Pitt’s resident Cathedral expert studies how the landmark shaped campus and the city

The curious architect stands at the base of the tower, looking up. Tall and magnificent, the structure looms above him, leaving him amazed and captivated.

It is March 2005, his first visit to Pittsburgh. He is here to interview for a faculty post and to check off items on a very specific architectural bucket list.

He's been downtown, standing before the more-than-a- century-old Allegheny County Courthouse, a masterwork of civic architecture. He's traveled through Pennsylvania's woods to Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright's iconic home suspended over a rushing stream.

Now he stands at the University of Pittsburgh's Cathedral of Learning, taking in the neo-Gothic limestone structure that soars into the sky and serves as a focal point for Oakland.

Few arrive more prepared to understand its history and symbolism in the context of 20th-century architecture.

When Drew Armstrong first came to Pittsburgh two decades ago, he was already well versed in the majesty and meaning of architecture. Raised in Toronto by a mother trained in fashion design and a father who was a physics professor at the University of Toronto, his childhood included travel through France, Germany, Italy and even apartheid-era South Africa, where he encountered some of the most historically and architecturally significant buildings in the world. He remembers visiting Gothic chapels with his mother as a child, absorbing the emotional and visual power of monumental architecture long before he had the language to articulate what he was witnessing.

[Want to hear more from Armstrong? Read about the Cathedral of Learning's path from ambitious idea to legendary landmark.]

Following those early experiences, Armstrong studied architecture at the University of Toronto and Columbia University in New York. The "aberrant structure," as Armstrong would later describe the Cathedral, was aligned with his research passions.

It did not conform to standard expectations of university architecture or skyscraper design. It was, instead, something hybrid, something ambitious, something tied to the place in which it stood and to the aspirations of Pittsburgh as one of America's great urban centers.

Hired to become the director of architectural studies in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, Armstrong has been teaching about the Cathedral since he arrived at Pitt.

Today, as the Pitt community celebrates 100 years since breaking ground on the venerable structure, Armstrong continues to research and write about the building. He's working toward publishing a comprehensive book that examines the historical moments that shaped the Cathedral and its significance to Pitt, to the broader community and to American culture between the world wars. For Armstrong, the Cathedral of Learning is more than a structure. It is a lens through which to understand the relationship among architecture, education and society.