JOHN YEON: REGIONAL MODERNISM

August 2021

In these times of international turbulence, it felt refreshing to delve into the work of John Yeon, an architect of rare purity and design genius. Yeon’s work focused on the Pacific Northwest of the USA during the early-to-mid 20th century when the area was grappling with the duality of an evolving regional architectural style and the impending incursion of the International Style from Europe. Yeon over the course of his career was able to not only cultivate, but eventually define the Pacific Northwest architectural style. His work continues to influence many who are still striving to achieve the clarity seen in his residential projects.

Yeon’s architecture endeavoured to create a synthesis between building and landscape. The built outcome was not subordinate to its surroundings, but instead was able to curate, acknowledge and accentuate it's natural setting. His style was also to celebrate the two counter forces of vernacular architecture and classical taste in a manner that was able to blend both warm interior settings and a rustic exterior form. It is this unique style of being both a modernist and classicist that has kept his work relevant and enduring to this day.

Yeon developed his professional skills away from the traditional academic setting. His emergence as a designer of prominence was influenced greatly by a period of employment with the Portland architect Herman Brookman. His experience with Brookman focused on large dwellings, regularly in the Beaux Arts style for extremely rich clientele. This experience heightened Yeon’s appreciation for the picturesque and Arts and Crafts classicism and nurtured his trajectory towards a cautious and tempered approach to modernism.

The foundational work by Harry Wentz to develop a vernacular Northwest architectural style was also an important precursor to Yeon’s career. Wentz had an uncanny ability to look at the setting in the Pacific northwest and cultivate built outcomes with a reverence for the natural surroundings. From early in Yeon’s career he admired Wentz’s mindset and embraced any potential connections to the context - regularly camping out on the project site to fine tune early design concepts. He utilised this mindset as a foundational piece in his own architectural style in combination with the evolving modernist doctrine to cultivate the work that would define the Pacific Northwest architectural style.

There were others like Yeon during this time, such as William Wurster in the Bay Area, who were grappling with the similar concepts of how to nurture a developing regional style in a time when the prevailing doctrine of architecture was pushing towards a universal solution. It was in this dichotomy that a series of West Coast architects were able to create a style of design that was attuned to the immediate context of the site, as well as the rising modernist movement internationally.

Yeon’s career will forever be identified with his first built project, the Watzek House, a house that has gone down in enduring publications as one of the best houses of the 20th century. The success of this project is remarkable given that it was his first built work, a significant note due to the maturity, confidence and clarity of the Watzek House.

The Watzek House was built in 1936 for Aubrey Watzek, a wealthy lumberman in a region renowned for its fine wood products. The house is one of the purest examples of the evolving Pacific Northwest style thanks to its ability to harmonise the rustic style of the vernacular forms with the clean lines of the modern era. The design on first appearance is quite humble, with minimal wood clad gable forms. This austere initial appearance is a strategy that Yeon regularly utilised to blend the house into its surroundings, whilst simultaneously accentuating the often more lavish interiors.

The profound experience of the Watzek House needs to be experienced to fully understand its sublime presence, especially the courtyard of the house during the warmer months when the planting is in bloom. Yeon, who regularly discussed his work publicly in a very conversational fashion provided a verbal walkthrough of his pioneering project for those who have not had the opportunity to visit:

The Watzek House quickly developed international acclaim and was heralded for what appeared to be a fully formed realisation of regional modernism, from an area sparingly recognised for its architecture and from a young unknown architect. The design’s interest stemmed from its ability to reassess the evolving principles of the International Style at the profoundly early date of 1936. At the Watzek House, Yeon was able to reinterpret the ideals of modernism to also embody the regional style of the area into an outcome that was undoubtedly American – a modern solution to a well-versed traditional typology.

The most common introduction to this project is via the photo above that was snapped by a photographer soon after the project’s completion. This unique photo captures a composition where the rhythmic gable forms of the house and the sharp shadows sit in harmony with the shape of Mt Hood in the distance. The photo appeared in a MoMA exhibition soon after and would elevate this project into the canons of residential design.

Yeon often used courtyards to heighten the entry sequence experience of his projects, and nowhere was this explored more profoundly than at the Watzek House. Yeon was able to utilise the courtyard as a way to accentuate the processional nature of the entry sequence to provide a series of thresholds that subtly transition one from the outdoors to the crafted interior spaces. His designs often wrapped around these courtyard spaces to create interior spaces that achieve views to both the untouched rural landscapes and the manicured courtyard spaces.

The Watzek House will forever be a pioneering piece of regional modernity that will stand as an example of the power of a home. Demonstrating the potential for a project that coalesces with a perfect site and brief, in the hands of a master architect to achieve the sublime.

Following the Watzek House, Yeon continued to explore across a series of projects the strategies that were important to his design beliefs. His designs continued to develop a version of landscape focused on cautious modernism, only integrating the contemporary ideals that suited his vernacular style. A particular element of the modernist movement that Yeon embraced was the enhanced efficiencies from the rise of industrialisation. Much like his aesthetic decisions he also approached industrialisation with the same restrained enthusiasm.

The potential of industrialisation first appeared in Yeon’s work in his series of Plywood Houses that were commissioned by the contractor of the Watzek House. These projects were intended to be inexpensive developments, in contrast to the expensively detailed Watzek House. This scheme was initially a series of ten small houses on highly wooded and rocky sites that were painted to match the setting. The Plywood Houses embraced the growing standardisation of materials to develop very cost effective building solutions that were clad in their namesake, plywood, with vertical fir battens to cover the modular ply junctions.

The Plywood Houses were featured in numerous publications and heralded for their ability to achieve a price point cheaper than typical tract housing. The designs were refreshing for their lack of pretence in creating austere site-specific dwellings that maximised the site elements of natural light and passive ventilation to achieve highly liveable built outcomes. The Jorgensen House was an example of a larger version of the Plywood Strategy that was able to blend the larger scale of the Watzek house with the efficient techniques of the original Plywood Houses.

Unfortunately, much like many other modernist architects of the era, their cost-effective options that strived for mass adoption were not extensively adopted due to the power of standardised tract housing. Whilst the modestly sized Plywood Houses were quite successful and were appreciated in their settings at the time of their construction, sadly most of these houses no longer exist as their once humble sites are now far more affluent areas.

As Yeon’s career progressed he toiled and refined his design ideology. He primarily worked alone and his projects were a labour of love, resulting in a small number of realised projects across his career compared to other peers. His career was dotted with a series of projects that helped to define and evolve the Pacific Northwest architectural style. Yeon’s regionalist style continued to dismiss the International Styles homogenous goals, nonetheless there were certain material and style innovations that Yeon did sensitively integrate into his otherwise classically vernacular style.

The Swan House is a prime example of what many characterise as Yeon’s ‘barn’ style of design that embraced the vernacular style of wood clad meandering volumes that is typical in the Oregon rural landscape. The form and scale, whilst rustic in palette, is contemporary for its time. The dwelling steps down the site, in contrast to the tenants of the International Style, to blend with the landscape in a manner representative of the vernacular wood forms in which Yeon’s origins originated.

In plan this project showcases a composition that Yeon regularly utilised in which the communal living and dining areas are defined as the negative space between two other more private volumes of the house. This strategy resulted in unique public areas that were often open-ended rectangular spaces which actively leaked into other areas of the house and site, energising the whole design. This house takes this aspect of overlapping spaces to Yeon’s richest extents and highlights how the occupants of a Yeon house are never over-burdened by the architect’s presence, instead one feels the spaces organically evolve as if they had always been there. It is the graceful and rambling connections between both spaces and landscape, exemplified by the entry sequence canopy, that prompts many to consider this project one of Yeon’s masterpieces.

In mild contrast to the organic nature of the Swan House, the Shaw House by Yeon demonstrates an alternate style of design that explores a more classical example of residential design. Yeon’s Beaux Arts origins and subsequent classical skillset are often contained to his interiors. At the Shaw House these are allowed to be utilised at the exterior form to create a calm form that sits gracefully on the crest of this site. Yeon noted that this style of form was required for this project to ensure that the site does not over-proportionally dominate the dwelling.

Like many other architects during the early 20th century the influence of Japanese architecture was a big influence on the concepts surrounding the modest adoption of the International Style. Yeon’s interiors are a strong duality of both classical and Japanese sensibilities to create warm and inviting interiors. Yeon uses his evolving understanding of the craft of Japanese architecture to raise his typical ‘barn’ style exterior to a more refined and curated palette that underpins the strength of this design.

The potency of the Shaw House exemplifies Yeon’s unique duality as a master of both rustic vernacular forms and classical beauty. Typically Yeon left the contrast of these two skills to work in rich contrast as one moved from the humble exteriors to the lush interiors. In his work you can appreciate in the humble elements that there is an understanding of high-art taste, and in the lavish interiors a frugality inherent in the detailing. It is this hybrid skillset that allowed Yeon dwellings to have an enduring appeal.

In addition to Yeon’s architectural endeavours he was also a staunch conservationist focusing his efforts on both the Columbia Gorge and portions of the Oregon Pacific Ocean coastline. His efforts to protect the Columbia Gorge area ensured it remained a pristine area of natural beauty. It is not a superlative to say that without Yeon’s rigorous interventions, the Columbia Gorge would be scattered with commercial developments. Yeon owned an important segment of the Gorge known as The Shire that was donated to his foundation as an ongoing educational asset.

Yeon’s work for the most part focused on residential work. Later in his career he worked on several civil and commercial projects that highlighted his architectural skillset extended beyond the beautiful rural sites. The most prominent of these was the Portland Visitors Center, a project that formed a key part of Robert Moses’s waterfront development and framed the entrance to the city from the south that Moses called out as “deplorable” and prompted the need for Yeon’s intervention.

The design for the Visitor Center is a strong example of the International Style, potentially Portland’s first, and was built around a three-foot modular grid. The building’s scale is modest, similar to a refined series of four large residential buildings arranged in a pinwheel layout, with the public outdoor realm created by the area in between these varying height-built forms and suspended shade structure. The result is a building of assured concept, with each element of the arrangement working off and gaining strength from the other parts of the layout.

The building was well received and widely published, most significantly in the MoMA’s 1952 ‘Built-in the USA: Post-war Architecture’ exhibit and book alongside other pivotal works of the era such as Mies’s Farnsworth House and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson Wax Building. This building in its urban context illustrates Yeon’s design capability to bring his design concepts out of the countryside and into the city. Making us ponder what may have been if more opportunities of this typology had eventuated throughout his career.

Yeon’s career helped define the Pacific Northwest architectural style along with his peer Pietro Belluschi whose pioneering work in the Portland and greater Oregon area helped to develop and highlight the era architecturally. This style, often called the ‘Northwest Style’ quickly rose to national fame largely due to Yeon’s inclusion in the MoMA exhibition during this period. Importantly Yeon helped to highlight the importance of Regional styles in contrast to the evolving homogenous agendas of the International Style. Their rebellion demonstrated that modernism could be tempered to allow the important origins of the subject site to also be incorporated into modern design.

Yeon’s design hypothesis was a consistent evolution from his early career influences of vernacular Oregon forms and classical professional experience. This evolved subtly, adding new influences of modernism and Japanese design when it was appropriate. Unlike some other architects of this era he resisted the inclination to adopt and shift with the contemporary trends of architecture – a topic in which he vocally spoke out against.

His work, whilst limited in quantity compared to his peers, uncovered some of the most powerful pieces of regionally focused modern design in a manner that few others were able to match. His work helped inspire many generations of designers after him to treat the landscape with respect and understand the power of crafted design solutions to create sublime residential outcomes. His work was humble and often did not get the notoriety it deserved because of this fact. His career should undoubtedly go down as one of the 20th century’s most important residential designers.