Born in Ancona, Italy, Pietro Belluschi served in the Italian military during World War I. He received a doctorate in civil engineering from the University of Rome in 1922 before emigrating the next year to the United States, where he continued his studies at the Cornell University. He became the design principal of his own architectural firm, which he founded in 1943 following seventeen years of practice with Albert E. Doyle in Portland, Oregon, and it eventually was merged into the firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Belluschi’s notable projects include the Juilliard School of Music, Alice Tully Hall, and the Pan Am building in New York City; the Portland Art Museum and the Equitable Building in Portland, Oregon; Bank of America in San Francisco; and libraries for Reed College and Willamette University. From 1951 to 1965, Belluschi was dean of the School of Architecture at MIT and he was a resident in architecture at the American Academy in Rome in 1954. He was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters and was awarded an American Institute of Architects Gold Medal in 1972 and a National Medal of Arts in 1991.
CFA Service:
1950–1955