Born in 1899 in Ancona, Italy, Pietro Belluschi served in World War I, after which he received a doctorate in architectural engineering from the University of Rome in 1922. In 1923 he came to America on an exchange scholarship and earned a civil engineering degree from Cornell University. In 1924 he was hired as an electrical engineer by the Bunker Hill/Sullivan Company in Kellogg, Idaho. He joined the A.E. Doyle architectural firm in Portland in 1925, and after Doyle’s death in 1928, he became the chief designer of the firm and went on to design numerous widely known buildings. In 1943, Belluschi bought the firm and changed its name to his own. From 1950 (when he sold the firm to S.O.M.) to 1965, he served as Dean of Architecture and Planning at MIT and as a design consultant on major architectural commissions. He was awarded the AIA Gold Medal in 1972.
Belluschi based his designs on the simple shapes and materials found in the Pacific Northwest and tried to balance the needs of the building’s inhabitants with the goal of creating an eloquent design. His goal: To design buildings from the inside out, where the standard is the human being and the kind of satisfaction it brings that person. “There has always been this difficulty for me in accepting something that has no obvious truth in it. Saint Thomas Aquinas said that the mind must rejoice, as well as the senses.”
During the two decades between 1930 and 1950, Belluschi dominated Portland and northwest architecture. No other city has experienced such a succession of inter-related architectural firms as the Whidden and the Lewis-A.E. Doyle-Belluschi triumvirate, each dominating a successive 20-year period from 1890 to 1950.
Two of his earliest designs portend the direction of much of his later work. The first, designed in 1927, but never built, was an addition to Cloud Cap Inn, the log and shingle structure on the east side of Mt. Hood. Belluschi’s proposed addition of shingled gable forms showed respect for the original design and for the setting. In 1928, he designed the eastside office of the Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company. The design, a conventional version of the “English Renaissance,” in split brick and sienna travertine, anticipates the early schemes for the main building of the Portland Art Museum, completed in 1932.
Pietro Belluschi’s work includes more than 50 churches, 12 performing art centers and many houses and commercial buildings in Portland, New York, Boston, Baltimore, San Francisco and other major cities.
At age 90 in 1990, he said in an interview that he felt architects are appreciated but that they don’t have as much impact on the real life of cities and urban areas as they should or could. They are simply the tailor of fancy clothes for pretty ladies. He was concerned that there wasn’t much done on housing, and that this was very important.
His thoughts for young people entering the profession, “I think that you should rejoice in the combination of having all the flaws of being in love, with all of its shortcomings, and of finding the spirit that moves…your feet have to be on the ground, always, but do not suppress the desire to be different, to explore, to test.”
Pietro Belluschi died in Portland on February 14, 1994