‘Not a random choice in the mix’: 'The Pitt' set is meticulously designed to immerse viewers in its North Side setting
Samuel Long / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
From the distinctive architecture to the tint of the lights, the details in “The Pitt” are intended to ground it in a specific place.
That place is Pittsburgh.
Though most filming for the Max medical drama took place more than 2,400 miles away, at Warner Bros. Studio in Burbank, Calif, such set design details do their job, said Allegheny General Hospital EMS director Kathy Sikora.
“I've been an emergency trauma nurse for 38 years and a lot of shows have come and gone,” Sikora said. “But this one just has an incredibly authentic feel to it.”
Small aesthetic elements add to the specificity of the show’s setting, series production designer Nina Ruscio said, rather than it seeming random. Within Pittsburgh, the hospital at the center of the show is anchored on the North Side, at Allegheny General Hospital.
With “The Pitt” rolling out new episodes Thursdays on Max, the season 1 finale is set for April 10.
Ruscio, who has worked in production design for “decades,” led the team in charge of fabricating the realistic feel of the show’s set. She was largely influenced by the aesthetics of AGH, where a few days of filming took place in September.
Sikora said “The Pitt’s” crew alluded to the hospital’s unique characteristics — including its location, which allowed for sweeping views of Allegheny Commons park as production shot from the helipad — a distinctiveness that, to her, contributed to the the series using AGH as inspiration. The building’s character is “truly so unique. It has such a unique look that I can absolutely understand why they chose Allegheny General Hospital.”
But even with the architectural specificity of AGH — the start of construction dates to the late 1920s, per a hospital spokesperson — Ruscio said there was a potential trap in proving that “The Pitt” was actually taking place in Pittsburgh.
“The entire show really takes place in the interior of an emergency department,” Ruscio said. “So how do you bring the outside in, when really the intention and the impact of the show is incredibly, almost claustrophobically interior?”
That was accomplished, in part, by peppering exterior design features of AGH inside the fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center, she said. For example, the marble columns seen in the emergency department and its cramped waiting room of the show are inspired by exterior columns next to the currently closed rotating door entrance at on East North Avenue.
Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center’s marble floors also nod to AGH’s own, as do its yellow-bricked walls. These details give the fictional space, much of which “has not been renovated for decades,” a historical feel.
“When I got to see the show itself, and I got to see how they pulled so many unique features of Allegheny General Hospital into this, from the marble columns to the blonde brick,” the details were precise, Sikora said. “Even their waiting room is very interesting in that it’s not spacious, but patients sit in there wall to wall with the same frustrations and aggressions that happen in busy emergency department waiting rooms.”
Ruscio also incorporated Pittsburgh’s Three Sisters bridges, bringing their gold hue into Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center’s signage. With a palette of yellow, black and deep gray, the identifiers can be seen scattered throughout the show.
"I was hoping that you would hold that in your mind as a viewer, that you could imagine that there’s a historical building that relates to this [emergency department], which is more sterile and blanched of pallet,” Ruscio said. “That was a task that I took upon myself, really, to ground this medical facility and make it less generic.”
The production designer also wanted to emphasize that the show’s emergency room is underground, hence its unofficial name as “The Pitt” within the show. That’s why there are a plethora of marble pillars in the main spaces — they’re “holding up the building above it.”
The set is designed for realism, but also to tell a story. To show the constant motion of the ER, the building features three main curves meant to catch viewers’ eyes and move them “in circles” throughout the first season, which unfolds across one 15-hour shift.
For the series’ colors, Ruscio said the crew embraced the idea of a “blanched palette” due to most people’s “aesthetically sterile” experience in real hospitals. “The Pitt” leans on yellow and black — inspired by Pittsburgh’s colors, she said — and, most importantly, white.
The rest of the palette is “restrained and reduced” to contrast with the dark colors of the cast’s wardrobe, such as the dark blue jacket worn by main character Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, played by Noah Wyle. That, in addition to the fluorescent, top-down lighting, mimics a real hospital.
“The idea was that these spaces are triggering for people, because they’re blanched and because they’re sterile,” Ruscio said. “We didn’t want it to feel like a lot of TV dramas where it’s blue, or there’s soft lighting.”
Shortly after the show began filming, in July, its crew took a quick trip to Pittsburgh for some shots atAllegheny General. Though Ruscio estimated 95% of filming took place at the California studio, the shooting that happened in the actual city helped to further immerse the audience.
While visiting, the extensive crew filmed on the roof of AGH’s Snyder Pavilion, on the hospital’s emergency helipad and took exterior shots around AGH.
“This little micro-percentage that we got to shoot in Pittsburgh, we use those like coupons to express and prove where we are,” Ruscio said. “The work at the top of episode one that takes place in Pittsburgh, Robby walks to work, to the beginning of the shift.
You see him walking up Cedar Avenue and you see him coming up to the exterior front of the hospital. Scenes shot on the roof of the building also appear in that first episode. And there’s a drone shot that takes you to The Point and across the Three Sister bridges and up, presenting the hospital.”
“Distilled” aspects of the city were key to creating a sense of place.
Ruscio designed a large chunk of “The Pitt’s” set before even stepping foot in Pittsburgh, mainly using social media posts and Google Maps street views of the hospital as references — though there weren’t many images of the inside of the facility online.
“Usually it’s a traumatic experience and you’re not documenting it, it’s not like you’re going to take a selfie out in front of a hospital or take pictures in interior space,” Ruscio said. “So I actually had very, very limited documentation about the space because the design process had to take place well before I went on a scouting trip with our [executive] producer Mike Hissrich to Pittsburgh.”
Still, Ruscio was able to design the marble floors based on an Instagram post she found. A June visit Allegheny General in June, about a month before filming started, ensured she wasn’t “making stuff up.”
That visit made Ruscio feel like a “kid in a candy store.”
And she was also able to confirm that the show’s set did what it was made to do — create a fictional but realistic emergency room that really feels like it’s in Pittsburgh.
Impressed by “The Pitt,” Sikora said it successfully captures the interior of an emergency department with a local feel. In fact, she said the fictional emergency department of the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center feels like a room in Allegheny General Hospital she “just might not have seen.”
“For me, from a design perspective, every single layout piece, every single piece of equipment, every prop from the property department, every single thing is purposeful,” Ruscio said. “There’s not a random choice in the mix.”