James A. Mitchell.

Genius mind.

Top student.

Wins shitload of awards.

Made Frank Lloyd Wright look like shit.

Mitchell designs an amazing missile factory for the Navy.

Super high military honors.

Awarded Deputy Admiral.

Becomes friends with heads of US Steel, Alcoa, etc..

Mellons, Carnegies, etc…

High Society Pittsburgh

Commissioned and designed beautiful hospital

Did a redesign of the entire city of Pittsburgh. City of the future. They don’t follow through on design.

Designs a flexible folding roof for City’s auditorium.

Inefficient but artistically brilliant.

Biggest piece of suspended steel.

Carnegie’s and Mellon’s are literal pieces of shit.

Sell entire steel industry to China.

I. M. Pei, son of the CEO for the Bank of China, gets to become a famous architect as part of the deal.

James Mitchell has trouble fitting in with American elite.

Short little Greek guy.

Goes to party for elites.

Start passing around a bowl.

All men put car keys into bowl.

Guy picks out key and its James key.

Demands to fuck James wife.

Realizes its a wife swapping party.

1950s elite are wife swappers.

James not cool with that.

Takes his wife and key and leaves.

James officially pisses of the elite.

Never gets another architecture gig.

Elites completely steamroll James.

Wife leaves him because no work.

Literally destroys James life.

James is largely forgotten.

Elites write him out of history books.

Ritchey had befriended Edgar J. Kaufmann. Kaufmann was the original owner of Fallingwater. Fallingwater is one of if not the most popular pieces of American architecture. Kaufmann wanted Mitchell to redesign Fallingwater due to structural issues.

"James A. Mitchell (1907-1999), a graduate of Carnegie Institute of Technology and Columbia Universities, was the lead design architect in the firm and deserves primary credit for the firm's assertive and sometimes innovative modern design work. He received U.S. patent 2,692,566 in 1954 for the design of a flexible folding roof that was developed for an early version of the firm's Civic Auditorium [Civic Arena] project. Mitchell left Pittsburgh soon after his partnership with Dahlen K. Ritchey was disolved in 1957, and was largely forgotten in Pittsburgh."

Largely forgotten is right. He's only written about in two historical articles I've seen and is mentioned once in the newspaper. Sad stuff.

http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/ma1f/ArchArch/mitchell&ritchey.html

http://www.popularpittsburgh.com/pittsburgh-info/pittsburgh-history/famous-pittsburghers/ritchey.aspx

http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1129&dat=20020115&id=KOlRAAAAIBAJ&sjid=NXADAAAAIBAJ&pg=6529,3340171

Just found this government PDF with a load of information on him. He did win a shitload of awards, and I doubt this is everything:

"James Anastasiou Mitchell (1907-1999) received a B.A. in Architecture from Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1932 and a M.S. from Columbia University in 1933. Mitchell was awarded a gold medal from the Beaux Arts Institute of Design in 1933 and was a finalist for the 1933 Paris Prize in Architecture. In 1934, Mitchell was awarded the John Stewardson Traveling Scholarship."

The whole thing about him receiving high praise in the military is completely true:

"Mitchell and Ritchey established an architectural practice in 1938, but the practice was suspended from 1943 to 1946, when the partners served as officers in the U.S. Navy. Ritchey served as a radar officer on the U.S.S. Saratoga, while Mitchell initially served as Technical Assistant for Industrial Structures in Ordnance Stations, Bureau of Ordnance. Mitchell's exceptional talent as a planner earned him a promotion to Chief of the Facilities and Services Section in the Naval Ordnance Establishments Division of the bureau, a position which no person had held without attaining the rank of Admiral."

Nearly everything is true to a T. This is absurd:

"Ritchey had befriended Edgar J. Kaufmann, head of a prominent Pittsburgh department store, while working for a year as a designer of window and furniture displays.8 This connection, along with Mitchell's reputation as a planner, resulted in Kaufmann selecting Mitchell & Ritchey in 1946 to prepare a study and exhibition, "Pittsburgh in Progress," to celebrate the store's seventy-fifth anniversary. "Pittsburgh in Progress" presented a daring vision of how Pittsburgh's infrastructure and natural environment could be transformed according to the tenets of modern planning and design."

"The study's popularity and critical acclaim likely influenced Kaufmann' s decision to engage the architects the next year to design a permanent home for the Civic Light Opera. In 1949, the Urban Redevelopment Authority of Pittsburgh entered into a contract with Mitchell & Ritchey to design an amphitheater for the Civic Light Opera, which, in its final form, would be the Civic Arena."

"In addition to its work on the Civic Arena, Mitchell & Ritchey designed several distinguished Pittsburgh projects in the mid-1950s, including the John Kane Memorial Hospital (planning and design services), Donner Hall at Carnegie Institute of Technology, and Mellon Square, which received national acclaim as the first urban park situated atop a parking garage."

Mitchell basically did all of the true architectural work, while Ritchey essentially got all the credit for it:

"Both Mitchell and Ritchey shared responsibility for producing working drawings, but Mitchell's chief responsibilities were planning and design, while Ritchey's chief responsibilities were business administration, supervision of work under construction, and checking of shop drawings. Work on the Civic Arena, as well the aforementioned projects, "was almost totally conceived, planned, and the details on them almost wholly determined" by Mitchell.12 In the mid-1950s, Mitchell & Ritchey employed a staff of fourteen, exclusive of associates. The partnership was terminated on August 30, 1957, under very difficult circumstances, but the architects' work on the Civic Arena was nearly completed by that time.”

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pnp/habshaer/pa/pa4100/pa4106/data/pa4106data.pdf

Sorry for formatting. Will fix later.

Original Storyteller- Starts about 5 minutes in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZ5yDHkvPlM