IFRAA Fall 2007 Conference
Pietro Belluschi and the Pacific Northwest
by Michael J. Crosbie, PhD, AIA
Meredith L. Clausen, AIA, professor of architectural history at the University of Washington and the author of two definitive monographs on Pietro Belluschi, FAIA, delivered the keynote address. Clausen opened by pointing out that the breadth of Belluschi’s work is distinguished by a strong sense of place and often deep spirituality. Belluschi’s religious works always bore a regional identity.
Belluschi was born in 1899 in Ancona, Italy. In 1905 his family moved to Rome, where they built an apartment building. Real estate development became a family business, and young Belluschi learned the world of design, construction, and running a business. Belluschi was quiet, introspective, a close listener, and adept at picking up nuances and working them to his advantage. Drafting was his favorite subject in school. He enlisted in the army, later attending the University of Rome’s engineering school, from which he received his degree in 1922. Winning a grant to study abroad, he enrolled in Cornell University to study architecture, which at that time focused on the Beaux Arts methods of composition and historical precedent.
After university he moved to Portland, Ore. and was employed by the firm of A.E. Doyle. The mountainous and forested landscape influenced his thinking. An important project was the Wentz Cottage in Neahkahnie, Ore., designed for a painter. Its rugged coastal setting meshed with the landscape, displaying the influence of Bernard Maybeck and other Bay Area architects. Materials were natural and simply detailed, with framed views of the landscape.
During the Depression Belluschi returned to Italy. In the early 1930s he came back to Portland to design the city’s art museum, which reflected the growing influence of European modernism, with its crisply detailed concrete, brick, and travertine. In this building and his later work, Belluschi focused on the principles and not the forms of modernism. He had his own sense of tradition, which grew out of the genus loci and reflected the people and conditions under which it was designed. This was the essence of Belluschi’s philosophy, and led to the Northwest Regional School.
In 1943 Belluschi bought out the Doyle firm. A string of churches came next. Belluschi always expressed a strong sense of personal involvement with church design, which he saw as a way of exploring architecture as an art. Church design represented new challenges to articulate the emotional needs of his clients who came from traditions different from his own. One of the biggest challenges was to reconcile the new, innovative architecture of modernism with congregations that wanted traditional church architecture.
St. Thomas More Catholic Church was his first church, designed in 1939–40. Belluschi’s approach to this small (for a congregation of 200), low-budget church (approximately $12,000) was straightforward. It bore enough of a resemblance to traditional forms to convey its religious function. He considered the traditional Italian churches of his youth to be superficial in their elaborate Baroque decoration. Belluschi attended services at the existing church to understand how the building would be used. He focused on craft and natural materials, and the skilful handling of light. This modest project established Belluschi as a major designer of religious architecture.
Belluschi’s Equitable Building (1945–48) in Portland, the first major modern postwar U.S. high rise, brought him international fame and led to the design of many other corporate projects, but his heart and soul remained in church architecture. His churches rejected historicism yet also avoided the abstractions of European modernism. This can be seen in his St. Philip Neri Catholic Church in Portland, designed and constructed in 1946–52. The Italian congregation sought a church that would remind them of their roots. Belluschi took as inspiration the form of an early Christian basilica in Ravenna. The church’s exterior local materials of unadorned brick, semicircular geometries, rose window, and a simple cross were reflected inside with its rectangular plan and flat east wall.
The Zion Lutheran Church (1947–50) presented Belluschi with a wholly different set of challenges. This congregation wanted a new building on the site of its existing church, which was surrounded with neighborhood buildings. The architect was unfamiliar with the traditions of this quiet and undemonstrative congregation. They wanted a simple communal space where music played a dominant role during the service. The congregation rejected Belluschi’s early design for a flat-roofed building. He gave them a church that had its roots in Scandinavian architecture with its pitched roof, and a spire marking the junction of the narthex and nave. The interior elements of narthex, cupola, and nave are expressed on the exterior. Inside, the roof’s wood structural system is expressed, rising over the nave with laminated beams and columns, giving the nave a sense of loftiness reminiscent of Gothic architecture.
Central Lutheran Church, designed in 1948–50, was Belluschi’s largest and most complex church, with a larger budget and more extensive program than his previous religious commissions. Sited in an established, middle-class Portland neighborhood, the nave accommodated 750 (expandable to 1,000 on holidays), with a parish hall, classrooms, meeting spaces, nursery, kitchen, dining hall, and recreation room.
The building is untraditional, including its bell tower (recently demolished for structural reasons). With its simple wood cross, it reads clearly as a church, with a semicircular apse rendered in a textured brick and recessed crosses in the coursing. The curved chancel contains windows not visible from the nave, flooding the chancel with soft light. The nave’s blue, purple, orange, and red stained glass casts a subdued light conducive to prayer and meditation.
Designed and constructed simultaneously to Central Lutheran, Belluschi’s First Presbyterian Church was sited in Cottage Grove, Ore., on a corner lot in a residential neighborhood. The layout of the L-shaped building places the parish hall at right angles with the church. Belluschi drew on local materials and encouraged the labor of the local community, which knew the native woods and how to work with them.
The building forms a courtyard with a Japanese flavor, accented with a sculptural stone hauled into the garden. Belluschi’s admiration of the work of Alvar Aalto is seen in the church’s gently undulating roof. Inside, a single, undivided sanctuary space unites clergy, choir, and congregation. The nave is small but spacious, with clear plate-glass windows on the north side of the nave, which visually connects with the landscape garden. Light from the right side of the nave floods the chancel with pale rose and violets. Theologian Paul Tillich, who admired this church, pronounced the space “luminous.”
In 1951 Belluschi became dean of architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He was a modernist with more in common with Aalto than Ludwig Mies van der Rohe or Eero Saarinen. However, his religious works on the East Coast shows more of the influence of the Bauhaus. For example, his Portsmouth Abbey in Rhode Island is more geometrically driven, with its eight-sided sanctuary.
Other projects of note during this period are the Church of the Redeemer in Baltimore, designed and constructed in 1954–58, a commission that he won in competition with Saarinen, Edward Durrell Stone, Marcel Breuer, and Walter Gropius. In this project, Belluschi displays a sensitivity to the site and the architecture of the century-old existing church. The new structure, accommodating as many as 1,000, is designed to not overwhelm the older church. Belluschi’s solution is a cruciform plan, similar to the old church, with generous transepts to allow room for expansion. The result has a Japanese sensitivity and Asian inclinations, modern yet traditional.
In 1973 Belluschi returned to Portland, where he practiced until his death in 1994. He returned to designing small churches, at one with their wooded terrain, such as Immanuel Lutheran Church in Silverton, Ore., completed in 1979. This modern form, which embodied the church’s traditional values, was inspired by Norwegian stave churches.
One of Belluschi’s outstanding late projects is the University of Portland Chapel, completed in 1986. This multipurpose building has a secular quality. It has simplicity reminiscent of Zion Lutheran and a Japanese flavor.
Belluschi’s varied, rich career produced work that is amazingly consistent over the years. There is a striving for clear, rational forms and structure, sensitive handling of material, an artistic eye, and a determination to meet the demands of the congregation to create an uplifting, spiritual space.
Project Visits
St. Thomas More Catholic Church
As Pietro Belluschi’s first church commission, St. Thomas More in Portland sets the tone for many of his later religious works. There is an emphasis on building craft and natural materials, and a skillful handling that makes it one of Belluschi’s best churches. As its congregation wished, the building was designed to harmonize with its natural setting. Designed in the late 1930s, St. Thomas More shares the rugged wooden structure found in many of the simple houses that Belluschi designed during the Depression, and recalls some of the simple rural churches of Europe.
The exterior is a simple gabled roof with a double slope, its eaves flaring slightly over the side aisles. The only explicitly religious exterior symbol is the spire, which rises on a cube-like base positioned over the chancel. The interior light is soft, filtered through diamond-paned windows in the side aisles and in the cupola under the spire. The upper part of the nave is dominated by a series of scissor trusses. Other interior materials are knotty pine paneling, rough-sawn boards for the sloped ceilings, and pine flooring.
During the visit the pastor of St. Thomas More, Fr. Michael Johnston, welcomed Interfaith Forum on Religion, Art and Architecture (IFRAA) Knowledge Community visitors and spoke about changes that had taken place to the church since its completion, such as a transept added in the 1950s, a crying room, the removal of the original altar rail, and the installation of new altar furniture (designed by the pastor).
Also on hand to answer questions was architect Benny DiBenedetto, FAIA, a friend and colleague of Belluschi’s and a St. Thomas More congregant. DiBenedetto discussed how the original altar railing was removed to facilitate the distribution of communion, and the creation of new light fixtures for the 1950s wing modeled on Belluschi’s original fixture design.
St. Matthew Lutheran Church
Completed in 1982, late in Belluschi’s career, St. Matthew Lutheran Church in Beaverton, Ore. is distinguished by several trademarks Belluschi used in many of his religious buildings: an entrance through a quiet, trellised garden courtyard dominated by a stone positioned near its center; a natural stone font inside a low-ceilinged narthex; a large sanctuary lifted in light; and an expressive structural system. In the case of St. Matthew’s, the structure is composed of white-painted square tubular steel sections that grow out of columns of unadorned concrete and support a natural wood–clad ceiling. The sanctuary is arranged on two levels, fanning out around the altar. The interior is inviting with its light woods and vibrant orange-red carpet. A tall, curved reredos wall behind the altar dominates the interior. There are excellent sight lines throughout the space. The mezzanine level, which overlooks the main sanctuary, has ribbon windows at the intersection of the roof and the vertical walls, allowing views of the surrounding landscape.
A St. Matthew parishioner related to IFRAA visitors the collaboration between Belluschi and the altar furniture designer, Ernst Schwitter. Schwitter’s heavily carved wooden altar table, pulpit, and crucifix capture the rustic art of the American Northwest, and play off of the lightness of the structure. Later additions to the sanctuary include two projection screens to either side of the altar area.
Belluschi was inspired by his Roman Catholic upbringing in locating the font in the narthex entrance to the church (a practice not common in Lutheran churches). The narthex is distinguished by a skylight. Belluschi’s homage to the natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest is seen in the entrance courtyard and its indigenous plantings. The church exterior is sculptural with its faceted hip roof, surmounted with a glassy monitor that draws natural light into the sanctuary.
Central Lutheran Church
Belluschi’s Central Lutheran Church, sited in a leafy Portland residential neighborhood, dates from 1950. The church exterior is crisply modern, with its brick envelope surmounted by an upper boxy, dark-stained wooden structure, punctuated by a wooden bell tower. The top part of the campanile was recently removed due to the extensive rot of its Douglas fir structure. Plans now call for its restoration.
The church is entered from the side through a stylized wooden Torii gateway, revealing Belluschi’s love of Japanese architecture. One arrives in a long, thin narthex that directs the visitor to the nave to the left. The nave is lit with natural light streaming through red, orange, blue, and purple glass that recalls the stained-glass windows of European cathedrals. The nave’s structure is expressed in its laminated wood arches. The nave seating is ingeniously tiered, with mezzanine-level seating positioned at its far end, elevated over a community room on the opposite side of the narthex. The mezzanine’s slight rake improves sight lines and gives congregants seated there an intimate sense of inclusion.
The sanctuary’s curved-wall geometry is a departure from the building’s orthogonal form. The curved sanctuary wall overlaps the nave walls, permitting two tall south-facing windows to flood the sanctuary with natural light, the source of which is concealed from people sitting in the pews. The robin’s egg–blue sanctuary walls are a departure from the original off-white color.
A presentation for IFRAA visitors of selected current projects by local architects Nancy Merryman, FAIA, Chris DiLoreto, FAIA, and Douglas Benson, FAIA, showed how each of these architects had been influenced by Belluschi. IFRAA chair Michael Landau, FAIA, presented church pastor Brian Brandt with a check for $1,000 to help restore the bell tower. Construction on the $150,000 replacement tower is scheduled to begin in early 2008.
Christ the Teacher Chapel, University of Portland
Completed in 1986 when Belluschi was 87, the Christ the Teacher Chapel at the University of Portland was one of the architect’s last religious buildings. Yet it contains many of the architectural themes, especially regional themes, that can be found across Belluschi’s entire oeuvre, starting with St. Thomas More Catholic Church nearly 50 years earlier. The program for the chapel was a multipurpose building and student center, which required Belluschi to balance prosaic assembly requirements with the ineffable sense of the sacred.
From a distance, the building’s scale appears grand. In approaching the entrance, the building’s scale seems to shrink and relate more to the individual, as one reads the chapel as a single-story building with a hipped roof, topped with a glassy cupola. Belluschi’s life-long fascination with Japanese architecture and design is evident, while the carved wood columns and doors acknowledge the influence of native cultures indigenous to the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. Its walls of gently curved brick and roof of clay tiles soften the building’s orthogonal geometry.
The compact space of the sky-lighted narthex contrasts with the generous gathering space, which is completely ringed with mezzanine seating on an upper level. The chapel’s expressed structure in the form of roof framing and laminated perimeter beams is a hallmark of Belluschi’s religious buildings. The roof structure appears to float over the chapel, thanks to ribbon windows on three sides of the mezzanine.
Architect and Belluschi collaborator Joachim Grube, FAIA, who worked on the chapel, recounted for IFRAA visitors how the restful interior immediately puts one at ease and peace. Although natural light floods the interior, there are few views directly out of the sanctuary to the landscape. Grube noted that Belluschi believed that views to the outside from a sanctuary were a distraction, and at odds with the contemplative nature of sacred space.
Loyola Jesuit Center
A visit to the Loyola Jesuit Center in Portland, designed by Hennebery Eddy Architects of Portland and completed in 2002, was an opportunity to see how the Northwest Regionalism school of design that Belluschi helped to define continues to evolve. Architects from the firm conducted tours for IFRAA visitors of the four-building complex that includes nearly 40,000 square feet for administration offices, priest residences, retreat residences, and a chapel, all housed in buildings of simple, vernacular architecture forms.
The landscape’s importance is immediately seen in the layout of the Jesuit Center, and the fact that four smaller buildings were designed instead of one large facility. This allows the landscape to flow in and around the buildings, along with features such as fountains, watercourses, waterfalls, and lush plantings.
The chapel at the center of the ensemble makes the strongest connection with the landscape. This open, flexible space is protected on the south side by a deep verandah that welcomes visitors. Like other buildings at the center, the chapel is crowned with a gently sloping hipped roof, surmounted by an elegant cross. North and south walls are all glass, with views of mature trees and a variety of rhododendrons. The views engender a sense of composure and reflection, and extend the sacred space out to the landscape with its surrounding, protective trees. All of the buildings at the center are composed of Northwestern indigenous materials such as transparent red cedar siding, wood doors, slate floors, and standing-seam roofs.
Interiors are simply detailed with native woods, with views concentrated on the central courtyard. Retreat residences are ample yet spare, engendering a sense of monastic simplicity. Art works, many of them created by the resident priests or the product of Northwestern native peoples, are carefully integrated with the architecture.
Panel Discussion: Spiritual Space and the Spirit of Place
A panel discussion on the influence of Pietro Belluschi and his work closed the conference. The discussion was moderated by Donald J. Stastny, FAIA, a Portland architect who worked with Belluschi, and included Robert Frasca, FAIA (of Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Architects in Portland, who came under Belluschi’s influence while a student at MIT); Joachim C. Grube, FAIA (who worked on a number of projects with Belluschi after Belluschi’s return to Portland from MIT in the 1970s); and Anthony Belluschi, FAIA, the architect’s son.
Stastny opened the discussion with recollections of practicing in Portland and Belluschi’s return to the city after his time at MIT. The senior architect helped a small group of practitioners to begin an architecture school in Portland. He related one of Belluschi’s most influential quotes, included in an article that was published in Architectural Record in 1963, in which he stressed the attainment of simplicity in architecture. Belluschi confessed in the article, with characteristic modesty, that he was “less secure in my powers as I grow older.”
Stastny invited Anthony Belluschi to share some insights into his father’s influence. Anthony showed images of his family home, drawings by his father, early buildings in Portland and on the East Coast, and paintings of the Tuscan hills completed while in Italy during the 1930s. Anthony noted that the paintings reveal his father’s love of nature and the countryside, and how this helped shape his sense of regionalist design. He found a way of connecting to the landscape and rural architecture of the Pacific Northwest.
Anthony and his brother Peter were not fond of New England when the family moved there in 1950 as Belluschi assumed the deanship of MIT. It was an entirely different experience than growing up in a farmhouse in Oregon, where his close-knit family shared time with friends. Anthony described his childhood as “idyllic,” and the farmhouse revealed his father’s love of wood as a material, which was a revelation to a man who had grown up in Italy, where most buildings are made of stone. “He loved the wood grains, the joinery, and he also cultivated a love of Japanese gardens,” Anthony explained.
An article written by Belluschi in 1958, “Should Your Child Be an Architect?” gave advice to parents about whether their sons should pursue a career in architecture (it was assumed at this time that architecture was not a profession for women). “There is enormous gratification in an architect’s work,” Belluschi wrote. Buildings can be seen and felt, lived in and used, and add to the world’s historic beauty. However, Anthony did not receive similar advice from his father. “He was telling me not to do it,” he explained of his dad, who did not steer him in the direction of an architectural career. Nonetheless, Anthony became involved in his father’s design work. For one of Belluschi’s first projects in New England, the First Lutheran Church in Boston, Anthony made drawings for the pews.
Anthony recounted trips with his parents to Italy and Finland to meet his father’s and mother’s relatives, and the richness of Italian and Finnish design has had a lasting influence on him. After studying architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design, in the 1960s Anthony practiced with Robert Frasca’s firm, and later at Jung Brannen Associates in Boston, before starting his own firm. In the 1970s he collaborated with his father on the design of a wooden church for a Norwegian congregation, which built it by hand. The church was later lost to fire. Anthony said that he believed one of his father’s most spiritual places on the East Coast is the Portsmouth Abbey Church in Rhode Island.
Robert Frasca opened his remarks about his relationship with Pietro Belluschi by describing it as both professional and personal. He was first introduced to Belluschi when he was a freshman at MIT. The Cottage Grove Church had just been published. Belluschi showed the building to his students and talked about the place of the rock in the courtyard. Frasca is Italian, and his father came to the United States the same year that Belluschi did, so he found similarities in his background. “He always kept you honest,” Frasca said of Belluschi in his role as a teacher.
Frasca described Belluschi’s influence beyond his work as a designer. He was an advisor to design competitions (such as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial), and he counseled Paul Mellon on the design of the National Gallery of Art’s East Building in Washington, D.C. Frasca says that Belluschi had a way with people, an ability to “get your own way in the design of buildings. He had a wonderful way of convincing a client that it was almost their idea, a gently subtle, intelligent way of doing it.” Frasca says that what he learned from Belluschi’s architecture was the “the whole idea of simplicity, and correctness.” He was influenced by the region he designed and built in, but he was also very original.
What he learned from the man, Frasca says, was a commitment to architecture and work. He recounted how, in his late 80s, Belluschi was working on a synagogue in St. Louis. “He had developed five different design schemes,” explains Frasca. “It occurred to me that work never killed anyone. He never stopped working, he just wore out. It’s a lesson to all of us. The rewards are considerable, and they have little to do with financial gain. But they have lots to do with what life is all about. That was the biggest lesson I learned from him.”
When Joachim Grube first met Belluschi in 1978, “we hit it off—maybe it had something to do with us both having accents!” Grube worked with Belluschi on a number of projects, including the Portland University Chapel. Grube remembers Belluschi’s passions. “He was extremely interested in politics.” He enjoyed sharing a good Italian wine and exchanging ideas. Grube also praised Belluschi’s abilities as a writer and a poet—“his letters were like poetry,” says Grube, who remembers Belluschi coming to the office in a corduroy suit, a blue shirt, and a yellow tie, topped off with his white hair. As an architect in his late 80s, explained Grube, his perceptions remained quite sharp. “He would listen closely to what people had to say, and he looked for solutions that were tailored for the client,” said Grube, who added that Belluschi’s churches had simplicity and clarity, and the ornament was in the structural systems and how the pieces were joined.
Despite the changes in architectural movements and styles, Belluschi’s architecture remained consistent, noted Stastny, and he kept a clear vision of where he was going. Anthony Belluschi added that his father’s philosophy was to base his architecture of a straightforward plan with elegant materials used in a straightforward way. Even during the postmodern period he stuck to his creed. Anthony believed that his father’s criticism of postmodernism has been borne out in the fact that it did not go very far as a movement, dying almost as fast as it came onto the architecture scene. Belluschi had a particularly dim view of the Portland Building, a postmodern icon.
Anthony Belluschi also commented on the influence of Japanese architecture on his father’s work. He visited Japan several times and the work of A.E. Doyle, with whom he first practiced in Portland, had a Japanese flavor, particularly the Wentz Cottage, in Neahkahnie, Ore., with its coastline site, windswept trees, deep eaves, and shingles. Grube added that, along with Japanese arts and architecture, Belluschi was influenced by the artifacts of Northwestern native peoples and their ties with Alaska. He pointed to the carved columns at the Portland University Chapel as evidence of Belluschi’s fondness for such roots.
Stastny summed up the panel discussion, and Belluschi’s influence on all four men, by recounting Belluschi’s view that, “No less than religion at its best, architecture is the witness and custodian of the spirit of modern man.” Bellushchi found his own road and followed it, gaining inspiration in light and material. Particularly in his religious buildings, said Stastney, Belluschi understood the power of the sound of silence in architecture.