Читать книгу Soul Murder - Daniel Blake - Страница 31

Of all Pittsburgh’s buildings, the Allegheny County Courthouse was Patrese’s favorite. It boasted the quintessential architecture of crime and punishment. Massive slabs of Massachusetts granite ran down long sides punctuated with brooding arches and flanked by half-towers, as though the edifice had been lifted wholesale from city gates in ancient Rome.

Richardson, the architect, regarded this building as his greatest work. He’d plundered from across Europe for it: detailing from Salamanca Cathedral for the front tower, still majestically authoritative despite the upstart skyscrapers which now dwarfed it on all sides; Notre-Dame’s cornice; the hollow rectangle massing from Rome’s Palazzo Farnese; and from Venice the rear campanile and the Bridge of Sighs, through which prisoners had been transported from jail to court and back again.