Art: Belluschi’s Beautiful Barns

Buildings that look like barns—which many people consider very beautiful—have made the reputation of Pietro Bel-luschi, architect of Portland, Ore. This week for the first time he plans to hang out his own shingle. He will hang it on the same Jefferson Street house (under Portland’s Vista ”Suicide” Bridge), long occupied by the defunct firm of which he had been a member (A. E. Doyle & Associate).

Very much like barns are Belluschi’s private houses. Less so is his Finley Mortuary, chosen by the Association of Federal Architects in 1938 as one of the nation’s 100 best buildings erected since World War I.

Belluschi, an admirer of Oregon’s low, richly weathered barns, began by designing long, low, rambling houses with wide eaves, which gave “a feeling of protection” against the heavy northwest rains. Because eaves cut off too much light, Belluschi introduced many large, carefully placed windows. His materials were mostly local woods—fir, spruce, cedar, hemlock—which, left in their natural state, colored sumptuously with age and weathering.

Black-haired, grey-eyed Pietro Belluschi was born in Ancona, Italy in 1899, served as an officer in the Italian Army in World War I. After getting an architectural degree in Rome in 1922, Belluschi came to the U.S. to study engineering at Cornell. He was hired in 1925 by Portland’s architect A. E. Doyle. Two years later he was head designer for the firm. Says he: “Barns lack pompousness. To say my houses look like barns is flattering.”