Visit · Lawrenceville · by appointment

4221 Butler Street.

The shop is on the second floor of a converted 1898 piano-roll warehouse at 4221 Butler Street, in the Lawrenceville neighborhood of Pittsburgh. By appointment only. Tea on arrival; the espresso machine if it’s working.

Exterior of the shop building on Butler Street: red-brick three-story facade with arched second-floor windows, a small brass plaque next to the doorway, a maple tree on the sidewalk. — Lawrenceville · 4221 Butler Stsecond floor

Address

Plenum & Reed
4221 Butler Street, Floor 2
Pittsburgh, PA 15201
United States

+1 (412) 555-0148
studio@plenumandreed.example

Hours

Monday–Friday, 8:00–17:30 Eastern. Closed Saturdays, Sundays, and the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day — though see why two of us are walking sites that week.

Standby pager (retainer clients only): 24/7. Inside one hour during business hours; inside two hours after-hours.

Getting here

By car — from downtown, ten minutes via Liberty Avenue. From the Strip District, eight minutes via Penn Avenue. Street parking on Butler is metered Mon–Sat 8–6 (about 75 cents an hour); free Sundays.
By bus — the Pittsburgh Regional Transit 91 from downtown drops at the corner of Butler and 43rd Street, a one-block walk. Run frequency every 15 min weekdays.
By bike — the Penn Avenue bike lane runs four blocks south. Lawrenceville is generally bike-friendly; we have a small rack on the sidewalk.
From PIT — 28 minutes by car under typical conditions. The 28X bus from the airport drops you downtown; transfer to the 91 from there.

What you’ll see

The studio is laid out in five rooms: a fabrication bay with a steel-and-walnut workbench down the middle; a small clean room (we close it for visitors); a sensor lab where Jules burns in nodes; a 220-square-foot library with the bulk of the practice’s reference shelf; and a meeting room overlooking the Allegheny River. The library is open to visitors. We will offer tea on arrival; if Conway has the espresso machine running, you may have an espresso instead.

Shop · liveR-00

T: 19.0 °C
RH: 41.0%
DP: 5.6 °C
±24h: ±0.4 °C / ±2.1%
Doors: both shut

Around the corner

Walking distances from the shop:

Contemporary Craft — 4 blocks (Pgh Lawrenceville)
Heinz History Center — 16 min walk
The Frick Pittsburgh — 12 min by car
Carnegie Museum of Art — 14 min by car (Oakland)
Carnegie Library, Lawrenceville — 6 blocks
Allegheny Cemetery — 8 blocks (Stephen Foster, Lillian Russell)
Espresso a Mano — 4 blocks (43rd St)
Cure (restaurant) — 12 min walk

Accessibility

The building has a single set of stairs to the second floor. There is no elevator. We will gladly meet at an accessible café in Lawrenceville on request — the Carnegie Library’s Lawrenceville branch has accessible meeting space, as does the Mr. Smalls’ venue at 400 Lincoln Avenue.

The neighborhood

Why we are on Butler Street, in two paragraphs.

Lawrenceville was, for the first century of its existence, a working industrial neighborhood — cordage, glass, iron, brass, lithography, photography — and Butler Street was its commercial spine. The cordage warehouses on the 4100 block of Butler and the smaller industrial buildings to the north are still mostly the buildings they were in 1903; some of them now hold breweries and architecture studios and one of them holds us. The neighborhood became a creative-economy hub in the early 2010s and is now home to the 16:62 Design Zone, a co-op of more than 60 design-led businesses operating out of refurbished storefronts. Contemporary Craft moved its main studios into a former warehouse four blocks from us in 2020.

There is no architectural reason we are on Butler Street; we are here because the practice is small, the rents in 2015 were reasonable, and Sloane wanted to be inside walking distance of two industrial-archival sites that turned out to become the practice’s most-cited cases. We have stayed because the neighborhood’s creative-economy ecology is, in practice, a good one to operate inside — the architects we work with, the historic-preservation consultants we partner with, and several of our private-collection clients all maintain offices or homes within four blocks of the shop.

References

Pittsburgh Regional Transit, route 91. rideprt.org.
Lawrenceville Pittsburgh, neighborhood guide. lawrencevillepittsburgh.com.
16:62 Design Zone. thedesignzone.org.
Contemporary Craft. contemporarycraft.org.
Carnegie Library Lawrenceville branch. carnegielibrary.org.
Allegheny Cemetery. allegheny-cemetery.com.
Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation. phlf.org.