Aubrey Watzek House

Name: Aubrey R. Watzek House
Address: 1061 SW Skyline Boulevard
City: Portland
Year of Construction: 1937
Architect: John Yeon (while employed at A. E. Doyle & Associates)
Original Use: Residence
Status: In Use
National Register of Historic Places: Listed (74001715); Designated a National Historic Landmark
Description: The Aubrey Watzek House is widely recognized as a significant landmark in the formation of the Pacific Northwest’s modernist architectural vocabulary. Designed by John Yeon while employed by A. E. Doyle & Associates (then managed by Pietro Belluschi), the residence revealed the young architect’s tremendous capacity for artistically melding building form, materials, landscape, and interior space.

The residence’s primary occupants have been Aubrey Watzek, a successful figure in the regional lumber industry, and subsequently Yeon himself and his partner Richard Louis Brown. The property is now owned by the University of Oregon and maintained under the auspices of the John Yeon Center for Architecture and the Landscape. The Watzek House is the most recently designated National Historic Landmark in the state of Oregon. The documentation prepared to support that designation in 2011 justified the property’s national significance:

“Since the time of its construction, the Watzek House has received national acclaim as a building that helped to redefine American residential design. John Yeon, a largely self-trained designer from Portland, Oregon, uniquely shaped the development of Northwest regionalism through civic and professional involvement beginning in the 1930s and continuing to his death in 1994. The inclusion of the Watzek House in the New York MOMA exhibitions Art in Our Time (1939) and Built in the USA: 1932-1944 (1944) directed international attention to his work and underscored Yeon’s importance among a new generation of architectural innovators. The design community immediately recognized the house as a building of national significance. The organizers of Art in Our Time proclaimed that ‘this house is emphatically American’ thus confirming Yeon’s groundbreaking role in creating a distinctively American version of Modemism. Other recognition for the building’s importance in fostering innovative approaches to housing design came from architectural critic Elizabeth Gordon who asserted it was ‘one of the really important houses, architecturally in America. It is great because it is an original building for a powerful landscape which had previously been encrusted only with imported styles.’ At the heart of the praise for the Watzek House lay recognition not only for the powerful design, but also the role that regional approaches played in enriching the search for an expression of modern residential building in the United States. The widespread influence of the Watzek House offers proof that the Modernist movement in America was richer and more indigenous than its critics have allowed. Regional responses to and adaptations of canonical modem design comprise a nationally-significant architectural context and central feature to the appearance and maturation of Modernism in the United States during the middle decades of the twentieth century.

“In addition to broadening the reach of Modernism in the United States, Yeon’s design for the Watzek House was essential to the establishment of a regional approach to architecture that became known as the Northwest Style. Marion Dean Ross, a pioneering scholar of Northwest architecture, former Acting Dean of the School of Architecture and Allied Arts at the University of Oregon, and a founding member of the Society of Architectural Historians, recognized in the 1950s that ‘in its sensitive composition, the forms of the vernacular tradition of the Oregon countryside were knowingly combined with contemporary spatial flow to produce a structure of archetypal significance.’ Writing in Space, Style and Structure (1974), the seminal guide to Northwest architecture, architect George McMath, one of the founders of the preservation movement in Oregon, noted that the building is one of ‘the monuments of the Northwest Style.’ Architectural historian Rosalind Clark argued in the 1980s that the Watzek House ‘sited with a view of Mount Hood and incorporating natively finished local woods, epitomizes the style.’ Indeed, although over seventy years have passed since its construction, contemporary Northwest architects continue to recognize the house’s influence on their work. John Cav recently observed that its designer, John Yeon, ‘single handedly conceived what has become known as the Northwest Style of architecture with his first major commission, the Watzek House.’ The ensuing spread of the Northwest Style was essential to the establishment of a design culture that was regionally sensitive, climatically responsive, and aesthetically powerful.”