|
Architecture as a Spiritual Experience
A Sermon Given
by the Reverend Roger Fritts
on October 28, 2001
at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
Bethesda, Maryland
Although many of you have been in this building hundreds of times,
most of you know nothing about the architect who designed this
space. Today I am going to fill that gap in your knowledge.
The consulting architect of this church was born on the east coast of
Italy, August 18, 1899. His name was Pietro Belluschi.
Pietro was the only son in a middle-class Italian family. His father and
grandfather worked for the Italian railroad. As an adult he would say
that both parents indulged him, hovering over him when he was sick
and staging splendid parties on his birthdays. He said he felt stifled by
his parents' attention. To assert his independence on family outings,
little Pietro insisted on walking on the opposite side of the street from
his parents.
In 1905, the family moved to Rome and six-year-old Pietro entered
public school. The future consulting architect of this church building
was such a poor student that he failed the fourth grade and had to
repeat it.
After finally finishing elementary school, Belluschi entered the
equivalent of a vocational high school, and he specialized in applied
engineering. The only subject he truly enjoyed was drafting which
came easy to him. In drafting class the teenager drew fluted Ionic
columns, complicated Corinthian capitals, and detailed moldings of
Renaissance cornices. Slowly the boy developed a sense of scale and
proportion.
In March 1917 Belluschi received our equivalent to a high school
diploma, and volunteered to serve as a soldier in the Italian army.
World War I had started in 1914 and Italy was battling Austria along
its northern borders. Belluschi participated in several battles and said
later that he learned to feel both the terror and the excitement of
battle. The war ended in 1918 and Italian Army discharged Belluschi
in 1920 as a first lieutenant.
Now twenty-one years old, he entered the University of Rome. The
University gave Belluschi two years credit for his military service.
Therefore, after only two years of study, the university granted him
the equivalent of an American bachelor's degree in civil engineering.
So the consulting Architect of this church did not have a degree in
Architecture. Instead he had only two years of formal university
education and his degree was in engineering.
In 1922 the Italian-American Society established a scholarship for war
veterans. The scholarship provided funds for a year of study in United
States. Belluschi applied, seeing the fellowship as an opportunity to
escape his mundane life in Rome. His English was weak, but his
attractive looks and charming manners made a good impression, and
they awarded the 23-year-old a scholarship for one year of study at
Cornell University. Excited by the prospect of travel, young Belluschi
prepared himself for Cornell by buying eleven new Italian suits
including both black and white tie tuxedos. He boarded a luxury
transatlantic liner in Genoa and arrived in New York City eleven days
later.
At Cornell Belluschi took the mandatory qualifying exam in
engineering, and passing the exam he said later by copying from
other students' exams. Still the university accepted him as an
undergraduate in the engineering school, not a graduate student.
Lonely and isolated, and fearing that he would return home a failure,
Belluschi threw himself into studying, improving his English as well
as learning engineering.
At the end of the year, having no wish to return to Italy, Belluschi got
an engineering job at a mine in Kellogg, Idaho. He loved the American
west but hated the life in the small mining town. So in 1925 he visited
Oregon, where a Portland architecture firm hired him as a drafter, and
in this way the engineer began to learn the skills of designing
buildings.
A department store in Boise, Idaho, in 1927 was Belluschi's first
design on his own. That same year 1927, one of the two principal
architects left the firm. Although his training was all in engineering,
Belluschi spent several months studying for the Oregon state licensing
exams for architecture and passed them in 1928. Two years later the
other principal architect and founder of the firm died. By default
Belluschi, at the age of thirty was left in charge of design.
His was a charming good looking young man who spoke with a
disarmingly soft, hesitant, half-broken English, working for a firm that
had an excellent reputation in Portland. He designed houses, a school
library, a coffee shop, and even a mortuary. It was the depression and
business was slow, but gradually he began to build a reputation.
In 1939 he signed a contract to design St. Thomas More Catholic
Church in Portland. It was his first church. Belluschi's parents had
been devoted Catholics, but Belluschi had found attending mass very
boring. As an adult he rejected the dogma and the formal teachings of
the Catholic church. He felt repelled by the external trappings of the
Catholic church, which he came to believe were nothing more than an
attractive appeal to the senses of the uneducated.
However, although Belluschi had as a youth rejected institutional
religion, he remained a deeply spiritual man. The opportunity to
design a church gave him the means of exploring architecture as art
instead of as a business. Church design was an outlet for spiritual and
artistic expression not possible with other buildings. Churches also
gave him contact with ordinary people and a chance to talk about how
a building could meet a person's deeply felt emotional and spiritual
needs.
By the 1930s Belluschi was fully committed to the American
modernist tradition. A well-thumbed underlined copy of Emerson's
Essays gave him his philosophy of beauty. Belluschi believed that
lavish decor, splendid mosaics, dazzling frescos, brilliant stained glass,
richly carved sculpture, and elaborate gilded moldings, were all
superficial and did not contribute to a spiritual setting. He believed
that a simple structure and the skillful use of light create a spiritual
setting.
In Portland Belluschi had met a priest socially at a gathering of the
Italian-American Society of Portland. The priest found the young
Italian architect to be gracious and personable. Knowing of his
Catholic upbringing and his reputation for design of low cost
buildings, the priest asked Belluschi to be the architect. The priest
requested only that the church be in harmony with its natural setting.
When it was finished, critics praised the church as fresh and new.
Belluschi created his second church design in 1945. It was for the
Universalist congregation in Seattle. A beautiful design with a floor
plan that looks much like the floor plan of this church, the
congregation never built the Church of the People. The congregation
could not raise enough money. However, the Universalists were the
exceptions. With the end of World War II and the growth of churches
across the United States, many congregations turned to Belluschi.
In 1945 he designed the Central Lutheran Church in Eugene, Oregon.
In 1946 he designed the Emmanuel Lutheran Church in Longview,
Washington; the Innanuel Lutheran Church, in Silverton, Oregon and;
St. Philip Catholic Church in Portland, Oregon. In 1947 he designed
the Zion Lutheran Church in Portland, Oregon. In 1848 he designed
the central Lutheran Church in Portland, and the First Presbyterian
Church, in cottage grove Oregon. And in 1949 he designed Sacred
Heart Church in Oswego, Oregon.
Still, churches were only part of his business. Belluschi also designed
office buildings, homes, shopping centers, and University buildings.
By 1950 Belluschi was one of the most highly respected architects in
the United States. That year President Truman appointed him to the
National Commission of Fine Arts.
Also in 1950, the President of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology asked Belluschi to move from Portland to Cambridge to
become the Dean of the School of Architecture and Urban Planning.
Belluschi accepted the offer and so this Italian emigrant with only
three years of undergraduate school, became Dean of MIT's School
of Architecture. Also improving his status among the PhD's he would
be supervising, Belluschi received an Honorary Doctor of Law
Degree from East Reed College.
Wanting a practice that would not interfere with his academic
responsibilities, Belluschi turned to associating with other firms as a
design consultant. Religious leaders sought him as a designer of
churches. Of eighteen churches, granted awards for design excellence
in 1956 by the commission on Architecture of the National Council of
Churches, four of the eighteen were by Belluschi. Of all buildings built
during the American Institute of Architects' history, Belluschi's
Central Lutheran Church in Portland is one of the only four churches
acknowledged as a masterpiece in church design.
In 1955 Belluschi agreed to become the consulting architect for the
design of what was to become Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist
Church. Simultaneously he was working on the design of Lincoln
Center in New York City.
Situated on a tree-filled lot on the midst of a new middle class
residential neighborhood, the exterior of the church is deliberately
unobtrusive. After parking our cars, we enter the building by first
walking along a sheltered walkway next to a landscaped courtyard
defined by a rustic wooden fence. Note that in his design of the
Sanctuary, the entrance is not straight on, but off to the side. He
designed a progression of spaces and turns like a small labyrinth. We
travel from street to parking into a secluded landscaped courtyard.
Instead of having us enter the building abruptly and directly from the
parking lot, the courtyard gives us a transition space. Belluschi
intended the courtyard to prepare us for the religious experience both
emotionally and psychologically. From the courtyard to walk to the
sanctuary, we would go through the narthex. To reach the Sanctuary
from the narthex would require a ninety degree, left turn. Belluschi
created this journey to the sanctuary because he believed in a
discovered rather than a stated beauty, a suggested rather than a
revealed truth. This is a Zen notion. It is a part of the subtle Japanese
influence in the design. Belluschi visited Japan in the summer of 1956
while he was working in the design for our church.
He designed the temporary auditorium for us to use as an attractive
worship space until the congregation could afford to build the
sanctuary. It included a stage because the congregation had a
community theater group. Reflecting the Japanese influence, the sojie
screen hides the stage in the auditorium and forms a back drop to the
pulpit.
Natural light was very important to Belluschi. Belluschi designed both
the auditorium and the sanctuary with stained-glass window walls on
both the right and left sides. Simple pale colors of rose, violet, and
amber glass were set in an abstract pattern of rectangles, like the
patterns found in a Japanese screen. They cast a soft colored light on
the floor of the room. Instead of inclosing the auditorium, the chapel
or the sanctuary, Belluschi's glass walls open these rooms to the
outside, imparting a sense of connection between constructed and
natural space. From many seats in this room we can see the trees and
often hear the sounds of children playing during our worship.
The grooved wood on the walls on either side of the stage form a
simple but visually warm, textured surface. It also provides an
acoustically absorbent surface to counter the hard reflective surfaces
of the glass and the floor. Grooved wood was also used on the ceiling
not only because it is pleasing to the eye, but also to absorb sound.
Our church design illustrates Belluschi's pleasure in composing
nuances of light, colors, textures and materials, including the texture
and color of our stone walls in our chapel. His overriding aim was to
create a contemplative space that is both private and communal, both
intimate and uplifting.
Of course, as in all of life, not everyone liked Belluschi's church
designs. When Belluschi presented plans for the church of the
Redeemer in Baltimore, one church member said: "It looks nothing at
all like a church though it would make a perfectly wonderful camp in
the Adirondacks." This is something that a lover of traditional church
architecture could also say about our building.
In the larger world Belluschi's buildings also came under attack. In the
1960s his reputation as an architect took a nose dive, with the
construction of the Pan Am Building, which changed its name to the
Met Life Building in 1992. New Yorkers complained that the building
was inhuman in scale and insensitive to the needs of the city. In 1965
Belluschi retired from MIT and in 1972 he moved back to Portland.
Nevertheless, he continued to serve as a consultant on many projects.
Today his influence is all around us. Belluschi was on the committee
that selected the design for the Vietnam war memorial, and for the
Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial. He was responsible for getting I. M.
Pei selected as the architect of the east wing of the National Gallery
of Art. He was a consultant for the World Bank Building, and he was
a consultant in the building of the Pentagon City in Arlington,
Virginia. He served on the committee that selected the design for the
INTELSAT Headquarters Building on Connecticut Ave. In Baltimore,
it was Belluschi who first proposed a master plan to rebuild the inner
harbor, a plan that is still followed today. The Meyerhoff Symphony
Hall in Baltimore was also his design. Altogether he helped design
more than 1,000 buildings. In 1991 President George Bush bestowed
on Belluschi a National Medal for the Arts.
The man (who gave hope to all children who failed fourth grade) died
on February 14, 1994 at the age of ninety-four.
Today we enjoy the space that he designed. A modest church placed
in a forest of trees. A sacred space that we enter through a garden
courtyard. A place of natural rock and wood, of soft light coming
through pale amber, rose and violet glass.
I give thanks to the work of the founders of the church.
I give thanks the builders and all the custodians and volunteers who
have maintained and improved this space over many years.
I give thanks to the thousands of people who have made this space
sacred by their child dedications, and weddings, and memorial
services. By Christmas candle light gatherings and by singing and
poetry, we have made this a sacred space.
And I wonder: what is my responsibility to the founders, to the
architects, to the members of this congregation today, and to my
children who will come after me?
As we have seen by recent events, buildings are important symbols for
human beings. They can inspire us and they can be the focus of our
hatred. They can move us to tears by their beauty and they can move
us to the deeps of grief when they are destroyed. For those of us who
worship here, these grounds and this building is such a place. May we
always treat it with reverence.
Bibliography
Clausen, Meredith L. Pietro Belluschi: Modern American Architect. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1994.
Office@CedarLane.org
| 
