Two Portland Art Museum architects, two divergent fates

Portland Art Museum, Belluschi Building (photo by Brian Libby) 

This Wednesday (August 11) at 12:30, I will be giving a talk in the outdoor courtyard of the Portland Art Museum (between the two buildings) as part of the “Midday Art & Cart” series. The talk will be devoted to the architecture of the two buildings and local food cart Koi Fusion (whose Korean tacos I love) will be serving lunch. The Art Museum is located on the South Park Blocks at 1219 SW Park Ave.

For those of you who can’t make it to the talk, I wanted to pass on what to me is one of the most interesting and personal narratives of the two buildings comprising the museum and the men who designed them. Both were talented, but one got famous while the other died tragically young.

Pietro Belluschi, the Italian native-turned Portlander who designed the principal PAM building (now renamed the Belluschi Building in his honor), is the famous name remembered today. After the Art Museum was built in 1932, it helped launch Belluschi to a celebrated career. His portfolio would come to include the Equitable Building, also in downtown Portland (known today as the Commonwealth), which is credited as the world’s first glass curtain walled office building, the forerunner of thousands of future glass and metal façades. Belluschi also gained fame for many midcentury modern house and church designs as well as the Pan Am Building (with Walter Gropius) and Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center in New York.

The Mark Building, which sits next door to the Belluschi Building, was originally built in 1924, just eight years earlier. Designed by native Portlander Frederick Fritsch who learned his trade at the celebrated firm Whidden & Lewis, it is everything its next door neighbor is not. And Fritsch unfortunately had a future afterward that was as short lived and tragic as Belluschi’s was long and successful.

Pietro Belluschi, 1958 (image courtesy Life magazine) 

Fritsch, a Portland native, was just eight years older than Belluschi and had been a World War I veteran. Fritch also married Oregon’s first licensed architect female, Mary Goodin, in 1928. But unfortunately his life ended tragically early. He suffered from a painful illness that forced him to retire at the age of 38, in 1931. Which, ironically, was right about the time Belluschi’s building was being constructed. Fritsch wound up committing suicide five years later, although his wife lived to be 93.

Belluschi said in 1931 of the modern style he was fighting for the right to see built as the Portland Art Museum’s home that the “…standard mask called ‘style’, whether Georgian, Italian, or English, is just a bad formula, and only our lack of imagination has tolerated its application on buildings where a new set of ideas had to be given a new form....Let us not try to twist the body to fit the suit but let us build a new suit consistent with the body.”

The Masonic Temple didn’t just embrace a pre-existing historical style, but a whole array of them. The building itself may have been based partially on one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus. It’s also got Greek influences in the stone colonnade and Persian influences in the window grilles. Then inside there were rooms with Moorish, Norman, and Louis the 16th styles.

Portland Art Museum, Mark Building (photo by Brian Libby) 

Belluschi was clearly making a statement with his building that he’d wanted to go in a different direction than this design by Frederick Fritsch. It took an intervention from Frank Lloyd Wright on Pietro Belluschi’s behalf to convince the Art Museum’s board of trustees to approve what was then a boldly clean-lined and functional space. But more than 80 years later, the two architects’ work is still bound together. And since the Art Museum purchased the Masonic Temple in the 1990s and transformed it into the Mark Building in 2005, they share exhibit space and even an underground tunnel for a connection.

Although I believe the 2005 renovation and expansion by Ann Beha Architects could have been more of an interesting hybrid of old and new building,  it was probably the right thing to do for the building to retain the Masonic Temple rather than tearing the building down to build an entirely new exhibit and gathering space, especially given that the latter building’s original ballrooms remain often used by the museum and the community. And one must not forget the practical fact that the expansion added several floors of natural light-filled space for viewing modern and contemporary art. Plus, the more you learn about the curious connection and divergent fates of Belluschi and Fritsch, the more the two buildings seem siblings.

It also goes to show that whatever the creative discipline, be it architecture, music or painting, while there are always a few iconic names who produce something lasting at a young age and are never heard from again, more often than not success is dependent on survival, and having the opportunity to put in years and years of work to make yourself a success. It wasn't a coincidence that Pietro Belluschi got that Art Museum commission. He'd been a museum member for years before his building was completed. He'd also left Italy for America at a young age and, despite his old-world personal elegance, worked his way up the ranks as a student at Cornell and then a young immigrant in Portland. Belluschi earned everything he got as a legendary architect, but unlike Frederick Fritsch, fate also gave him the opportunity.

Comments

[LaValle]

Listen to the loud applause from the couch here in NW Portland. Thank you for posting such an interesting article on these two buildings and these two architects. I have read a great deal about Belluschi and listened to your Artist's Talk at PAM a year or so ago. After reading about Frederick Fritsch here, I am going to have to see if I can find out more ... I'm hoping to be at your talk at noon.

[LaValle]

More applause. Your talk is happening as I type. My apologies for confusing you with Randy. Thank you for doing this talk today.

[Aneeda]

It's unfortunate that many aspects of Andrea Cochran's beautiful courtyard design were destroyed during the renovation.

[Miron da Serra Circular]

I have never seen his work before. Looks a lot like Unicamp, Brazils biggest University. Very nice...

[Rick Potestio]

Thanks for the interesting viewpoints. I would like to elaborate on your comments.

Pietro Belluschi was a very talented architect. He is credited, rightly so, with being a remarkable inovator. His church designs revolutionized church architecture, and of course, he was the first to achieve the bauhaus dream of a truley glass encased building.

That said, I think the greatest lesson today's architects can learn from Pietro Belluschi, was his humilty and his conviction to meld his architecture to the buildings and urban scape around them, ie, the "context", that most overused and under appreciated word.

Look at the Masonic Temple, the Fritsch building, and compare the Art Museum to it. You will immediately note the that both buildings share a similar composition, symetry, massing, relationship of wall to opening, base walls framing the building, window trim, flat cornicelike treatement and wall surfaces in brick and stone.

While Belluschi's building may have seemed radical in realtionship to the neo-georgian style the Museum Board sought, it is not out of step with the basic stylistic attitude of its neighbor. Rather, it is very complimentary. It is for that simple reason that the two make such a great ensemble.

I wish that the renovations to the Masonic Temple had been so respectful. Ann Beha's interventions are mostly in keeping with the original, but she could not resist interjecting the horid protrusion illustrated above.

It makes me think of what is proposed to happen to Lincon Hall. The last renderings I saw had an equally agressive and inappropriate addition on the Broadway side of the building, in a place where a subtle symetrical or classically inspired gesture might be more timeless and appropriate. I am not advocating for sylistic adhearance, but for a design approach that is based in continuing an architectural dialogue rather than interupting it with a totally new language or contrary statement.

As Portland grows and infills, I would hope that architects look to the precedent of Belluschi and his peers... they created a city that had an incredible design cohesiveness.... it was not by accident or by sylistic convention, but a result of mutual respect and the relization that in the making of a city, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.