Review: John Yeon: Modern Architecture and Conservation in the Pacific Northwest, by Marc Treib

Abstract

Marc Treib John Yeon: Modern Architecture and Conservation in the Pacific Northwest San Francisco: ORO Editions, 2016, 282 pp., 68 color and 152 b/w illus. $40 (cloth), ISBN 9781935935278 While John Yeon's overall creative output was relatively small, his life and career present an expansive and complex topic for any author to tackle. In John Yeon: Modern Architecture and Conservation in the Pacific Northwest , Marc Treib has undertaken this task in a manner as distinguished and thorough as his subject. Yeon was a self-taught architect, landscape architect, conservationist, preservationist, and art collector, whose architecture was widely celebrated during the later 1930s and early 1950s but ultimately faded from standard studies of the field. Born in 1910 to Elizabeth Mock and John Baptiste Yeon II, a self-made businessman who accrued a fortune in lumber and real estate, Yeon was raised in Portland, Oregon. Following matriculation from the Culver Military Academy in Indiana and a short stay at Stanford University, he spent time in New York working for the architectural firm of Young, Moskowitz, and Rosenberg and attending extension courses in architecture at Columbia University, but he never registered as an architect. Following travel in Europe, Yeon returned home in 1930, where he initiated his lifelong passion for conservation when he purchased property along the Oregon coast, preserving it from development. Several years later he became involved with the movement to preserve the integrity of the Columbia River Gorge, in which he played a pivotal role. During this same period Yeon produced studies for several architectural projects (nonrealized) and designed a garden for his mother. In 1936, at age twenty-six, he developed plans for the Portland home of Aubrey Watzek and his mother. Watzek turned to Yeon after rejecting plans by Pietro Belluschi, a friend of Yeon then working in the Portland office of A. E. Doyle; Watzek and Yeon had met in 1931 when both were serving on the Oregon State Parks Commission. Lacking the professional …