Mission
Korean Heritage Room Committee has been formed to create a Korean Heritage Room in the Nationality Rooms Program in the Cathedral of Learning at University of Pittsburgh with mission to exhibit 5000 years of Korean Culture and History
Nationality Rooms
Classrooms that Teach
A visit to the nationality Rooms in the University of Pittsburgh's monumental Cathedral of Learning will take you around the world in 90 minutes. These internationally famous Rooms are gifts to the University from the city's ethnic communities. Of museum quality, often designed by architects abroad, 27 Rooms adapt Classical, Byzantine, Romanesque, Baroque, Renaissance, Tudor, Empire, Minka and folk styles to recreate cultural periods prior to 1787, the year the University was founded.
THE ROOMS
You will experence a mini-tour of heritages that transports you from 5th century BC Greece to 18th century Ukraine. Authetic period furnishings combine with carved stone, stained glass, sculpted and inlaid wood to provide unforgettable glimpses of European, Scandinavian, Middle Eastern, African and Asian cultures.
The Nationality Rooms are expressions of timeless human values. In these rooms themes are rendered in wood and glass, iron and stone, fabric, color, and words. Inspiration flows from such varied sources as Athens in the time of Pericles, a palace hall in Beijing's Forbidden City, an ancient monastic Indian university, flowers that grow in Czech and Slovak valleys, a 6th-century oratory from Ireland's Golden Age, an Asante temple courtyard in Ghana, London's House of Commons, and the intimate hearth-centered life of America's early New Englanders. Enduring concepts spanning time and space are clearly expressed for all to interpret: honesty, courage, love of nature, order, faith, freedom, respect for learning, the urge to create beauty.
Among the documents placed in the Cathedral of Learning cornerstone, set in 1937, is a copper plate engraved with these thoughts expressed by the Nationality Room Committee chairpersons to the University:
"Faith and peace are in their hearts. Good will has brought them together. Like the Magi of ancestral traditions and the shepherds of candid simplicity, they offer their gifts of what is precious, genuine and their own, to truth that shines forever and enlightens all people."
The emphasis on ethnic identity and the search for one's ancestral roots is reflected in the committees formed to create new classrooms representing the cultures of Denmark, Switzerland, the Philippines and Latin America. As these rooms take their places around the Commons Room, they will add new dimensions of pride and understanding to the unique totality of America's heritage.
