Archives West Finding Aid

Ibsen A. Nelsen was born on October 2, 1919 in Ruskin, Nebraska, the son of a Danish immigrant father and a mother whose parents had left Denmark for America. Later, the family fled the Dust Bowl for Medford, Oregon, where Nelsen graduated from high school. He served in the South Pacific theatre during World War II, where he won a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart as an infantryman and captain in the U.S. Army.

During a posting at Fort Lewis, Nelsen met Ruth Hanawalt and they married in 1946. After earning his architecture degree at the University of Oregon in 1951, he moved to Seattle with his wife and practiced with several Seattle firms. In 1953, Nelsen opened his own office in the University District. Over the course of the next four decades, he worked independently or in partnership with others to produce a number of notable works. His work with designing residences and commercial projects included a California home for the artist Morris Graves, the Inn at the Market and Stewart House in the Pike Place Market, Seattle's Museum of Flight, the Merrill Court Townhouses on Capitol Hill, and several buildings on the campus of Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington.

Nelsen was active in preserving landmarks in Seattle, including historic buildings in Pioneer Square and in the Pike Place Market. He played a key role in the battle to protect the Pike Place Market from developers eager to replace it with a high-rise office-commercial-residential project in the 1970s. As a design commissioner, Nelsen pushed for the inclusion of public art, tree plantings, and other amenities in commercial developments. During a period of tremendous expansion and construction, he was vocal in efforts to preserve the city's residential character and retain traditional architectural elements of the Pacific Northwest.

Nelsen was a member of the first Seattle Design Commission, the agency created by voters when they approved the Forward Thrust bond proposal in 1968. He served as the first president of the Seattle Municipal Arts Commission and president of Allied Arts of Seattle. Nelsen was elected to the AIA College of Fellows in 1981 by a jury of his professional peers. In 1989, he received the AIA Seattle Medal, awarded by the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects in recognition of his lifetime achievement in architecture and the Seattle community. Ibsen Nelsen died on July 19, 2001.