The floating Fennel Residence (photo by Cameron Neilson)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
Robert Oshatz has long been one of the Portland area's most iconoclastic architects. Practicing here since 1971, Oshatz design houses with soaring forms and bold geometric shapes that are also draped in natural materials like wood. There's a little bit of Frank Lloyd Wright organic architecture in Oshatz's work, for he worked under Wright's son, Frank Lloyd Wright Jr., for years in Arizona, before relocating to Oregon. But his style also feels rooted in or at least seen through the prism of his first decade in practice, the 1970s, in that it feels somehow modern and postmodern at the same time, as well as both simultaneously futuristic and primitive.
At first, Oshatz designed mostly commercial buildings, and one of his unbuilt works, an office tower planned in downtown Portland for a major insurance company called the C.A. Bright Tower, remains eye-catching and innovative (it was highly sustainable) nearly 45 years after it was first designed. But beginning in the late '70s, Oshatz turned his attention almost exclusively to houses.
C.A. Bright Tower model (photo by Brian Libby)
Come across one of the architect's local works, from the floating Fennel Residence on the Willamette to his own soaring Elk Rock Residence near Lake Oswego to the diamond-shaped Rosenthal Residence in Portland, and it's impossible not to do a double-take. Whatever his influences may be, nothing else looks like a Robert Oshatz house.
A longtime sole practitioner who doesn't even offer clients renderings or drawings of the houses he designs, Oshatz isn't big on self promotion. But he's a music lover, and as a board member of the Portland Chamber Orchestra, he recently agreed to help coordinate a tour of four of his houses on June 20 as a fundraiser for the ensemble, one of the nation's oldest chamber orchestras.
Oshatz recently talked with me about his career and the four residences on the tour: the Elk Rock Residence (1989), the Fennel Residence (2005), the Rosenthal Residence (1984), and the Wilkinson Residence (2004).
Portland Architecture: given its uniqueness, what kind of feedback do you get from the local architectural community about your work?
I don’t really get feedback from the architectural community. It’s partly my own fault. Unfortunately I’m kind of quiet and shy in a sense, so I don’t kind of go out and put myself in a public situation. I don’t really know too much about what other people say about my work. But I’m reaching the point in life where you know when you do something what you did well, what you missed. I don’t like entering competitions, for example, because to me half the time the judges are just looking for confirmation of their own work, and things like they’re doing.
When we were in school, for example you had professors at some schools that were nationally known, and students would just copy what their professors did. Some of them would kind of regurgitate. The good ones tried to encourage what you were doing, not relate it to what they did.
In design competitions, the only time I ever saw one where I thought the best design won was the Sydney Opera House. The other times I thought the winner was really rather weak. The project happened because of the Eero Saarinen connection. He was on the board and came late to the jurying process. They put in a pile everything they weren’t interested in. He didn’t see anything he thought merited a winning design. In the discarded pile he found this one design, by Jørn Utzon. He convinced the jury to go with that design. That’s a very rare and unusual situation.
Rosenthal Residence (photo by Cameron Neilson)
Is doing good work, then, a matter of following your own vision?
Actually when I meet a client and talk, I have no idea whatsoever what I’m going to do. When it’s time for you to sit down and do something, you have to blank your mind and get rid of everything. You might be thinking, 'I wish I could design a cathedral.' But what comes in the door is this little chicken coup. You have to design the best one you’re capable of and forget the cathedral.
So what's your relationship like with clients? How are you able to negotiate their expectations?
A lot of times my clients ask me, 'Don’t you have any opinions? We want to know what you think.' I’d say, 'I’m a designer. My job is not to tell you what you can have and can’t. My job is to find out what you want.' I’m not trying to be conceited, but the main thing I think is different from myself when I was young was I knew I wasn’t the answer to every single client. Some clients especially when you’re young can take you in a wrong direction and you do something that’s pretty awful. People come to you because they want that awful thing too, and you have to do it over and over again. You need to be honest with yourself and interview the client as much as they interview you. I know the typical thing being said was, 'I took that client as far as I could take them.' My feeling was you should go right where the client wants to go but make sure it’s where you want to go also. You want to make sure you want to go where he wants to go. You can’t force him to do something you don’t want.
Most of it just was a matter of being honest with yourself and trying to do the best you can. The scary thing is that it’s hard to get hired when nobody knows what you’re going to do. If you don’t know what you’re going to do, someone else won’t. I remember in my first or second year in practice, a businessman told me, 'You’ll never get a job that requires a committee. They’ll only choose someone where they know what they’re going to get.'
Wilkinson Residence (photo by Cameron Neilson)
But now in old age or so, you have a volume of work, and the main thing is convincing people you’re not going to do the same building they saw and came to you for.
I tell clients the structure will be at peace with its environment, and they’ll be at peace with the structure. If they want that, we’ll be able to work together. I’ve been lucky that throughout my career clients never ask what my building will look like. They just assume the outside will be to their liking also if the floor plan suits them.
The Wilkinson Residence, for example, he saw just floor plans and maybe one section to get a sense of the volume. He never saw a model. One was never built. He never saw an exterior elevation or rendering. Even in the working drawing, the elevations were just partial, enough to get a building permit.
Do houses appeal to you, then, because you can have more control of the process?
Not really. If you ask an architect what the most diff project is, he’ll say a house. If you do a commercial building, it’s all about dollars and sense, but on the house he’s looking at every little doorknob. But houses are an opportunity to do some experimentation, more than a commercial building.
For me, you always want to do something that you haven’t done before. I would rather have the mix of a lot of different projects. I’m lucky: for some reason I don’t have a big following of clients in Portland. But I’m able to travel a lot. I get phone calls from people all around in different environments. The result of doing predominantly residential is the fact that there’s no going out and looking for work. Whatever strange phone call I get is what I have to do. Once in a while there’s something in it. I did a commercial building about 10 years ago up in Idaho, a large complex. But the recession hit and the project never went ahead. Now I’m doing an entertainment pavilion in japan, a structure for banquet dinners for 60 people, a lecture hall for 70 people. Unfortunately just whatever comes into the place is what I get to do. I would love to do a church. And I’ve done some churches but they’ve never been built. I’d love to do an opera house, a museum. You can dream about them, but the job that comes into the office, you have to get these other ideas out of your mind.
An upcoming Oshatz project in Japan (images courtesy of the architect)
I started out doing nothing but commercial work, but as the economy changed, people started to ask for houses. Between residential and commercial, that difference in scale of the projects, people have been successful at both ends of the spectrum. But it’s very difficult to make that transition from one end to the other. I’ve always wanted to have that opportunity to make the transition between the two. But they come to you because they like what you’ve done. You don’t have that battle. I tell interns, 'Nobody is going to come to you and ask you to do the greatest building in the world. You haven’t done anything. You have nothing to show. But when you get your first job, you’ve got to the best you can and not compromise your values.'
Let's talk about the four houses on the tour, starting with the Wilkinson Residence.
That house was one of those sites that had to go through a lot of design reviews, not aesthetic but environmental, being right by a ravine and having a number of trees that had to be saved. It was a difficult site to work with, but every site has its own sense of poetry to it. Your job is to capture that sense of poetry and translate it into the architecture.
The client was marvelous in that he didn’t come with an agenda of what he wanted the house to look like. We discussed a program. We talked about two elements. It’s easy to say, ‘I need to sleep three people and I want two or three bathrooms and an open kitchen.’ But you have to draw out of them: do they like soft, flowing lines or angular lines? Do they want sunlight hitting them in the morning or a dark space to sleep in? What colors or textures do they want to have?
Wilkinson Residence (photo by Cameron Neilson)
In his case, music was a very important element. He sang in a repertory choir and he played the viola in a quartet. Also his eating habits were that his girlfriend would make a gourmet dinner on the weekend. It might take up the full day were she would cook one course and he’d think about the wine served and they’d eat it. She’d go back and make that course and he’d think about the wine again. It might take six hours. And he wanted a nice big deck where he could make ice cream on in the summertime. That was the starting point of the house. It told me that he needed a house that had marvelous acoustics so he could enjoy music in it. The shapes and forms and the materials used had to be consistent, to give him good acoustics. He needed to have a kitchen someone could really cook a meal in and he needed a space to be able to sit and contemplate the wines he would choose. That and the sense of poetry of a site and a sense of how he perceives space and materials that he liked, colors and textures. That’s how the building started to evolve just from those choices.
Then he also made one very important comment. You always have to do this work in a budget. He gave me a budget but he said, ‘If I’m getting a piece of art to work with I’ll spend more money.’ We spent months and months and months just working on floor plans, giving him a floor plan and letting him think about it and talk about it. Sometimes his ideas might change. At one point he wanted a separate space to play his viola in and practice. We decided it wasn’t necessary. Where the fireplace was going to be: it was part of the kitchen, then part of the living room. Things evolve, and the client massages the design. My job is never to tell them what they can have and do it in a beautiful way for them. He had no preconceived ideas about what the house was supposed to look like. But he’s very happy with it. He loves his house.
What about the floating home you designed, the Fennel Residence? A tour I curated last month included a floating home near the Fennel, and lots of people wound up asking about it.
Randy Fennel didn’t know any local architects whatsoever. His friends suggested a number of architects to go talk to. They were all good firms, but more what I would describe as the kind of boutique firms that were very modern, white, slick houses. For some reason, that didn’t appeal to him. So he finally decided to go on the Internet and look for a local architect for himself. He came over to talk and the interview didn’t go very well. He said that I was too expensive. All I was able to say was, ‘I don’t have any idea what others charge, but I know what it costs for me to do something.’ And I couldn’t build the house quick enough. He wanted to be in there within a year. I thought, ‘This is going nowhere.’ I said, ‘I’m the wrong price for you, and I can’t build it quick enough. But I have to go to the Wilkinson jobsite, and maybe you can come along.’ He got out there and said, ‘Now I can understand why you charge what you charge.’ This was on a Friday. By Monday morning I had an email saying, ‘I want one of those. Just do it as fast as you can.’
Fennel Residence (photos by Cameron Neilson)
The other problem was the client saw a particular building and he wanted that building. I didn’t want to do that. But he liked the curved glulams, and the use of wood. I had to do it in a way appropriate way for him and his site, and not an appropriation of something else. I wouldn’t be interested in it. It’d be repeating yourself. A painter doesn’t want to paint the same canvass again. It had to be a variation on a theme. I used a lot of different materials [compared to the Wilkinson], but he actually at the last moment said, ‘No, I want the shingles and the curves’ like it had. It was difficult in that I wanted it to have its own expression. The Wilkinson, he would go out to look at the house when it was under construction to see which one was better. I said, ‘For you, yours is better.’ I tell the client, ‘Don’t worry what your friends say. They’re not living in your house.’
That house, it did have a completely different site, on the water. So it had the rhythm of the water and the flow. I wanted to capture the emotional quality of water going downriver and the ripples and wakes. People going inside say they feel they’re in the wake of the wave as they go into the house. But it wasn’t a conscious effort to do that. I wanted to capture the poetry of that rippling movement of water. The client also wanted a loft-like feel: a large volume and aloft above.
What about the Rosenthal Residence? It's not curvy at all.
It’s a completely different geometry. When I first got started and I was doing commercial buildings, people said, ‘Can’t you do anything but a straight line?’ I said, ‘Yeah, if it’s appropriate.’ Then people said, ‘Everything you do is curves.’ I did an affordable house in Japan recently that’s rectangular. The rectangle is a beautiful geometric form. I love working in it. Here that was the appropriate solution. I built the Rosenthal as a spec house. I was trying to make sure that I did something I was happy with, that would be sellable and also affordable so I could afford to get the financing and build it. At the time I was doing predominantly commercial work. Afterward I started to get calls from people who had seen it. Before I knew it all I was doing was houses.
This house, it had this gorgeous view of Mt. Hood. I wanted to frame the house to that view, and give privacy from the houses next to it, yet in that dark site amidst the trees bring in as much light as possible. I did these diamond windows that would bring light into two levels. Then I had a lot of high windows that would bring light in but they were clerestory windows so you’d have privacy. The house focused on Mt. Hood so that on the main floor there was this big pane of glass, six feet tall and 12 feet long. It framed Mt. Hood just like a picture. Upstairs in the master bedroom suite there was this other window five feet tall and 10 feet wide that framed Mt. Hood and the night lights, so that when you’d go to bed, you’d look at this big window and it would be like a movie theater screen.
Rosenthal Residence (images courtesy of the architect)
I didn’t realize it was going to change everything and change my practice. I lived there for a few years, and then the Rosenthals came from New Jersey and bought it. When they came to the house, they had seen it on a previous trip when they were scouting Portland. When they came back, the real estate agent wasn’t even interested in showing them the house. They asked to drive by. At the time it wasn’t on the market any longer. They blocked my driveway looking out the house. I asked them to move their car and they said, ‘Is the house for sale?’ I said, ‘No but I will sell it.’ They came in.
The living room and kitchen area didn’t work for the way they lived. They wanted to turn a closed kitchen into an open kitchen and move some things around. I said, ‘I can redesign this to fit your needs.’ I was glad to do it. I wanted to design a house that fit the needs of clients. I wasn’t all that thrilled, I realized, about doing a spec house. It was easier than a house for an individual. You create a program. In every design, it starts with an idea. Everything takes work. You reach a point in the early part of design where you say, ‘I can’t do this. The best things I’ve done, I’ve already done. I’m washed up.’ But you can’t, so you force yourself and you work something out. On a spec house for yourself, you get stuck. Instead of solving the problem, you change it so you don’t have to solve that. Spec houses weren’t as challenging as a custom house. I didn’t enjoy doing it as much. The custom made you design for a particular human being. The spec you were thinking in general terms, and you could change the terms if you got yourself stuck, so it wasn’t as challenging. But that house I like the flow of it, the feeling. All the houses are designed from the inside working my way out. The exterior is just a reflection of the interior space.
And what about your own house, the Elk Rock Residence?
That started out as a spec project also. It’s kind of hard because when as an architect you do a spec house that you’re financing yourself, you’re trying to do something affordable and sellable. But the more unique the house is, the fewer potential buyers there are. The reality is most people aren’t interested in architecture. When you do something other than the standard house, your market is lower and lower. On this, I wanted to do a spec house but something I’d also enjoy doing: something that was an interesting challenge. And a challenge it was. It was built with unskilled labor. My foreman had never built a house before. He was a handy man with some knowledge of concrete, of framing, of sheet rock.
Elk Rock Residence (images courtesy of the architect)
It wasn’t a simple house at all, but it’s a house that I wanted to do and I didn’t care about the fact that it was going to be hard to sell. It would be unique. I wasn’t going to take the site and bulldoze it into flat ground and build a standard house on it. I wanted the house to have a sense of soaring out from the hillside but remaining attached to the ground. And the higher on the site, the better the view became, but the grater the noise from Macadam. I had to find a balance and figure out how to mediate the sound from the highway. That house was also designed completely from the inside. The elevation drawing was never done until it was under construction. As I got into the project, I always dreamt about living on a lake. The view of the river would be the closest I’d ever get. I decided to stay in the house myself.
It wouldn’t happen today, but back in 1988, the city didn’t even want to do a plan check on it. I called and said, ‘When am I going to get a building permit?’ They said, ‘Come in and we’ll talk about it.’ When I got in, I saw someone had written on the drawing, ‘Space, the final frontier’ [quoting the opening to the original Star Trek TV show]. People had said my work looked like The Jetsons. I had never seen the show so I didn’t know what they meant. Finally I saw it, and I said, 'My houses don’t look like that.' They’re really warm inside. People always told me they were surprised how warm the interiors were.
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