Ibsen Nelsen FAIA

AIA Seattle Medal 1989 

A native of Ruskin, Nebraska and the son of a Danish immigrant builder, Ibsen Nelsen FAIA (October 2, 1919 - July 19, 2001) moved to Oregon and took his architecture degree from the University of Oregon in 1951.  He practiced with Seattle firms including Naramore, Bain, Brady & Johanson before establishing his own practice in 1953.  Independently or in partnership with others, he produced notable works including a California home for the artist Morris Graves, Inn at the Market and Stewart House in the Pike Place Market, Museum of Flight, and Merrill Court.  The house he designed for his own family, on Vashon Island, recalls the Danish farmhouses of his forebears.

Ibsen grew deep roots in the Northwest.  Early in his career and with other close friends and colleagues, he committed himself to the creation and promotion of an architecture close to the earth and highly accessible to people of simple means.  He lived and worked in the belief that a young veteran returning from service in WWII (in which he served himself as a Captain in the US Army) deserved a well-designed and affordable family home.  With others including Margery Phillips, he contributed to the Home Plan Bureau, which made residential designs of good quality accessible to those less than affluent.  Homes he designed appeared frequently in the early decades of the AIA Home of the Month program which began publication in The Seattle Times in 1954 -- another vehicle for his vision of quality design serving all segments of society.

One would see Ibsen often about the town, regularly in the company of his great friend and ally Fred Bassetti or George Bartholick -- dapperly attired in summer tans with a straw hat.  I often compared him, with his natural and unaffectedly courtly ways, to a romantic figure in an Ingmar Bergman movie in a Swedish summer. With his luxuriant whiskers and gently scratchy voice, he came across at other times as the gruff and brooding Dane, speaking with ringing disdain an;d despair of things he found abhorrent -- especially the dangers of design that failed to embody the simplicity and naturalness by which he characterized his vision of the true "Northwest architecture."

References:  
Ibsen Nelsen HistoryLink
Ibsen Nelsen, HistoryLink Remembrance by Arthur Skolnik
DoCoMoMoWeWA biography:  Ibsen Nelsen
Ibsen Nelsen DAHP; PCAD