Planning Commission Green Lights New U.S. Steel Headquarters in Pittsburgh’s Lower Hill

The Pittsburgh Planning Commission has approved the design and construction of the future U.S. Steel corporate headquarters at the former Civic Arena site in Pittsburgh's Lower Hill District.

By Adriana Pop, Associate Editor

The Pittsburgh Planning Commission approved the design and construction of the future U.S. Steel corporate headquarters at the former Civic Arena site in the city’s Lower Hill District.

According to the Pittsburgh Business Times, the upcoming 285,000-square-foot project, planned by St. Louis-based developer Clayco, will be the first building to go up as part of the area’s redevelopment. The Pittsburgh Penguins Hockey Club has master development rights to the cleared 28-acre site, where it plans to build a mix of office, residential, hospitality and retail space over the course of 25 years.

Construction on the office facility is scheduled to begin during the second half of the year and be completed in 24 months. Meanwhile, U.S. Steel’s current lease in the U.S. Steel Tower is set to expire at the end of 2017. The new building will feature five stories of 50,000-square-foot floors, as well as a steel museum and other retail space.

An earlier version of the project, designed by Chicago-based Forum Studio, a Clayco subsidiary, was criticized by some members of the planning commission when it was presented last month.

“There were concerns that were raised about the horizontality of the building and how to break the building down into smaller component pieces to respond more to the desires of the master plan,” Chris Cedergreen, chairman of Forum, told the newspaper. “We listened very carefully and we worked through a lot of different issues and worked very closely with U.S. Steel.”

He added that his firm explored more than 50 different design considerations with U.S. Steel in order to find a solution that worked for both the company and the city’s planning commission. Furthermore, Christopher McKee, president of Clayco Realty Group, noted that there are at least 10 different parties weighing in on the design of the building and that minor adjustments could still be made.

Photo credits: U.S. Steel

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