The architectural legacy of the 1959 centennial Exposition.(Oregon Places)(Report)

Fifty years ago, centennial-themed festivals, ceremonies, parades, balls, exhibits, rodeos, and jamborees filled event schedules in even the smallest towns in Oregon throughout the state's centennial celebration, which began on February 14, 1959. The anchor event for the statewide birthday party was the Oregon Centennial Exposition and International Trade Fair, held in north Portland for 100 days between June 10 and September 17. Marketed as the "Frontier of the Future," the celebration attracted 1.3 million visitors, cost over $3 million, covered 65 acres of land, and like most expositions, left nothing physical in its wake. (1)

Like those of its predecessor of fifty-four years, the Lewis & Clark Exposition, the Centennial Exposition grounds were meant to be temporary. Nonetheless, several prominent architects and artists collaborated on the design and decoration of a community of progressive buildings and exhibits that, despite their ephemeral character, did not exist in a vacuum. The modern aesthetic that dominated the Centennial Exposition grounds reflected the competing paradigms and shifting trends that characterized modernist theory nationwide at the end of the 1950s. While the 1930s saw the rise of regionalism in the arts and architecture, the 1950s found interest in regional identity waning in the wake of the momentum that Mies van der Rohe and the International Style gained after World War II and in the emergence of post-modernism. In 1959, Oregon's Centennial Exposition brought together the Pacific Northwest's foremost practitioners of regional modernism with a charge to do what all expositions strive to do: anticipate the future. If regionalism was not the future, what was? Photographs of what was there and fifty years of perspective help us see how Oregon's mid-century architects answered that question.

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Most scholars agree that regionalism as a branch of American modernism began in Chicago with Louis Sullivan and his steel-frame office buildings and organic forms, a distinct departure in the late 1890s from standard masonry technology and the Beaux-Arts ornamentation that had been so deeply popularized after Chicago's Columbian Exposition of 1893. Sullivan trained Irving Gill, who later went to San Diego, and Frank Lloyd Wright, who later mentored Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra, in a belief system focused on natural indigenous materials, organic forms, pioneering technologies, and design that responded to individual sites and local conditions. Concurrent trends in California, led by Bernard Maybeck and the firm of Greene and Greene, were also focused away from classicism toward honest expressions of natural materials, Asian influences, and the incorporation of fine art in their Arts and Crafts residences of the 1900s and 1910s. (2)

The European modernists were organized by this time, also embracing new technologies and rejecting historicist forms. Europe's new aesthetic was born in Germany in a period of social reform and technological advancement after World War I, a movement known as "Neues Bauen" or "new building." The appeal of the emerging streamlined aesthetic was not confined to Germany, however, and in 1925, the French put together a ground-breaking exhibition of modern decorative arts widely recognized as the introduction to the rest of the world of the popular "Art Deco" style. (3)

In Portland, architects such as A.E. Doyle dabbled in Art Deco in the late 1920s, but the seeds of regionalism, seen by architects as the more humanist version of modernism, had already been sown in the city, where it caught the attention of a couple of progressive young designers working for Doyle. In 1916, Doyle helped his friend Harry Wentz, a painter at the Museum Art School in Portland, design a cottage studio at Neahkanie on the Oregon coast. The building's simple exterior, sophisticated interior treatment, fine craftsmanship, framed views, and unpolished local materials seemed to rise out of the landscape as though it had been there forever. Without bearing any resemblance to the architecture of the nascent European modernist movement, the cottage reflected its fundamental tenets: a lack of historicist ornamentation and a simple form that followed the specific function of the building. This was not Doyle's first cottage at Neahkanie; it was his last of several designed between 1908 and 1916. While his earlier cottages recalled the English Arts and Crafts movement, the Wentz Cottage directly referenced the regional architecture of California, including the work of Bernard Maybeck, and showed the influence of Wentz's admiration of Japanese art. It profoundly inspired architect Pietro Belluschi and, later, his friend and colleague John Yeon, both of whom would go on to define and refine the Northwest Style of architecture in Oregon. (4)

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