Ninety-two years ago, Pietro Belluschi was a young, unknown architect who conceived of an unadorned design for the Portland Art Museum. If constructed, the modern building would forever change the architecturally conservative city. But it wouldn’t be easy.
Museum trustees and donors pushed for an ornamental Georgian style. At a crucial time in 1931, Belluschi turned to the most famous architect in the world, Frank Lloyd Wright, for support of his building that would “favor the artwork to be exhibited rather than itself.”
Belluschi, who would later become Oregon’s most revered designer and one of its most highly awarded citizens as well as the dean of architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explained he was guided by the direction and intensity of natural light to create a succession of visual experiences.
He asked the 64-year-old Wright: How do you go about trying to sell something that is not the old thing?
Wright, an iconoclast celebrated for using native materials to blend with the environment, responded from his Taliesin home and studio in Wisconsin, on July 6, 1931: “My dear Belluschi, I think your plan simple and sensible, and the exterior would mark an advance in culture for Portland.”
Wright’s stamp of approval and Belluschi’s handsome museum design vaulted the 31-year-old architect’s career. In turn, for decades, Belluschi’s Oregon buildings have drawn many young architects to Portland, and the region continues to benefit.
The ageless 1932 Portland Art Museum, which anchors the downtown South Park Blocks green space, is recognized as one of the 20th century’s most distinguished art exhibition buildings.
Across Southwest Park Avenue from the museum is the Oregon Historical Society (OHS), which held an event on Aug. 18, the 124th anniversary of Belluschi’s birth, focused on established architects helping emerging architects.
Anthony Belluschi stands near a portrait of his father, Pietro Belluschi, with Anthony's wife Marti, left, at the Oregon Historical Society's Pietro Belluschi Architectural Resource Center on Aug. 18, 2023.Pietro Belluschi Architectural Resource Center
Guests heard presentations on “The Legacy of Architects on Other Architects — Inspiring and Mentoring” and toured the Pietro Belluschi Architectural Resource Center, a collaborative learning and meeting space within OHS’s research library.
The special collections library holds more than 20,000 drawings by Belluschi, the largest collection of his archives on the West Coast. Syracuse University in New York has a larger collection.
Safeguarding original drawings, reports, correspondence and visual media at libraries and other research institutions can preserve the architects’ vision and help historians track their career. Archives open to the public also allow property owners, neighborhood preservation groups and others to find accurate information beyond what’s on file at city building departments.
OHS’s research library has more than 550 collections related to the built environment, making it one of the largest archives of architecture, engineering, landscape and interior design in the Northwest, according to library director Shawna Gandy.
People can visit OHS’ newly renovated reading room Tuesday through Saturday or view digital copies of documents at digitalcollections.ohs.org. More online material is being added over time, said Gandy. Information is also online at the Oregon Encyclopedia, a resource maintained by OHS’s library staff.
Notable people represented in the library’s design holdings include:
- A.E. Doyle, architect of the 1913 Multnomah County Central Library, downtown 1909 Meier & Frank Building and buildings at Reed College.
- Margery Hoffman Smith, a painter and interior designer who was called the “grande dame of Arts and Crafts” for her work at the 1938 Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood.
- Architect Saul Zaik, noted for his midcentury modern homes, especially the 1971 Zidell House atop a ship’s mast.
- Architect and educator Thomas Hacker, who inspired generations of students at the University of Oregon and designed the 1982 High Desert Museum in Bend, 1997 Columbia Gorge Discovery Center & Museum in The Dalles and 2000 Woodstock Library.
The Belluschi family said they donated to OHS’s research library to encourage other Pacific Northwest architects to donate their archives.
The personal archive of architect Robert (”Bob”) Frasca, whose Zimmer, Gunsul, Frasca (ZGF) firm designed the Portland International Airport and Oregon Convention Center among other landmarks, will be donated to the library’s architectural collections.
Frasca’s widow, Jeanne Giordano Frasca, spoke at the Aug. 18 event at OHS’s downtown building, which Frasca designed with Belluschi serving as a consultant.
Giordano Frasca told the crowd her husband earned a master’s degree in planning and urban Studies from MIT when Belluschi was the dean. After graduation, at Belluschi’s suggestion, Frasca moved to Portland.
“Bob designed the Oregon Historical Society building with Pietro Belluschi as also happened with the addition to the original Portland Art Museum across the street, so it feels like home,” Jeanne Giordano Frasca told The Oregonian/OregonLive. “Since a large part of Pietro’s archives will reside at OHS, I like the idea of mentor and mentee continuing to connect.”
Pietro Belluschi’s legacy
The 1948 Burkes-Belluschi House that Pietro Belluschi designed in Portland's West Hills was restored and expanded by his son, architect Anthony Belluschi.Sally Painter
Pietro Belluschi is the only Oregonian to receive both the National Medal of Arts for his lifetime achievements and the American Institute of Architects’ highest honor, the Gold Medal.
He arrived in the U.S. in 1922 from Italy, where he was born was Aug. 18, 1899 and where he was awarded three crosses for bravery while serving as a First Lieutenant in the Italian army in World War I.
Belluschi knew few words in English but possessed indomitable determination as well as an engineering degree from the University of Rome. He earned his second degree in civil engineering at Cornell University in New York, which he attended on a scholarship.
In 1925, Belluschi arrived in Portland and quickly found a job as a draftsman at A.E. Doyle’s prestigious architectural firm. He later bought the firm and opened Pietro Belluschi, Architect in 1942.
With the 1938 Jennings Sutor House on Northwest Skyline Boulevard, Belluschi employed the hallmarks of Pacific Northwest Modernism that he and his architectural contemporaries John Yeon and Van Evera Bailey introduced to their residential clients and that endear them to modernists today.
The style’s warmth relies on simple materials such as local wood, stone or brick, and “the judicious use of such intangibles as space, light, texture and color,” Belluschi explained.
The 1940 St. Thomas More Catholic Church in Portland’s Southwest Hills represented Belluschi’s first new church design in the Northwest Regional style.
Between 1930 and 1950, before his firm was acquired by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Belluschi achieved international prominence, primarily for his 1948 design of the Commonwealth Building (originally the Equitable Savings and Loan Association Building). It was the first office tower with a glass and aluminum curtain wall and air conditioning, and is still accepted as a seminal work by prominent architects Eero Saarinen, I.M. Pei and others.
In 1951, at the height of his influence, Belluschi turned away from his $150,000-a-year practice to accept a $15,000-a-year academic job as the dean of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning.
While living in Boston, he began a second career as a collaborator and design consultant, helping to pioneer a new field in which influential architects lend their name and a critical eye to projects actually executed by other firms.
He partnered with other top architects to refine projects such as New York’s 1963 Pan Am (MetLife) Building with Walter Gropius and the 1969 Brutalist-style Juilliard School at Lincoln Center, which has since been altered.
One of Pietro’s sons, Anthony Belluschi, is an award-winning architect in his own right. He designed the American Airlines Terminal at O’Hare in Chicago, Park Meadows Retail Resort in Colorado and Les Quatre Temps in Paris, France, among other projects.
Anthony spoke at the Aug. 18 event about his father’s contributions and influence as an architect, educator and mentor to others, including his son. Anthony showed photos of his own designs, which are distinctive and yet follow Pietro’s vision and continue the Belluschi heritage.
Pietro and Anthony collaborated on commercial and residential projects in Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Ohio as well as the Emmanuel Lutheran Church in Silverton.
After Pietro’s long, prolific career ended shortly before he died at age 94 in 1994, Anthony was asked by people who owned a Pietro Belluschi-designed structure to help them make sensitive renovations.
Anthony’s best known restoration is the peerless 1948 Burkes-Belluschi House in Portland’s West Hills. No one but Anthony had the intimate knowledge to carefully renovate and expand this celebrated dwelling to complement his father’s vision.
The Burkes-Belluschi house was one of Pietro Belluschi’s earliest Northwest modern residences and an offer to buy it from the original owner motivated him to return, in 1973, to the city where his reputation for innovation and elegant buildings began.
Pietro spent his last years here. His second wife, Marjorie, continued to live in the house until she passed away and in 2009, son Anthony and daughter-in-law Marti inherited the property and saved the worn, but unaltered house from the wrecking ball.
Drawing from conversations father and son had decades before, Anthony conceived of ways to expand the meticulously engineered and crafted home, among other improvements. Anthony converted an original breezeway into an elongated gallery with a skylight that gracefully joins the old with the new.
In 2014, Anthony was awarded Restore Oregon’s DeMuro Award for preserving, restoring and updating the house and designing a standalone guest suite and studio in the backyard.
More than 3,000 architects and preservation supporters have toured the private Burkes-Belluschi House since most of the renovations were completed in 2012.
“I am very pleased and proud of the ongoing interest in my father and his work,” Anthony told the gathering at OHS. “It is a pleasure to have so many join in celebrating his 124th birthday. We hope that our presentation and the archives will provide some type of inspiration for everyone.”
Anthony and Marti Belluschi have been working with the Oregon Historical Society since they designed and curated the 2012 exhibit “The Architecture and Legacy of Pietro Belluschi.” They then donated more of Pietro’s archives to OHS and created a name for the library’s extensive architecture archive, the Pietro Belluschi Architectural Resource Center.
“We are hopeful that national recognition of Pietro’s name will encourage use of the vast OHS architecture archives,” said Marti Belluschi. “We believe that an historical society is a good place for Pietro’s archives because architecture is so reflective of history. As centuries pass, societies are often judged by their art and architecture, exemplifying the uses for buildings, materials, new techniques, designs, styles and more.”
Pietro’s great grandson, sculptor Christopher Belluschi, also attended the event, with friends commenting that the artistic gene continues in the family.
Wright in Oregon
John Waters of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy in Chicago thinks the Wright-Belluschi connection deserves more research.
“From what I know of the independence of the Portland modernist story and Wright’s independence from mainline European modernism, it makes sense that Belluschi would reach out to Wright, an American modernist, to ratify what he was trying to promote in Portland,” said Waters.
In early May, Waters and others with the nonprofit Wright conservancy visited Anthony and Marti Belluschi at the Burkes-Belluschi House and toured the 1950 Zion Lutheran Church, which Pietro designed in downtown Portland. The group also spent time at the only Wright-designed structure built in Oregon, the Gordon House in Silverton.
The Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy was instrumental in saving the house Wright designed in 1957 from demolition and moving it near the Oregon Garden where it was reconstructed and opened to the public in March 2002.
Wright gave a lecture at the University Oregon on March 7, 1931, and Marti Belluschi wonders if Pietro attended and if that encouraged him to write his letter, “knowing that they shared a vision,” she said. “However, we have always believed that he wrote to Wright because of Wright’s prestige and the value of his opinion.”
Marti Belluschi spoke at the OHS event, saying Wright was generous to respond to an unknown architect in 1931, and in 1948, Pietro returned the favor by spearheading a movement demanding that Wright be awarded the AIA Gold Medal, “something resisted by the East Coast conservative architects leading the organization,” she said.
John Waters found a copy of Pietro’s letter to Wright at the Getty Research Institute library’s special collections in Los Angeles. The original letter is at the Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library at Columbia University, which, with the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, acquired Wright’s archives.
Waters, who calls Belluschi one of the great American modernists, would like to see more research on Belluschi reaching out to Wright. And Waters knows where someone should start: the Pietro Belluschi Architectural Resource Center at OHS’s research library. “It’s a wonderful facility,” he said.
Visitors to the Oregon Historical Society’s research library can enter through the building’s main lobby at 1200 S.W. Park Ave. in downtown Portland Tuesday through Saturday (see ohs.org/library for hours and requirements).
— Janet Eastman | 503-294-4072
jeastman@oregonian.com | @janeteastman
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