Of the thousands of visitors to Oregon’s Ecola State Park each year, few leave without pointing their cameras south to frame the view of Chapman Point and Haystack Rock. But had it not been for John Yeon, the composition would likely be much different. In 1931, when plans emerged to build a dance hall atop the point, Yeon borrowed $4,500 against a life insurance policy and bought it — at age 21. Seventy years later, it remains a state nature preserve.
Within this act of youthful largesse lie the manifold complexities and ironies of a man who, for lack of a better term, is best called an “architect.” Chapman point was Yeon’s greatest gift to his beloved home state, yet virtually nobody knows he was responsible. Of the many gestures Yeon made on the landscape, this, his most visible, actually resulted in nothing ever being built. And along what is now the most tourist-clogged, strip-malled stretch of the Oregon coast, all that Yeon ultimately saved was the best view.
Historically, Yeon will mainly be remembered for what he built. But it is impossible to fully understand the architecture, let alone the man, without appreciating his less easily traced trail as a conservationist, art collector, activist and, perhaps most of all, connoisseur.
No architect stands as a better example of a “Northwest regionalist” and a worse example of a “provincial.” The son of one of Oregon’s early lumber barons, Yeon carried his inherited wealth, neither as an empire to expand nor burden to bear, but rather as a means to pursue a profoundly original vision for the relationship between the built and natural landscapes. As much as his sensibility was shaped by his surroundings and family history it was informed by a studious mind, hungry eye and connections to the world beyond.
But for a brief stints in the architectural offices of Herman Brook- man and A.E. Doyle, Yeon was entirely self-taught as an architect and never bothered obtaining a license. Nevertheless, his sensibility seems to have emerged fully formed by age 26 when he realized what has become his most celebrated work in 1937, the Watzek House. Designed with 75 pages of sublimely detailed drawings (a number more typically required of highrises of the time), the house seamlessly blends a vast array of Modernist technical and formal innovations with a cunning use of historical precedent. Camouflaged in rough-sawn fir siding and fronted by a seeming bland (but studiously abstract) entrance, the house immediately opens to a world of breathtaking detail and craftsmanship, from the courtyard garden to the final crescendo of a floor-to-ceiling, glazed view of Mount Hood.
Published internationally and exhibited next to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water in the Museum of Modern Art’s 10th Anniversary exhibit, the house became one of the major icons of an the emerging West Coast interpretation of Modernism, the “Northwest Regional Style.” Yet in his radical reconfiguration of a veritable catalog of spatial effects and formal details from the architecture and landscape design of the past, he presages the most sophisticated notions of Postmodernism. Synthesizing elements of everything from urban Chinese gardens to the theatrics of Karl Friederich Schinkel, Yeon’s goal was to architecturally dramatize the procession from nature to culture and back.
A circa 1939 correspondence from MOMA’s architecture curator John McAndrew, reveals an almost giddy hope in the young Yeon’s future sparked by the Watzek House. Walter Gropius, McAndrew writes, described Yeon as “one of the most hopeful talents in the country.” He writes of Edward Durrell Stone and fellow curator Elizabeth Mock “raving” about the Watzek House and of Alvar Aalto counting Yeon with Stone and Harrison as the only Americans he wanted to publish in an anthology of Modernist work. The Watzek House, McAndrew says, “has been the Pike’s Peak of a half a dozen lectures I have been emitting — here, there, Baltimore, Boston and even Bryn Mawr.”
Little known in Oregon beyond a close-knit circle of intellectuals, fellow architects, clients and the wealthy establishment in Portland, Yeon grew to enjoy a far more outwardly public life in New York, socializing with the likes of Alfred and Ilsie Barr, Lincoln Kirstein, Henry Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson. He once even posed nude for the celebrated celebrity photographer George Platte Lynes. Yet, despite social connections on both coasts that could have easily resulted in more prestigious commissions and a larger national reputation, Yeon seems to have used the muscle of his wealth and family name sparingly and selflessly. Behind the scenes, he was saving important historic buildings, influencing the design of Portland’s Tom McCall Waterfront Park and most of all, toward what would be his lifelong passion: conserving the Columbia Gorge.
The same year Yeon purchased Chapman point, he was appointed by Oregon Governor Julius Meier to the state’s first Park Commission. Three years later, at a time when America’s rivers were seen almost solely as electrical generating plants, Yeon led the commission’s Natural Resources Board to create the first preservation plan for the gorge.
The Columbia River ran deep in Yeon’s blood. His father had overseen the construction of gorge’s first highway, completed in 1916, importing Italian stone masons to build the masterful bridges and guard rails. But when the road was immediately lauded as one of the most beautiful highways in the world, the young Yeon wit- nessed the first impacts of its ensuing popularity with motorists in their new Model A Fords. Yeon’s 1934 report — advocating innovations unheard of in the West such as the conservation of top soil and the creation of wide “buffer zones” free of strip development — stands as one of the Northwest’s first environmental impact statements.
But as much as Yeon might appear to be a proto-environmentalist or urban naturalist, his motivations were ultimately aesthetic. For instance, his report advocated an expanded highway, but one contoured with gentle curves echoing the shoreline instead of more cheaply and easily built straight-aways. His sometime collaborator and occasional nemesis Nancy Russell, a more single-minded preservationist (and, with Yeon, co-founder of the Friends of the Columbia Gorge), described Yeon as “a park person” who wanted to “make sure the gorge looked good.” Yeon, she recalled, believed “clean air and water were, first and foremost, public health issues.”
Or, as Yeon wryly put it in a 1984 lecture, “I was, I suppose, what would now be called an environmental activist, though not of the beautifully bearded sort.”
Yeon’s commitment to the gorge was as unwavering as it was difficult to categorize. Thirty years later, as I-84 was being constructed in a hard straight line along the river, Yeon flew to Washington, D.C. and persuaded the head of the U.S. Bureau of Roads to change the design. Today, remnants of the freeway Yeon stopped in its tracks can now be seen in the parking lot for Benson State Park. In 1964, when plans for a factory emerged for a mile-long stretch of the Washington shore, directly across from the iconic Multnomah Falls, Yeon bought the land. And it was here, over the subsequent three decades until his death, that he created his last work and the one that most readily stands with the brilliance of the Watzek House.
A former logging port and a pear orchard that had been long overgrown with blackberries, the 75 acres became what Yeon affectionately called ”The Shire,” after the rural districts of Great Britain. But like so many things with Yeon, the name holds a hint of slyness. He designed the park along similar principles as English picturesque gardens. But inverting the more typical British fetishization of culture in the landscape, Yeon instead celebrated the site’s natural features within what he knew would be the encroaching development.
At it’s simplest, The Shire is a series of walks engineered for enjoyment of the land as a work of art, cut through tall foxtail grass, wandering in the meadows and shoreline. Yeon’s hand is subtle, expressed in themes and variations. Dynamically gnarled trees, for instance, frequently stand apart from the crowd like the classic picturesque ruin of English Gardens. As each path leads to a vantage point, Multnomah Falls appears like a leitmotif in a long meandering composition. Indeed, the longest walk, heading deep into the woods, suddenly comes to a dead end, leaving the visitor to turn and, through a series of narrow keyhole cuts in the trees, confront the falls as a terminal vista. In what could stand as a metaphor for the architect’s life, The Shire’s only built structure Yeon buried in a berm: a tool room opening through a sliding panel to a tiny cell fitted with a careful selection Chinese, Korean and Scandinavian furniture along with some of his own designs.
Courtesy of Yeon’s longtime associate Richard Brown, the Watzek House and The Shire have been endowed and donated to the University of Oregon School of Architecture and Allied Arts, who will turn them into the John Yeon Center for Architectural Studies and John Yeon Preserve for Landscape Studies. As nothing more or less than a “house” and a “park” in their most refined and nuanced forms, they will remain as the quiet manifestos of a man who left his mark on Oregon by being careful about the marks he made.
As Yeon himself so simply put it in a 1984 lecture, “My attitude toward building in the landscape was and is that of a landscape painter imagining what would look well in his landscape painting.’’
