American Italians in Architecture
Pietro Belluschi
Robert Venturi
Pietro Belluschi (b.
Ancona, August 18, 1899; d. Portland, OR 14 February 14, 1994)
Pietro Belluschi, born in Ancona, Italy in 1899, trained as an
engineer at both the University of Rome and at Cornell University, emigrating to the U. S.
in 1923. After working as a mining engineer, he joined the Portland based architecture
firm of A. E. Doyle. Belluschi acted as chief designer with A. E. Doyle for several years
before becoming a partner in 1933. He assumed control of the firm under his own name in
1943. During his years in Portland, Belluschi designed several commercial buildings in the
evolving International Style. Although his commercial designs owed much to the
International Style, his domestic and religious work showed a preference for regional
traditions and native materials. While contemporary firms rejected tradition, Doyle's
office maintained a strong Beaux Arts tradition. From 1951 to 1965, Belluschi was Dean of
Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the nation's
oldest. His buildings include MIT's MacGregor House dormitory at 450 Memorial Drive,
opened in 1970.
In 1948 he completed the Equitable Building In Portland, Oregon, an office building
originally 12 stories high and later 13, that set styles for hundreds that came after. It
was the first to be sheathed in aluminum, the first to employ double-glazed window panels,
and the first to be completely sealed and fully air-conditioned. It was the first 'pure
glass box.'
The New York Times described him as a modernist architect whose work ranged from elegantly
simple structures at the start of his career to such massive urban skyscrapers as the Pan
Am Building in New York City and the Bank of America in San Francisco, and the Boston and
Keystone buildings in Boston. He participated in the design of more than 1,000 buildings
in all, among them the Juilliard School of Music and Alice Tully Hall in New York, which
were done in association with a colleague from MIT, Eduardo F. Catalano.
He was widely known as an educator during this period, writing and lecturing frequently.
But he continued his architectural practice, doing most of the work at a drafting board at
his Back Bay home.
At his retirement, MIT President Julius A. Stratton praised Dean Belluschi as "an
inspiration to faculty members and students alike," adding that "his taste and
judgment" had helped shape the Institute's own building plans and would be
permanently reflected in the development of the campus during that period.
He continued: "During a period when contemporary architecture was dominated by a
spirit of impersonal functionalism, he sought to combine elegance and beauty with
usefulness. Here at MIT his creative spirit has been a dominant factor in the development
of the School of Architecture and Planning... He has brought to the Institute a number of
outstanding new members to the faculty. He has supported with vigor and imagination the
extension and strengthening of the graduate program in the Department of City and Regional
Planning [now Urban Studies and Planning]. Outstanding among the developments in planning
during his tenure as dean were the establishment in 1958 of the PhD degree in planning,
and the founding, with Harvard, in 1959 of the Joint Center for Urban Studies."
A good biography of belluschi is Meredith L. Clausen's Spiritual Space: The religious
Archtecture of Pietro Belluschi, August 1992.
Robert Venturi has been described as one of the most original talents in contemporary architecture. He has also been credited with saving modern architecture from itself. He has done this by being eloquent verbally with his writings and visually with the forms of his buildings. Like other Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureates before him, he is a writer, a teacher, an artist and philosopher, as well as an architect.
One of his earliest memories was when on one of his first trips to New York City "— maybe I was 10 years old — my father's impulsively instructing the cab driver to pull over and wait as we approached the old Penn station on Seventh Avenue, and then conducting me down the gallery that overlooked the great hall based on the Baths of Caracalla."
Venturi graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1947 and received his M.F.A. there in 1950. He furthered his studies as a Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome from 1954 to 1956 where "by means of its location, I might exist every day in architectural heaven, and learn new lessons via Michelangelo, Borromini, Brasini, hilltowns, and other historical mentors and places, and where I discovered the validity of Mannerism in art for our time, and from whose perspective as an expatriate I could better perceive my own country and the genius of its everyday phenomena, to see the Piazza Navona and Main Street.
Shortly after his return to this country, he taught an architectural theory course at the University of Pennsylvania, School of Architecture. In the past three decades since, he has lectured at numerous other institutions including Yale, Princeton, Harvard, UCLA, Rice and the American Academy in Rome.
In his first book, "Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture," published in 1966 by the Museum of Modern Art, Venturi posed the question, "Is not Main Street almost all right?" He was arguing for what he called "the messy vitality" of the built environment. As he puts it, "We were calling for an architecture that promotes richness and ambiguity over unity and clarity, contradiction and redundancy over harmony and simplicity." He was challenging Modernism with the multiple solutions available from history—a history defined as relating not only to the specific building site, but the history of all architecture. He wanted architecture to deal with the complexities of the city, to become more contextual.
In his original preface to the book, Venturi states, "As an architect I try to be guided not by habit but by a conscious sense of the past—by precedent, thoughtfully considered." He continues later, "As an artist I frankly write about what I like in architecture: complexity and contradiction. From what we find we like—what we are easily attracted to—we can learn much of what we really are."
It would be impossible to discuss Robert Venturi's writing without mentioning his famous response, "Less is a bore," to modernist Mies van der Rohe's dictum, "Less is more." This was Venturi's way "to make the point that modern architecture had become too simplistic. Venturi is an architect whose work cannot be categorized; to him, there is never a single solution. Lest anyone try to pigeon-hole him as a postmodernist, he declared that he was practicing modern architecture, and paraphrased his own words earlier about Main Street, "the modern movement was almost all right." emphasizing his close affinity to the basic tenets of modernism, while still giving importance to human use, memories, comfort and entertainment. Venturi has made it possible to accept the casual and the improvised in the built environment.
In his first book, Venturi declared, "Architects can bemoan or try to ignore them (referring to the honky-tonk elements in buildings) or even try to abolish them, but they will not go away. Or they will not go away for a long time, because architects do not have the power to replace them (nor do they know what to replace them with), and because these commonplace elements accommodate existing needs for variety and communication. Architecture is evolutionary as well as revolutionary. As an art it will acknowledge what is and what ought to be, the immediate and the speculative."
Venturi's early professional work was in the office of Eero Saarinen, where among other projects, he worked on the design of the Milwaukee County War Memorial Center. He also worked in the offices of Louis I. Kahn and Oscar Stonorov in Philadelphia. One of his first projects to be built that captured the attention of the architectural community was a house for his mother in the Chestnut Hill section of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 1989, it received the AIA's Twenty-five Year Award as a design of "enduring significance that has withstood the test of time." Scully described it as, "Disarmingly simple after the spatial antics of late Modernism, its plan...is based on a symbolic conception rather than upon one that is purely spatially abstract."
Robert Venturi's wife, Denise Scott Brown, is an architect, planner, author, educator. She has been a partner in the firm since 1969 and his collaborator in the evolution of architectural theory and design for the past 30 years. She is noted for bringing particular attention to the relationship of architecture, planning and social conditions, and is primarily responsible for planning, urban design and architectural programming.
Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour collaborated on another book, published in 1972, "Learning from Las Vegas," a further exploration of urban sprawl and the suburbs in relation to their architectural theories. A collection of their writings was also published in 1984, "A View from the Campidoglio: Selected Essays, 1953-1984."
In one of the essays in the latter collection, Robert Venturi confessed, "Alvar Aalto's work has meant the most to me of all the work of the Modern masters. It is for me the most moving, the most relevant, the richest source to learn from in terms of its art and technique. Like all work that lives beyond its time, Aalto's can be interpreted in many ways. Each interpretation is more or less true for its moment because work of such quality has many dimensions and layers of meaning." With a characteristic Venturi human, humorous touch, he added, "But Aalto's most endearing characteristic for me as I struggle to complete this essay, is that he didn't write about architecture."
In one of his essays in "A View from the Campidoglio," Venturi says, "When I was young, a sure way to distinguish great architects was through the consistency and originality of their work...This should no longer be the case. Where the Modern masters' strength lay in consistency, ours should lie in diversity."
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