![]() ![]() I kept the job but I kept dropping out of classes and New York became very glamorous at night. I had to take courses on, you know, how to put water tanks on top of buildings in New York and so on. However, Columbia was excruciatingly boring. …I lived in a little room up by Columbia. Instead I went to New York and worked at an architect’s office by prearrangement from Portland, and went to Columbia at night. …I came back at the time of his death and never went back to Stanford. I was only at Stanford one quarter and my father died. I didn’t learn much architecture then because I always ended up either making models or doing renderings or fancy pictures.” I seemed to know that’s what I was interested in because I stopped going to the beach in summer at my own request and stayed in Portland and worked as an office boy in the Doyle office. But when Mocks Crest was developed, of course, there were houses built and I watched very, very carefully. Responding to a question by Kolisch as to when he became interested in architecture, Yeon responded, “I don’t know when it started. A lack of degrees does not equal a lack of instruction he seems to have attended a number of fine schools on all levels around the country but simply accelerated out of them, moving on to the next level before completing the one he was in. I did graduate from sunday school”(Kolisch Interview ). I didn’t graduate from grammar school, from high school, or college. In his own words “I didn’t graduate from anything. Yeon never completed formal architectural studies. He did museum gallery installations in Kansas City, Portland and San Francisco. He began the design of the Portland Visitors Center in 1947 (Ritz, Richard, Architects of Oregon, p.444) which is often referred to as his only commercial building, but he also did a small office building for a real estate firm. There was another handful of private homes he did as commissions in addtition to the Watzek House (Jorgenson 1939, Vietor 1941, Van Buren, Shaw 1950, Swan 1950, Cottrell 1950, Corbett? ). Yeon also referred to the Jorgensen house as one of the plywood houses but it is on a larger scale and it was done on commission. Around six more plywood houses of subtly different designs were built in Lake Oswego. They became known as the “plywood houses.” Two were built in the southwest hills off of Barnes Rd and two were built in north Portland (interestingly in the Mocks Crest area). The builder of the Watzek house, Burt Smith, was so impressed with Yeon’s work that he had him design some small houses that he could build on speculation. It was included in both the 10th and the 15th anniversary exhibits at New York Museum of Modern Art (Gragg, web). It is perhaps his best known work and was remarkable for the time and is remarkable still. In 1937 he had his first built commission, the Watzek house. The list of Yeon’s built work is not long. His architectural work has an elegance and refinement that reflects an intense attention to detail and an emphasis on composition and proportion not only in form but in how one moves through space. He became one of the regions most celebrated architects and intellects, achieving national and international recognition. John Yeon was born in Portland in 1910 and was raised in the Mocks Crest area of north Portland. Other sources are referenced in parenthetical notes referring to “sources” list at the end of the piece. In preparing this “sketch” I relied heavily on an interview that Marian Kolisch conducted with John Yeon and which is part of the Oral History Interviews in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. ![]()
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