Saul Zaik, 2014 (Brian Libby)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
If I had but one thing to say to Saul Zaik right now, or one thing I could have said before his January 4 passing if I had it to do over again, it would definitely be this:
"You will not be forgotten."
I mention this promise because it's in response to a fear that this wonderfully talented and historically significant architect expressed to me on more than one occasion over the years. Saul Zaik believed he either was already or was in danger of becoming what he called "the forgotten man."
Maybe it was easy to feel insecure when you were a designer of modern houses in the 1950s trying to follow an act like Pietro Belluschi and John Yeon. After all, they were the pioneers of the Northwest Modern style in the 1930s with houses like Yeon's Watzek House in 1937 and Belluschi's Sutor House in 1938, both of which built on their time at the Rosetta Stone of Northwest Modern, the A.E. Doyle-designed Wentz Cottage from 1916 on the Oregon Coast. Yet neither Yeon or Belluschi was ultimately destined to be principally a house designer in the 1950s and '60s. By that time, Belluschi had graduated to much bigger buildings and was dean of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's architecture school. Yeon, though he was still designing houses, also had broader concerns and interests, be it protecting Oregon's natural wonders or collecting art and designing museum exhibits.
Into that void came Zaik and the 14th Street Gang.
Born in 1926, Saul Zaik was a native Portlander who upon graduation from Benson Polytechnic entered World War II as a US Navy radio operator, aboard a transport ship in the Pacific. After the war, he attended the University of Oregon on the GI Bill, earning his architecture degree in 1952. He worked for a trio of small firms his first two years and then at 28 joined the Portland office of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill.
Zaik in an undated photo (Legacy.com)
This was a seminal period for the SOM office, which had previously been the office by Pietro Belluschi before being sold to the legendary New York and Chicago firm. What's more, SOM Portland was about to produce two Oregon landmarks: Memorial Coliseum in Portland and Autzen Stadium in Eugene. But ultimately his time was short. In 1955, Zaik was set to marry his fiancée, Frances (Chris) Lowry. As he later recalled, the head of the office implied his job might be in jeopardy if he took a honeymoon. Zaik decided this was a good time to accept some of the home-design commissions he'd been offered.
By 1956 Zaik had started his own practice, first working out of his home and soon office space in an old Victorian home on NW 14th with a group fellow University of Oregon grads: William Fletcher, Donald Blair, John Reese, Frank Blachly, Alex Pierce, and interior designer George Schwarz. Known as the 14th Street Gang, They each had their own projects but often collaborated and helped each other. They shared drinks and ideas, and eventually helped popularize the Northwest Modern style that had begun with Yeon and Belluschi.
During this time, Zaik produced some of his most acclaimed residential designs, such as 1956’s Feldman House, which is my favorite of his works, with its low-pitched gable roof, exposed wood ceiling and cedar siding.
1A House (Bob Zaikoski), Feldman House (Brian Libby)
"[My generation of architects] were all World War II veterans, and we were out to change the idea of architecture," Zaik told me for a 2015 Dwell article on the Feldman House and its renovation (overseen by Jessica Helgerson Interior Design). "We were really just building boxes with a bunch of windows but experimenting with how you integrated indoor and outdoor spaces."
But the Feldman is just one example. Zaik’s own house, completed in 1959, is also a delight, with a bridge connecting public and private pavilions.
1A House (Bob Zaikoski), Zaik Residence (Brian Libby)
Zaik was decades ahead of his time with the prefabricated 1-A House, a collaboration with the American Lumber Company that after its 1965 completion received an award from Better Homes and Gardens. A number of the houses were built in the Cedar Hills area. Priced at $17,500 — the equivalent of $142,000 in 2019 dollars, adjusted for inflation—the houses provided value and style.
There's also the exceptional Fort House, which was renovated a few years ago, and the handsome Bigley House. And given the nostalgia that exists online for eye-catching, over-the-top 1960s houses, the Zidell House, which Zaik designed for Arnold Zidell with the home perched on a tall, thin ship’s mast made from a decommissioned Liberty Ship from World War II, is still surprising to encounter on Marquam Hill.
Fort House (Redfin), Zidell House (Portland Modern)
A 1973 portrait of Zaik in Symposia magazine started out with this description: “When one thinks of Oregon architecture one immediately envisions weathered wood structures resembling Willamette Valley farm buildings. The Oregon architect of the current generation most sympathetic and skilled with this vernacular is Saul Zaik of Portland. His residences, condominiums and apartments are to be found throughout Oregon, and like his predecessors Pipes, Brookman, Yeon and Belluschi, a Zaik home is easily identifiable. The shapes of his structures are sometimes complex, but always the roof lines are simple, and the resulting building is an easily understood statement of its use and its site.”
In a more recent interview, for the documentary Coast Modern seven years ago, Zaik said: "Four people can live very nicely in a 2,000-square-foot house. You don't need 20,000 feet. But when I talk to my son and to other architects...people want to live in that McMansion. But to live in a box with little windows punched out looking at your neighbor and a huge TV screen, that's their beauty is in that damn TV screen. I think people have to learn a little bit more about how they want to live in a house. What we should be thinking about is our environment and the fact that it does all relate. Wouldn't it be better if we had more of a connection?"
Saul Zaik didn't just design houses. He and his collaborators also worked on several renovations of historic Oregon landmarks, including Vista House at Crown Point, additions to Timberline Lodge and Crater Lake Lodge. The Timberline addition was so seamless that today people forget it's not part of the original. His residential work also included renovations of houses designed by masterful local architects like Wade Pipes and Herman Brookman.
Yet I haven't even arrived yet at what may be the best thing about Saul Zaik: the fact that he was so committed as an architect, so loving of his craft, that he continued coming to work right up until the end. Zaik certainly wasn't the first architect to work into his 90s. Thanks to famous architects like Philip Johnson and Frank Gehry, or Frank Lloyd Wright before them, the notion of an aging but still-practicing architect is practically a cliché. Yet it's still uncommon, for an architect or a member of any other profession. As someone who has always yearned to be liberated from the pressures of making a living, I'm blown away by people coming to work who don't have to. Yet you can see in this video by Bob Zaikoski, featuring an interview with Zaik about his drawing, that this wasn't a job. It was fun that he got paid for.
"Architect Saul Zaik" (Bob Zaikoski)
Over the years, I had the good fortune to get to know Saul Zaik in a series of conversations. He used to call me from time to time, eager to talk about architecture. The word that comes to mind is irrepressible. He was getting older, and his gait was pretty slow, but his mind was always sharp. I think he felt like he was still making the case for himself, even though he had been named an AIA Fellow way back in 1973, the year after I was born. And it's true: some of his best houses have been altered over time, and there's not yet any book that re-photographs all his work and puts the totality of his career in context.
Yet the architecture itself still compels. The thing is that Saul Zaik's houses, like those of other Northwest Modern contemporaries who followed Yeon and Belluschi such John Storrs, William Fletcher and Van Evera Bailey, are really what completed the promise of that earlier generation. I'm a tennis fan, and it reminds me of what's called consolidating the break. Yeon and Belluschi started something, but it only really became a genre when the next generation continued and expanded the vision. Zaik's houses weren't happening in a vacuum. Earlier this year, I wrote about a midcentury house in Spokane that was quite similar looking to Zaik's Feldman House. These designs became something larger than any one architect: a regional movement in a time when Modernism was rendering local vernaculars largely obsolete. They took international Modernism and made a version of it that was our own.
We'll never forget that, Saul, and—rest assured, my friend—we'll never forget you.
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We were very sad to hear of his passing. We have the immense pleasure of living in one of Saul's treasures on the Oregon coast -- The LongHouse Condominiums. Seven units on the ocean in Salishan. Saul told us when we ran into him that these were the first condos in Oregon. His ability to marry the environment with the architecture makes it a very special place. And he will not be forgotten in our household!
Posted by: Joe | February 02, 2020 at 08:52 AM
I first met Saul in the early ‘70’s when he came to look at a possible addition. He told me the house was already overbuilt for the area and proceeded to spend the next two hours talking with my girlfriend about her medical career.
A few years later I walked across the entrance bridge of a home I saw in the old MLS book and I said to the listing agent rather flippantly “this looks like a Saul Zaik house”. He said it was. I bought it within a month and literally from that day lived in that architecturally amazing home for 30 years to the exact day.
Saul visited it (and me) during a kitchen, office, dining update in maybe 2006-ish and generally approved.
And we should all be so fortunate that the most recent buyers of the home have already embarked on many an amazing and artful updates to his original 1963 designs. (And they like me now have his original/mostly as built blueprints).
Very artful and interesting fellow.
RIP
Posted by: Jim Felt | February 06, 2020 at 09:05 PM