Frederick C. Sauer

Who was Frederick C. Sauer?

Frederick C. Sauer was a German-American architect, particularly in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, region of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Sauer, a German-born immigrant to the United States, was a stonemason, bricklayer and carpenter while studying at Technical school in Wittenberg, before studying at Stuttgart. He moved to Pittsburgh from Germany in 1880, established a Pittsburgh office in 1884, established the Aspinwall-Delafield Land Company in 1904, and built about a dozen Catholic churches in the area. Perhaps his most notable works are St. Stanislaus Kostka Church in the Strip District of Pittsburgh, St. Mary of the Mount Church on Mount Washington in Pittsburgh, Saint Mary Magdalene Church in Homestead, Latimer School in East Allegheny on the North Side of Pittsburgh, the old St. Nicholas Croatian Catholic Church in Troy Hill, and the St. Nicholas Croatian Church in Millvale. In 1898, Sauer built a home for himself in Aspinwall, Pennsylvania. After remodeling his chicken coop in an eccentric mode in 1928 and 1930, he gradually transformed a wooded hillside into an architectural fantasy, and a complex of castlesque buildings and landscape features in Fantastic architectural style gradually took shape and was progressively added to by Sauer until his death in 1942. The site is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as an historic district entitled the Sauer Buildings Historic District. "It is the most bizarre collection of buildings in Western Pennsylvania," says Franklin Toker, professor of art and architecture at the University of Pittsburgh.