Pietro Belluschi built it, using Cascadian woods — red cedar, white oak, silver maple, yellow fir, Sitka spruce, hemlock, pine, cherry. Behind it are muscular oaks and madrone trees and tall lean vaulting Douglas firs as straight as poles, and adjacent is a thicket of laurels and rhododendrons so old that their arms are thicker than your legs. Here Belluschi wanted to make a holy cabin that would fit its place, a university chapel big enough for hundreds of people and thousands of prayers but not so big that it would be arrogant — not there, not against those massive oaks, the massive river, the massive forest that once housed the biggest trees in the history of the world.
He used brick and stone and tile too, the stones drawn from local rivers and arranged as a little streambed outside to course away the rain from the gutterless tile roof, but otherwise the chapel is wood — beams of fir, roof of hemlock and pine, floor of white oak, walls and altar and chairs and kneelers and lectern of cherry.
He wanted mammoth doors, herculean doors, doors as big as boats, so he asked his friend LeRoy Setziol to carve the doors, which he did, and the posts and lintels too, huge things, big as trees.
Setziol had been in the war and had hidden from Japanese snipers in caves on remote islands in the Pacific. After the war he came home and was ordained a minister in Maryland but when he welcomed black people into his congregation he was invited to not be a minister anymore, and eventually he ended up in Oregon, where he decided to become a woodcarver, although he had never picked up a gouge or chisel in his life. It turned out that he was a sort of a genius at carving wood. “Wood is the history of its own living,” he said once. “I try to cooperate with it, and feel for unknown properties and unpredictable events. That’s about as well as I can explain it.”
Setziol waited and waited for the right wood to cooperate with, and one day three huge black walnut trees washed up on the Oregon coast, and he had them hauled to his wood-shop in the hills near the old timber town of Willamina, and there he cut the doors and lintels, four tons of walnut incised with a sunburst, and a branching vine, and Greek letters, and other signs and symbols of the Christ, the man who had once been Yesuah ben Joseph, a young itinerant preacher in Judea during the time of the Roman Empire.
Belluschi found an ancient ivory crucifix for the tiny side chapel where the faithful are shriven of their sins, and a glassmaker to make the densely colored inch-thick stained-glass windows, and a priest who was a scholar of ancient Christian baptistries to design the concrete baptismal fountain that trickles all night and day like a creek running through the nave of the chapel, and a massive organ from Austria, and a thick tapestry from the Netherlands, and then the chapel was finished just as summer closed up shop twenty years ago.
It was dedicated in early October, on a bright windy day. Priests and donors and students spoke and then Belluschi spoke, briefly, fingering a scrap of paper on which he had jotted notes.
“A church is much more than a building,” he said. “It is people coming together to evoke God’s harmony. It is our hope that the qualities which we have tried to impart to this structure, inadequate as they may be, will endure, and move people to incomparable adventures of the spirit.”
When he sat down he crammed the scrap of paper back in his jacket pocket, but a sharp-eyed priest later asked him for it, and the university for which Pietro Belluschi built his little wooden chapel still has the paper, now carefully framed and hanging in the museum.