John Yeon, 1977 (John Hinchcliff)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
The new Portland Art Museum exhibit devoted to the life and career of John Yeon is a revelation. Seeing the totality of this Renaissance man's life blended together in one space — the architecture for sure, but also the activism that helped save and spotlight some of our area's greatest natural wonders, as well as his superlative art collection featuring a breadth of Asian and European art and antiquities — brings Yeon alive in a compelling, showstopping way.
The exhibit begins in a double-height space within the museum's original Belluschi Building, and the space is dominated by two things: a massive and beautiful new wood architectural model of Yeon's masterpiece, the Watzek House (including the entire hillside on which it sits), as well as a multi-story photo mural of Chapman Point on the Oregon Coast just north of Cannon Beach, which a young John Yeon saved from development (it's now known as Ecola State Park) by cashing in his life-insurance policy and buying.
Here and throughout the exhibit are also a series of rare sculptures and antiquities from Japan, Korea, India and Italy, but really for me the ultimate message of the exhibit came through the juxtaposition of the Watzek model and the Chapman Point mural: that John Yeon loved framing beautiful landscaped settings, sometimes with architecture as the focal point and sometimes not, but never without a sense of the topography and its potential to engender a sense of awe.
As one moves through "Quest for Beauty" this same type of juxtaposition happens throughout, with models and drawings and photos of Yeon's additional houses and a public building or two interspersed with the art he collected and representations of the landscapes he helped save, none more stunning than The Shire, a swatch of Columbia River-side property on the Washington side, immediately across from Multnomah Falls, that Yeon arranged into a breathtaking pastoral, nearly-wild yet park-like setting (while also saving from development).
A model of the Watzek House in "Quest for Beauty" (Brian Libby)
As if the narrative and visuals of Yeon's life so artfully presented weren't enough to be excited about, the museum and its collaborators also endeavored to tie the designer's life to the present day. So Portland State University's Center for Public Interest Design has an installation beside the Yeon exhibit that adapts plywood, which Yeon famously took advantage of after World War II to design and see built a number of quite-affordable starter homes (costing less than $60,000 in 2017 dollars, adjusted for inflation), to the CPID's current homeless housing exercise. And Lever Architecture, which collaborated with Randy Gragg, Superfab and others in creating the Yeon exhibit itself (included custom display pieces), also has an architectural installation in the courtyard demonstrating how plywood can actually be sandwiched into the most basic structural building blocks: how we can build whole buildings from it.
The exhibit opens this Saturday, May 13, and as a primer, I talked with exhibit curator Randy Gragg about the multi-year effort to create and bring to life "Quest for Beauty" along with the equally-ambitious two books on Yeon's architecture and landscape careers, respectively. (I've perused both and they're spectacular, featuring not only a trove of images but a variety of thought-provoking essays.) Meanwhile, the Q&A with Randy:
Portland Architecture: Do you recall when you first started to become aware of Yeon and his work? I wonder if he was someone whose work you became enamored with right away after starting to write about architecture and art in Portland, or if, because his built portfolio and international notoriety are smaller than Belluschi's, it took more time for you (as it probably did for me) to fully realize his blend of architectural talents, civic passion and keen eye for beauty.
Randy Gragg: I’ve long been interested in a certain idea of landscape and “local identity,” going back to my budding days as a writer in Nevada. I moved to Seattle and started a magazine in Seattle that expanded to the Northwest—a kind of Cascadia idea. When I came to Portland in 1989, one of the first books I read was “Space Style and Structure”—to this day, the best study of architecture and landscape in the Northwest. I saw that famous picture of the Watzek House’s rooflines, Mount Hood rising behind. My first week here working for The Oregonian, I wound up in semester-end crits at the now-long-defunct Oregon School of Design and met Rick Potestio, John Cava, and Bill Tripp who were all citing Yeon as important.
I was writing mostly on art in those days, so I didn’t hunt Yeon down. Then one day, Richard Louis Brown—Yeon’s life partner—called me and asked if I’d like to meet John. He had, as Richard put it, “designed” a Portland Art Museum exhibit of Asian objects within the “Portland Collects” exhibition showcasing local collections. It was all John’s things: fifteenth-century screens after the Japanese master Sesshu Toyo; a pair of twelfth-century lacquer sake bottles; a Ming painting table; a sixteenth-century Negoro lacquer water ewe. He was around 82 and very frail with sunken cheeks and a gravely whisper for a voice, but glittering blue eyes and a wry smile. I barely knew anything about Asian art—and still don’t—but I know exquisite when I see it. The display was also witty with little juxtapositions like a Ming cloisonné incense burner in the form of a duck in conversation with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Japanese ceramics decorated with ducks. It sounds effete, and it was, but it was also funny—like watching two artists from different eras and styles enjoying the same joke.
Subsequently, he and Richard invited me to the Watzek House and out to The Shire, his 78-acre landscape in the Columbia Gorge. I knew so little about architecture or landscape at that time, looking back. (Now, at least I know what I don’t know.) I don’t think I had anything but shallow questions. But I was blown away.
I wrote about and visited a lot of Belluschi houses and churches in those days, too. His early work is incredible. But then I went off to Columbia University on a fellowship and culled the Avery library for material on the Pacific Northwest and discovered just how important Yeon was. His historic reputation had faded. So I took him up as a kind of cause. Unfortunately, he died while I was away.
Yeon's Shaw House (Portland Art Museum)
I've always been interested in 20th century architects (like Yeon and Belluschi) who ultimately became modernists but who resisted the Bauhaus idea that modern architecture must make a clean break from historical references. This seems to of course be the case with Yeon. How might you characterize what Yeon took with him from architects like A.E. Doyle and Herman Brookman? Is it about detail and craftsmanship?
I don’t think John got much from Doyle, other than whatever of Doyle is in the Wentz Cottage at Neahkahnie. That’s the 1916 cabin on a high overlook of the ocean and mountain that the painter Harry Wentz built with Doyle as the architect. Wentz was head of the Portland Art Museum School. Yeon and Belluschi visited and drew with him there. The cottage is basically the “Rosetta Stone” of Northwest regional architecture. Yeon described it as “the first really beautiful piece of architecture, at least in Oregon, that I had experienced.” But nothing Doyle did before or after is anything like it. Yeon interned with Doyle, but thought of him as a kind of merchant architect.
Brookman, on the other hand, he called ““my first exposure to the real thing.” He interned two summers with him, roughly aligning to when he was designing Menucha, Julius Meier’s retreat in the Gorge, and Temple Beth Israel. Brookman drew beautifully and designed every detail of his houses. He was basically a one-man show who teamed with other as he needed the. John liked to say he got architectural education in Brookman’s library. (Yeon was never formally trained or registered as an architect.) In a speech, John described his attraction to Brookman’s work: “I liked its Romantic nature, inventive surprises of form and details, its use of crafts and unusual materials, its magical evocation of long ago and far away.”
There is a richness to Brookman’s work, a deep love for history. Plus, he had aesthetes as patrons: Aaron Frank for the Fir Acres (now the heart of Lewis & Clark) and for the Temple. Doyle got a little bit of that kind of cultured money for Reed College. But you read his letters and he’s often bitching about budget. As they say, an architect is only as good as the money behind him. Brookman found the clients.
John Yeon, 1941 (Portland Art Museum)
I seem to recall that you got to know Yeon before his death in 1994. Could you talk a little bit about the impression you got of him in person, and how his temperament struck you?
I got a far better sense of John through his writing. When I came back from Columbia, I spent a lot of time in his archive. He was a conservation and civic advocate of a high order, and was constantly writing letters and testimony. He was an elegant writer—or I should say, an elegant read. He struggled through draft after draft—the first one scrawled and, then, one after another, all typed. And, there I found a kindred spirit. I’m an obsessive re-writer. So was he.
This is really where I grasped the scope of his vision and pursuits, his intelligence, obsessiveness, eloquence, impatience, and humor. From his early twenties on, he was fearless and eloquent, a purist and sometimes a little bit of a jerk. He got distracted with things he shouldn’t have. But as Nancy Russell once put it to me, John was “a star up in the sky, a pure point of view.”
Obviously Yeon's national profile rose quickly after the completion of the Watzek House in 1937 and its inclusion in MoMA's “Art In Our Time” in 1939, but what's your sense of how aware people in the greater architecture community beyond Portland—historians, journalists, academics—are of his work?
An older generation of architects and historians know of him. But Yeon more or less dropped out of architecture by the mid-1950s. He turned his attention to art collecting, gallery design, and his conservation and activist pursuits. In 1956, he wins the second National Arts & Letters Bruner Award (shared later winners like Richard Meier, Frank Gehry, and many others—distinct for its focus on “beauty.” But he really doesn’t do architecture after that. He didn’t really promote himself. Thus he kind of faded from view. When I came back from New York in ’95, I started finding ways to reknit him into local history. And when notable historians, critics and architects came to town, I often took them up to The Watzek House and, sometimes, The Shire. I recall touring Michael Sorkin around for something he was writing about the urban growth boundary. We were out in the burbs on the edge. He was getting grumpier and grumpier. So I took him to the Watzek House. It was though he smoked a joint: pure joy. Right after he won the Pritzker, Glenn Murcutt was in town for some eco-conference. I kind of kidnapped him and took him to both Watzek House and Jorgensen. He gave me the tour. Watching him discover Yeon was one of the more rewarding architectural experiences I’ve had. “Everything I’ve ever tried to do,” he said, “is here.”
Watzek House courtyard (Portland Art Museum)
I'm curious about the idea that on one hand Yeon was a crucial preservationist with regard to natural wonders, but he also had no qualms about the idea of orchestrating the landscape. Could you talk a little bit about how for Yeon that wasn't a contradiction?
Yeon was a parks advocate and a conservationist, not really a preservationist—at least as we apply the term now. He was deeply influenced by picturesque ideas, both in the European tradition, but even more in the Chinese tradition of captured views. He talked about Chinese scrolls that charted a river’s source to the ocean in the journey of unrolling it. That’s how he wrote about landscapes: in journeys and pictures. As a builder, he once said, “I suppose my attitude towards building in landscapes was, and is, that of a landscape painter imagining what would look good in his landscape painting.”
The people we call “preservationists” today also paint their pictures, just with things like woody debris. There is little in the way of “untouched” landscape to be had. I wish we could blend Yeon’s outlook with today’s preservationists’.
I know this can only be speculation, but what might Yeon make of Portland today? What issues—like architectural/ecological preservation, or density and affordability issues—might drive him to take some kind of stand?
I’m always dubious about that kind of speculation. But let me outline what maybe was Yeon’s biggest impact on Portland. In the mid-‘70s when Harbor Drive was being taken out, Robert Royston was designing Waterfront Park to look like what Yeon called a “miniature golf course.” He wrote this treatise about park design where he argued for a formal park, a simple line of trees that would grow into a “great arboreal hedge” that would stand as “a powerful binding and unifying element in the harbor façade of the city.” Apparently Mayor Neil Goldschmidt read it, and took it to heart. Unfortunately, this grander vision been eroded over time by various memorials and such. The park probably needs to be a different set of gestures now. But I think we can safely say that nobody is thinking about the city at that scale these days.
"Quest for Beauty" at the Portland Art Museum (Brian Libby)
Obviously the Watzek House is a masterwork, but what might be some of your most favorite of his other houses, and why?
They all have their individual merits. We’ll actually being doing a very limited tour of 5 of his houses in June. But I think the other masterwork is the Jorgensen House. It was one of his plywood houses, the first use of the material as an exterior cladding. He organized the entry procession and the plan to preserve some big trees. Yeon obsessed over creating elegant roof forms. Jorgensen is one of his best. Like the Watzek House, Yeon bought it. He lived and worked there the rest of his life. The color—so-called “Yeon blue”—has been carefully matched over the years. Watzek was built for $78,000. Jorgensen for a little over $7,000. If I got to pick one to actually live in, Jorgensen would get my nod.
You've had the opportunity to host a variety of events as head of the Yeon Center. Could you talk a little bit about watching people encounter the architecture there? What moves or surprises people the most?
It’s really interesting. People who really enjoy making things bond with it most immediately and most deeply. Sure, there are the architects, and there is a conceptual dimension to the house. But Yeon paid so much attention to the details that the idiosyncrasies are what true makers of all kinds—weavers, furniture makers, and the like, and some architects—start to home in on. For instance, I’m always interested in whether a visitor notices one particular corner detail in the ceiling of Watzek’s bedroom. It’s unexpected, but a sign of someone thinking, like the break in a pattern you see in a really great Turkish rug. The other day, I dared a group to find a knot in all of the incredible old-growth fir that shapes the house, inside and out. One person did: in one of the few pieces of wood that has been replaced.
But mostly, people almost always seem to find a kind of peace in the beauty and care with which is was created. You can see it on their faces like a spot of sun growing through the clouds.
You and your collaborators have done a wonderful thing bringing Yeon into the public eye with this book, the PAM exhibit, and the opening of the Shire and Watzek to occasional public tours. Is there a next step in that journey, or have we reached the end of that effort?
You would need to ask the University of Oregon’s School of Arch . . . er, sorry, the College of Design. My role with properties will return to being “friend” at the end of the exhibit.
Portland Oregon Visitors Center (Portland Art Museum)
Are there any particular architects working in Portland today in whose architecture you particularly see a Yeon influence?
Hmmmm, influence would mean having had an engagement with his work. It’s really interesting how few local architects have had that. Rick Potestio, Bill Tripp, and John Cava all have done deep dives on Yeon. But there are so many architects I know who have never seen it or only did after I started working for UO.
Historically, it was not easy, as Yeon didn’t promote himself. Potestio tells a hilarious story of marching up to the Watzek house and talking to a guy frumpily dressed with a straw hat working in the garden. Rick kept trying to talk his way in and the guy resisted. Rick being Rick, kept at it talking in great detail about his architectural discoveries on a recent trip to Europe. Finally, the gardener relents: “Oh all right, I’m John Yeon and you can come in.”
You need to be a bit of a seeker to be influenced by John Yeon.
You've spent a lot of time writing not only about John Yeon but also Lawrence Halprin. Is there a connecting thread or commonality that you see in the two designers, beyond their each having contributed landmarks to the city?
That’s a hard question and ultimately a very personal one. Larry and John were such different characters and designers. John Cava once described me—I forget the exact wording, but it a finely tuned brush off—as someone with a sociological interest in the built environment but with fondness for architecture. Now that I’m older, I’ll own it. I’m very interested in convergences of talent, money, opportunity, but most of all, spirit. With Yeon and Halprin (more specifically, his work in Portland), what turned fondness to love and commitment is the spirit: they gave the local a timelessness.
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