Pietro Belluschi

Pietro Bellushi comes from Ancona, in Italy, Where he was born in 1899. He passed, by way of training in Rome, and a degree n civil engineering at Cornell, to the office of A. E. Doyle in Portland, Oregon, which he served as chief designer from 1927 until the firm was dissolved in 1943. He then set up his own practice, but this, in turn no longer exists as a normally constitutd office and since he was made Dean of Departement of Architecture at MIT, Belluschi has wored as a roving consultant in design, especially in the fields of church architecture, shopping centres, and office buildings; His work in these three fields is so dramatically dissimilar that he eludes routine evaluations as an architect in terms of styl--whether personal or generalized--and he has been appreciated mainly for his achievement in building up a position in which he can design buildings that commad respect in the often deadening mental climate of a provincial city--though in this respect Portland is a a-tyical as he is. But the stylistic adaptability is as integral a part of his make-up as the community-con-scious, for both are aspects of what he calls ‘the kind of integrity that breeds variety as nature will have it’--nature in this instance clearly subsuming the character of the community as well as the building’s function.
His churches and houses, wood-framed, wood-clad, and often likened to local barns, were early in the field of ‘red-wood vernacular’ and were taking circumspect note of Japanese architecture as long ago as 1938. On the other hand, his business buildings, square, smooth and sharp-edged, include in their number the Equitable Building of 1948, which anticipates much of what was later to be done at UN and Lever House.