Paper Architecture in a Real World Portland Art Museum
The Portland Art Museum is pleased to announce Quest for Beauty: The Compages, Landscapes, and Collections of John Yeon, a retrospective look at an Oregon original.Few architects accept influenced and then many facets of a region as John Yeon (1910-1994). Yeon is well-nigh widely remembered as an architect, in particular for a serial of innovative houses—about prominently, the 1937 Aubrey Watzek Firm—that drew an international spotlight to regional modernism in the Pacific Northwest.
Nonetheless Yeon had equal vision and influence as a planner, conservationist, historic preservationist, urban activist, and, maybe most of all, connoisseur of elegance and craft. Largely self taught, and working independently, Yeon designed distinctive buildings, shaped precedent-stretching gardens, and fought to preserve some of the Northwest'south most treasured vistas—the Columbia River Gorge, the Oregon Declension, Olympic National Park.
In improver, he amassed a highly personal collection of Asian and European decorative arts.
Developed with the University of Oregon's John Yeon Center for Architecture and the Mural, Quest for Dazzler's architecture and landscape department surveys two dozen projects and buildings designed between 1927 and the mid-'50s, including a dynamic 1934 scheme for Timberline Social club; Yeon's inventive plywood houses of the belatedly '30s; and the 1950 Shaw House, which elegantly anticipates the stylistic eclecticism of Postmodernism. The exhibition features original models and drawings, along with images by a trio of the midcentury's greatest architectural photographers: Ezra Stoller, Maynard Parker, and Roger Sturtevant. Newly developed models and axonometric drawings will invite a greater understanding of Yeon's careful siting of buildings and his cutting edge construction and sustainable design techniques. A high-definition time-lapse video records the changing seasons at The Shire, the stunning 78- acre preserve in the Columbia Gorge that Yeon saved from development and shaped into a unique landscape.
The exhibition features a wide selection of art, decorative arts and historic materials lent by Richard Louis Brown, who founded the Yeon Heart in 1995 with his gift of the Watzek House to the University of Oregon. Yeon'south interests as a collector encompassed a range of materials from afar times and places, with concentrations of Chinese furniture and ceramics, Korean ceramics, Japanese screen paintings, Japanese lacquers and ceramics, and Indian miniature paintings, likewise equally European decorative arts of the 18th century. He had a keen sense of quality and an heart for detail, and he moved effortlessly across scale and scope, finding delight equally in small objects and vast vistas.
Together the buildings, landscapes, art, article of furniture, and objects showcase a restless eye and mind that could blot the lessons of centuries of Asian and European art while developing an original vision for the Pacific Northwest.
Quest for Beauty is accompanied by two books published by the Yeon Center with Monfried Editions, John Yeon: Architecture and John Yeon: Landscape. The Museum is presenting a variety of public programs and tours in conjunction with the exhibition, including an opening lecture by distinguished curator and architecture scholar Barry Bergdoll.
Organized by Portland Art Museum and curated by Randy Gragg, executive director of the Academy of Oregon'southward John Yeon Middle for Compages and the Mural. Collection exhibition curated by Maribeth Graybill, Ph.D., The Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Curator of Asian Art, and Dawson W. Carr, Ph.D., The Janet and Richard Geary Curator of European Art.
John Yeon's accomplishments every bit an builder received national recognition while he was even so in his prime, and his impact on the Oregon landscape as an activist for the environment was well known regionally. His genius every bit a collector belonged to the more private aspects of his life and may be less familiar to Museum audiences. The selected highlights from the drove featured in this exhibition illuminate the extraordinary breadth of his interests, spanning several centuries of human try from Europe to Asia, and his unerring eye for quality craftsmanship. Yeon was an assiduous educatee of the arts, reading and traveling widely also as corresponding regularly with leading scholars in the field. His choices were, however, uniquely his own. He seems to have been drawn to objects with flowing, curvilinear contours or asymmetrical compositions—works that played well against the almost Spartan rectilinearity of his compages. He displayed these works in his residential interiors in thoughtfully curated arrangements, bringing together Due east and Westward in utterly unexpected, brilliant combinations.
One of his favorite acquisitions was a pair of Japanese screens of birds and flowers, which he believed to be by Sesshū (1420–1506), the nigh famous painter in Japanese history. Modern scholarship considers them to be by a shut follower, an opinion that in no way diminishes their dramatic graphic bear on. Yeon would use Japanese screen paintings as the visual anchor for a big infinite, and then populate the residue with art works of smaller scale, such equally the magnificent Chinese baluster vase in dazzling yellow and blue, or Indian miniature paintings in intense hues.
Yeon'southward penchant for Asian fine art was echoed in his pursuit of chinoiserie, whimsical 18th-century European objects that freely interpret Chinese and Eastward Asian artistic traditions. He was peculiarly attracted to chinoiserie made in Venice, Europe's gateway to Asia. One of the most spectacular objects in his drove was a door from the Ca' Rezzonico on the G Canal, in which whimsical sprays of flowers, tied with crisp ribbon, enframe 2 scenes that recap European fantasies of the exotic East. Made about 1760, the door is painted in loftier relief and finished to resemble Asian lacquer.
In collecting European art, Yeon favored Italian and French works of the Baroque and Rococo periods, especially those depicting dramatic movement. These include two objects depicting figures in flight: Hubert Gerhard'south bronze Putto and an impressive sketch of a flying effigy viewed from below past Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. Well-nigh spectacular of all is an ivory carving, less than 6 inches tall, depicting The Conversion of Saint Paul with numerous figures in action. These works no doubt first attracted Yeon because of their extraordinary treatment of materials, but the movement of forms surely also appealed to the architect.
[Plywood] POD Initiative
From exorbitant rents and spiraling holding prices to a growing houseless population, problems around affordable housing are some of the virtually pressing issues faced by those living in Portland today. Notwithstanding, none of these challenges are new. In the late 1930s, the demand for financially accessible housing was a driving force behind John Yeon's Plywood Houses. His innovative series of modernistic, inexpensive, modular homes pioneered the use of exterior plywood, a production locally sourced and fabricated famous in the early twentieth century by the Portland Manufacturing Company in St. Johns.
In the spirit of Yeon'due south innovative thinking, we developed the [Plywood] POD Initiative to explore how the power of design — together with the economical fabric qualities of plywood — could play a part in creating shelter solutions for houseless residents in Portland. Similar the 1930s, visionary design thinking is needed today to address the crisis of homelessness here and around the land. The work in this space represents members of the Portland architecture and design community responding to this claiming, offering new provocations to back up a village model of individual tiny houses with shared civilities and a culture of customs and self-governance.
About the POD Initiative
The POD Initiative is organized by Portland State University's Center for Public Interest Design and Communitecture, and is guided by the piece of work of the Village Coalition. The Village Coalition is a Portland-based non-profit organization made up of advocates, activists, designers, and houseless individuals committed to combatting homelessness through placemaking. Members of the Hamlet Coalition and partners in the houseless community accept contributed to this endeavour from its conception to serving as jury members to review submitted designs.
The work represented through this phase of the project builds on significant steps made by the Portland architecture community in the POD Initiative's inaugural project in the autumn 2016, which resulted in 14 built prototypes for tiny houses called sleeping pods. Those sleeping pods will now provide shelter for 14 women in a new village in North Portland's Kenton neighborhood operated by Catholic Charities and the Joint Office of Homeless Services of Multnomah County. We invite you lot to help us imagine how the designs in this exhibit might inform the creation of new villages in Portland equally 1 arroyo to a larger array of solutions necessary to respond to the homeless crisis in our city.
Special Thanks
This space was designed and made possible by partnerships betwixt the Portland Art Museum and Portland State University's Eye for Public Interest Design (CPID). Special thanks to Todd Ferry, CPID Research Associate and Kinesthesia Fellow, along with students Olivia Snell, Brendan Murphy, Danette Papke, Rosemary Colina, Heather Peterson, Aung Kyaw Zin, and Tomasz Depression; Randy Gragg of the Academy of Oregon's John Yeon Middle; the Hamlet Coalition; Marking Lakeman of Communitecture; Sergio Palleroni, Director of the CPID; and residents of Hazelnut Grove.
Participating Design Teams: Architects Without Borders Oregon, Carleton Hart Architecture, Clark/Kjos Architects, GBD Architects, Holst Architecture, LRS Architects, MWA Architects, Office Andorus, Opsis Architecture, Brendan D. Sanchez, Scott Edwards Architecture, SERA Architects, and Shelter Wise + Tiny Nest.
Source: https://portlandartmuseum.org/exhibitions/quest-for-beauty/
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