, between the massive trusses of the double-decker bridge, is a tight array of urban architecture from H. H. Richardson's Allegheny Courthouse and Jail (1884-88) to Harrison & Abramovitz's Alcoa Tower (1953) and--in a comparatively rare moment of Post-Modern posturing--Johnson Burgee's PPG Place (1979-84), that audaciously reinterprets London's Houses of Parliament in Pittsburgh Plate Glass's own reflective glass.

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The Liberty Bridge spans the Monongahela River just before it joins the equally broad Allegheny to form the Ohio, a primary artery of the Mississippi system. The apex of land between the Monongahela and Allegheny was the site of Fort DuQuesne, France's eighteenth-century trading post. That name survives in such Pittsburgh institutions as Duquesne University, with Mies van der Rohe's 1968 Hall of Science, and the blue chip--decidedly not blue collar--Duquesne Club now somewhat marooned Downtown. The English, however, quickly dislodged the French and renamed the settlement in honour of William Pitt the Elder. Thus Pittsburgh is in a small group of cities--Melbourne, Wellington, Salisbury (now Harare)--named after British prime ministers. An omen perhaps of modernization and a long way from previous royal affectations (Charleston, Annapolis, New York) in the Colonies.

Precious little of pre-Civil War Pittsburgh survives. Soon after glass industries sprang up along the Allegheny (the genesis of PPG), iron and steel foundries colonized the alluvial banks of both rivers, a vast Scottish or Scots-Irish enterprise giving rise to Pittsburgh fortunes (Carnegie, Mellon, Frick, Westinghouse), subsequent influxes of immigrant labour (the Slavic/Irish/Italian grandparents of the generation depicted in The Deerhunter), and appalling pollution. Thus Andrew Carnegie could become the world's wealthiest man and benefactor when he offloaded his principal holdings in 1901 for 500 or so million dollars. And so one James Parton, a visitor during that same period, could infamously liken Pittsburgh to 'hell with the lid off'.

The factories and steel mills have now almost entirely disappeared, erased from the conurbation to be replaced by new technology office parks--logical incubators of the next generation of expertise--and the inevitable shopping centres, as at Homestead where a few surreal chimneys stand as kitsch reminders of a redundant past. With ambition, or confidence, more of these century-old structures could have survived to give the high-tech start-ups and consumer 'experiences' of today a setting that would be both culturally resonant and of spatial interest.

Like Glasgow and Newcastle, Pittsburgh has its scenographic array of bridges and hillsides. Furthermore, 18 funicular railways--known locally as inclines--once operated as vertiginous mechanical veins connecting hilltop homes to workplaces down in the city. Two survive as popular visitor attractions. Key to Pittsburgh's renewal strategy for its former industrial sites is the insertion of a trail network, a car-free amenity for joggers and cyclists. The city's Urban Regeneration Authority (URA) plans to reintegrate the Hot Metal Bridge--built expressly for the transportation of molten iron from one bank of the Monongahela to the other--into this system by adding access ramps and secure pathways.

In Downtown, many of the edifices dating from the Carnegie era are also being reintegrated into the social life of the city. Through the auspices of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, several early twentieth-century buildings have been rehabilitated. The former Stanley Theater, for instance, with its vaudeville marquee, is now the Benedum Center for the Performing Arts. The Trust was also instrumental in realizing the recently completed Allegheny Riverfront Park, a linear and stepped design by landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh and Ohio-based artist Ann Hamilton.

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However, the major intervention Downtown is the new David L. Lawrence Convention Center with its signature white roof swooping from high structural posts inland down to a glazed panoramic concourse cantilevered out over the Allegheny itself. Designed by Uruguayan-born, New York-based Rafael Vinoly, the centre pays unusual attention to issues of energy responsibility. Thus the main hall--normally a dark, isolated place--enjoys natural illumination with glimpses of the outside world.

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To make such expensive statement architecture requires considerable civic clout. Away from the spotlight, the city and inner suburbs still retains the fabric of often spacious industrial buildings. These are perhaps the collective laboratory of a younger generation of architects. The energetic and talented EDGE studio has rehabilitated a former tramworks as its own office while across the street, in a neighbourhood called Friendship, dggp architecture (with Bruce Lindsey) have, with tectonic skill and a modest budget, inventively reconfigured an early car showroom as the Pittsburgh Glass Center--a welcome continuation of a local craft, here as art form.

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In Butler, just north of the city, another former car dealership is being reworked by SPRINGBOARD, the Pittsburgh studio of Paul Rosenblatt. Combined in an unlikely pair with an 1870s domestic house, it will open in November as a small museum of jade, ivory and porcelain, Chinese and German items collected by a wealthy local heiress. At each end of Pittsburgh's warehouse and market Strip District, Arthur Lubetz Associates Architects has currently two provocative interventions on site. Like some of Eric Owen Moss's reconfigurations in Los Angeles, Lubetz envisages a hovering, translucent box of office space supported on a series of spindly pylons above an existing commercial structure and adjacent trace of buried freight tracks. For the much larger Crucible, Lubetz is inserting two new floors into a vast shed, part of the old Carnegie empire, plugging a family of sculptural service towers along the exterior of one exposed flank.

Whether enough of these projects--to create critical mass--are realized and appreciated remains to be seen. Collectively, however, these more experimental and thoughtful architects are in a sense calling the bluff of Pittsburgh boosters in the financial and political establishment. A progressive synergy between old and new could re-present Pittsburgh as more than just a pretty picture from the Liberty Bridge. It could be a persuasive model for a post-industrial city where people enjoy life in the early twenty-first century.