Eastern approach to Cathedral of Saint Mary (Brian Libby)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
Over the last 20 years, writing about architecture in Portland has inevitably and happily meant becoming familiar with the work of the city’s most acclaimed architect: the late Pietro Belluschi (1899-1994).
I’ve had the good fortune to visit a lot of great Belluschi buildings over the years, whether it’s cultural landmarks like the Portland Art Museum, innovative commercial buildings like the Equitable, or a succession of houses and churches that helped define the Northwest Modern style. Though each design responds to specific site and topography conditions as well as client needs, they share a connecting thread: a cohesive yet never oppressive visual language.
Yet the overwhelming majority of Belluschi’s buildings I’ve visit in person have been here in Portland. Though I’ve been to the Pan Am Building and the Julliard School in New York, as well as the Rohm & Haas Building in Philadelphia, there’s always been so much more. Particularly after he left Portland to become dean of MIT’s school of architecture in 1951, Belluschi began to see buildings built all over the country, especially in cultural capitols like, NYC, Boston and San Francisco.
So recently when I began planning a Bay Area reporting trip, I knew I had to make time to see the Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Assumption, designed or at least co-designed by Belluschi and completed in 1971. I’d been meaning to visit for so many years.
It was worth the wait, for St. Mary’s Cathedral, as it’s commonly known, is an uncommonly great building. The pictures I took don't do it justice, but nobody else's seem to either.
Even though San Francisco is one of the most beautiful of American cities, with some exceptional and iconic architecture, I think this building ranks among its finest. Don’t take my word for it. Take it from their urban design and architecture critic, John King, who ranked in his SF all-time top 25 and called St. Mary’s “one of the city's most startling buildings.”
The paraboloid-shaped dome of St. Mary's (Brian Libby)
Occupying a prominent position on a hilltop between the Japantown and Tenderloin districts, the cathedral straddles a superblock so that streets to the east and west like O’Farrell Street, where I was coming from, become a processional leading there. Set back from the street on all four sides, including a large northern entry plaza, the cathedral begins with a square base that gives way to a huge sculptural form that acts like a traditional dome but is instead comprised of four hyperbolic paraboloids. When I posted exterior photos of the cathedral’s white travertine-clad, quadruple-paraboloid shape to Instagram, more than one person suggested the 1971 building seems to prefigure Frank Gehry’s iconic sculptural architecture such as 1997’s Guggenheim Bilbao and 2003’s Walt Disney Concert Hall. Maybe so: it’s a simpler, more restrained basic geometry by comparison, but enjoys a similarly striking presence.
Inside, the paraboloids create the equivalent of a dome—a soaring volume—but seem to rise higher, their thin concrete shells sloping inward in a kind of coffered pattern, coming together to form a giant cross of stained glass. As King writes, “Except for a literal cross at the summit, and an ornate bronze entryway, the travertine-skinned structure is modern as can be. Yet its aura is as majestic as any cathedral of old, commanding attention despite the presence of taller towers nearby.”
Inside the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Assumption (Brian Libby)
And even when compared to the finest buildings in Pietro Belluschi’s portfolio, St. Mary’s cathedral seems to my eyes, or at least after this first visit, as good it gets even for this legendary architect. Yet on paper, it’s only partially his design.
Replacing a nearby circa-1891 Gothic Revival church that had been destroyed by fire in 1962, the new St. Mary’s represented the city’s most important religious commission in a generation, and a mix of both regionally and nationally-renowned names were rumored to be interested, including the great Louis Kahn and Marcel Breuer as well as San Francisco architect Mario Ciampi, who designed the excellent Berkeley Art Museum, John Carl Warnecke, who designed the Hawaii state capitol, several buildings at Stanford University, and John F. Kennedy’s eternal flame gravesite at Arlington National Cemetery.
But none of those architects got the job. Instead, in 1963 the commission went to a trio of local architects: Angus McSweeney, Paul Ryan and John Lee. This met with immediate pushback. In the San Francisco Chronicle, Gerald Adams wrote that “the reaction was a stunned, ‘Who?’” Architecture critic Allen Temko went even further, particularly attacking McSweeney: “One cannot possibly associate his name with a single significant piece of modern architecture.” Things only got worse when a preliminary design was said to be underwhelming. The editor of Worship magazine wrote, “It reminds me of the effort of a camel and a donkey to mate.”
This is the point at which the archdiocese of San Francisco hired Pietro Belluschi to join the team. And Belluschi, anticipating a soaring concrete structure, suggested the team add the great Italian engineer and architect Pier Luigi Nervi, known for his work with reinforced concrete including 1957’s Palazzetto dello Sport in Rome (the latter a forerunner of America’s domed stadiums of the 1960s and ‘70s).
Belluschi and Nervi were a natural fit as collaborators: both Italians born in the 1890s trained as engineers who practice architecture. And they already had enjoyed a kind of collaboration by proxy in Portland: 1960’s Memorial Coliseum. Its lead designer from Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, Myron Goldsmith, had studied under Nervi at the University of Rome for two years on a Fulbright fellowship. But most of the architectural staff at SOM’s Portland office had come from Belluschi’s sale of his firm to Skidmore when he became dean of the MIT architecture school in 1951.
Nervi's Palazzetto dello Sport in Rome (Eduardo Pompeo)
Aircraft hangar in Orvieto, Italy (Mario Carrieri)
Is the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Assumption truly a Belluschi building? Does it have that Belluschi fingerprint? I certainly think so, although Nervi is there too. When I got home from San Francisco, I consulted University of Washington professor Meredith Clausen’s definitive career survey, Pietro Belluschi: Modern American Architect, published in 1994. Looking through that book at other religious architecture he designed, such as 1966’s Immanuel Lutheran Church in Silverton, the interior wood wall patterns are unmistakably similar to the inside of the concrete parabolic interior as it soars to the building’s crowning cross. I think Nervi helped Belluschi design and engineer the form of the paraboloids, and he had employed a similar language with previous reinforced-concrete-based projects. But I think the vision was Belluschi’s not just because you can see his visual fingerprint in the details and materials (including the travertine exterior), but becuase he was the only accomplished church architect. It’s harder to discern what contribution came from the McSweeney, Ryan and Lee. Belluschi didn’t really have a firm of his own at this point; he was just a consultant officially. So maybe these local guys were the architect of record: the people who stamp the drawings and carry out the details after Belluschi and Nervi came up with the concept.
I actually happened to exchange emails with Clausen about St. Mary’s, after I was surprised to find fairly little about the project in Modern American Architect. She reminded me that one of her other books, Spiritual Space: The Religious Architecture of Pietro Belluschi, includes a thorough account of the cathedral. “It’s one of his finest buildings, to my mind, despite the fact he himself felt the exterior was flawed,” Clausen wrote. “It’s a superb building, one of his best.” I also posed the question of perhaps influencing Frank Gehry. “He undoubtedly knew PB’s work,” she wrote, adding that she plans to ask Gehry during an already-planned upcoming interview for a book on architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable. “I’d be willing to wager he admired him considerably more than people like [Walter] Gropius.”
Inside St. Mary looking east and southwest (Brian Libby)
Last Saturday I arrived at St. Mary’s in the early afternoon under quintessentially golden San Francisco skies: that almost Mediterranean light that, when the fog and clouds clear, makes the city so exceptionally beautiful sometimes.
As I passed through the ornate bronze entryway, a wedding rehearsal had just completed and members of the extended wedding party were exiting, leaving the entire cathedral practically to myself. I stayed for nearly an hour, sitting in different pews and alternately staring up at the massive volume beneath the skylight-cross or out at the postcard view of the city at the corners of the building’s glass-ensconced base.
Over the years on various travels, occasionally I've had while visiting a great building what I call a moment of wonder: an experience powerful enough to outweigh all the stress and anxiety and logistical headaches and exhaustion of travel. I had it while visiting St. Paul's Cathedral in London, while standing before Whitby Abbey in Yorkshire, while touring Mies van der Rohe's Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, passing through the canals of Amsterdam, looking up at the dome of the Karlskirche in Vienna and standing outside Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater house in Pennsylvania. I can't plan these moments of wonder, for they aren't guaranteed even when visiting the greatest architectural masterpieces. They usually arrive when there aren't many people around. I remember going early to Whitby Abbey, for example just before a bus of tourists unloaded, and the fleeting moment of my time with this 12th century ruin to myself, with the morning sun hitting the ancient stone off the coast of the North Sea, helped make the moment magical.
Now I can add to that wonder-list last Saturday's visit to the Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Assumption. Over the final 20 minutes or so, as I relaxed there on the pews and thought about how inspiring this religious architecture was—how resolutely it differed in its spirit from the ugliness of so much American evangelism today—a woman began playing the cathedral's massive pipe organ. I think she was rehearsing for the upcoming wedding, because the first piece sounded like one of those Baroque pieces people choose for a wedding march. But it felt like a soundtrack to my own private communion with the cathedral's architecture.
And lest all this talk of solemn, contemplative ecclesiastical architecture and moments of wonder should seem too stuffy, after returning from San Francisco I learned that the building is rather infamous in one other way. Of course one of its derogative nicknames is St. Mary Maytag for how the exterior forms arguably resemble the interior rotors of a washing machine. But if you'll forgive the crassness, apparently at 2:00pm on sunny days, its shadowing is said to resemble the outline of a woman's breast, and apparently this phenomenon is known as the "two o'clock titty." Judge for yourself.
Inside and outside St. Mary's (Brian Libby)
Regardless, I know now that should have visited St. Mary's Cathedral a decade or two ago. It should have been informing how I thought about Pietro Belluschi all this time. All those years I was writing about his work in a way that would be like writing about the Beatles without having heard, say, Abbey Road. Well, now I have. And to borrow from an old saying, this design is one sublime piece of frozen music.
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