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The Arc of the Architect
In a career that spans fifty-eight years and counting, architect Saul Zaik ’52 has become a very visible invisible man.
Firmitatis, utilitatis, venustatis.
These are what the architecture textbook identifies as the three defining principles of a good building. This particular textbook happens to have been written by the Roman architect Vitruvius early in the first century C.E., but not that much has really changed. A good building should (still) be durable, function in a manner suited to the people who will use it, and be delightful to the eye while uplifting to the spirit. Two out of three doesn’t cut it—witness your average strip mall, gas station, or tract house.
It is the architect (from a combination of the early Greek words for “leader” and “builder”) who must create the balance. And it is a position of some responsibility: entire cultures, entire peoples, entire ages are remembered by their buildings. From the distance of forty centuries, the ancient Egyptians didn’t merely build the pyramids, the ancient Egyptians are the pyramids. Ditto Rome’s Coliseum, the Alhambra, Angkor Wat, Chichen Itza—the list illuminates high points of human history.
So the stakes are high, and in the last century or so, America has produced one true popular icon of architecture, the one name (or actually three) that almost anyone in the country can pull to mind: Frank Lloyd Wright. There are others in the pantheon, of course: Philip Johnson, Frank Gehry, Richard Meier, Michael Graves, I. M. Pei, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Eero Saarinen, Pietro Belluschi, Alvar Aalto—to name a plausible few.
The state of Oregon can claim one of the names on that rarified list, if more by an accident of geography than anything else. Pietro Belluschi was born in Italy and educated at Cornell. He came west in the mid-1920s to work as a mining engineer in Idaho, where he soon heard about a job as a draftsman in the office of the famous Portland architect A.E. Doyle. Within a few years of Doyle’s death in 1928, Belluschi took over the firm and by the end of World War II had designed the landmark Equitable Building (now known as the Commonwealth Building) in Portland. It was one of the very first “glass box” office towers, and the first to use double-pane glass, aluminum cladding, and to be totally sealed and air-conditioned. The building made Belluschi an icon of modernist architecture and the hero for an exceptional group of Northwest architects, who would begin to come into their own at the halfway point of the twentieth century.
One of those young guys worked briefly in the office of Belluschi, Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill (BSOM), although by the time he arrived the famous architect had departed to be dean of the architecture school at MIT. A Portland native and recent graduate of the University of Oregon School of Architecture and Allied Arts, Saul Zaik would soon begin making quite a reputation of his own. As Louis Sullivan, the late-nineteenth-century architect of the early skyscrapers, famously said: “Form forever follows function.” The arc had begun.
Utilitatis
Some architects know their true calling from a very early age. Buildings speak to them; they hear music in structure and space. That was not Saul Zaik.
Born in 1926 in northwest Portland, just a few blocks from where his office stands today, Zaik grew up without much idea of what he wanted to do. He liked to draw, usually cars, and he enjoyed taking things apart to see how they were put together.
When Zaik was around twelve years old, an uncle took him aside and said, “Saul, the future is going to be in something called ‘television,’ so you want to take math and science and then go to Benson Polytechnic and learn about electricity.”
So Zaik did as prompted, attending the city’s lone vocational high school. He took math and science; he learned about electricity. Television, however, eluded him.
“I never could understand,” Zaik says today, “how you could send an electron through the air and get a TV picture. I still don’t, really.”
When he graduated from high school in 1944, the U.S. Navy called. Based on his education, Zaik went to what the military called radio school, but was actually training in the early electronics of the time. Again, too many electrons.
“I didn’t care much for it,” he remembers, “so I sort of just let it flow by.”
The Navy eventually sent him to sea, just about the time the war ended, and Zaik spent a rather pleasant eighteen months on what was called the “Magic Carpet”—a transport ship ferrying troops between exciting San Francisco and beautiful Hawaii. It wasn’t exactly the Love Boat, but tougher tours have been served.
Discharged in 1946, Zaik was eager to get back to the Northwest. His plan was to attend Oregon State University and become an electrical engineer—but the Fates, or the electrons, or at least the campus housing department, had other ideas.
“There were so many vets going back to school at that time,“ Zaik says, “that I didn’t find a very welcoming situation at OSU. There was just no housing available. So I tried the University of Oregon, and it was more friendly—they had just finished a new dorm for vets and I could move right in.”
Zaik soon found himself drawn to the School of Architecture and Allied Arts, and, as Oregon architecture writers Brian Libby and Bob Zaikoski note, “Zaik’s friends included not only the fellow young architecture students who would become his colleagues, but also artists like painters Carl Morris and Tom Hardy [’42, M.F.A. ’52], glass sculptor Fred Heidl, and potter Jim Bartell [’48].”
For Zaik, it was a freeing environment. “It was a different world in those days,” he says. “The architecture school was less structured, less formal. There were no grades, and it was a noncompetitive environment.” He particularly remembers the late architecture professor Bob Ferens and the late architectural history professor Marion Dean Ross.
It was a different world in many ways. Zaik’s tuition under the G.I. Bill was $37 a term. Most of his fellow architecture students were, like Zaik, in their mid-twenties. And imagine some kids in the Class of 2013 pulling this off: Zaik and two of his fellow students got a G.I. loan, then designed and built a house while they were still in school. It was out in what was then a brand new neighborhood, at 28th and Alder. Zaik laughs when he says that he keeps meaning to get down to Eugene and see if the house still stands today.
A snow skier since high school, Zaik also raced on the UO alpine ski team coached by none other than 10th Mountain Division veteran Bill Bowerman ’34, M.Ed. ’53. Zaik remembers that many team practices involved running along far behind the track guys.
Zaik graduated in 1952—his thesis was the plan and drawings for an imagined ski resort lodge at Diamond Peak in the Cascades—and returned to Portland in an energetic era full of growth and promise. An era when Zaik’s friends, even barely out of college, could pull together $300 or $400 to pay him to design their first house, which they would build for less than $10,000.
“That sure doesn’t happen today,” Zaik says with a shake of his head.
Venustatis
There is a homegrown architectural style variously called Northwest Regional or Northwest Modern. Depending on the interpretation, it began some seventy years ago with architects including Belluschi, John Yeon, and others, and probably reached its zenith in the heyday of talents like John Storrs, Van Evera Bailey, Herman Brookman and, of course, Saul Zaik. The style incorporates the clean lines and expanses of glass used by the mid-century modernists with the warmth and solidity of local materials, primarily wood and stone, and pays particular attention to the demands and beauty of the site.
Once asked if Northwest Regional is valid in the context of more widely known architectural styles—the International Style of Le Corbusier and van der Rohe, for example—Zaik answered without hesitation: “It is absolutely valid. It is site-oriented in terms of sun and weather. It respects the vegetation of the site. . . . I think it has to do with a Northwest lifestyle. Our clients were outdoor people who appreciated the landscape and wanted to be connected to it and to preserve it.”
In what writers Libby and Zaikoski call “the golden age of houses,” from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s, lifelong outdoorsman Zaik would become perhaps the most “Oregon” of all the Northwest Regional architects.
A 1973 article in the magazine Symposia declared, “When one thinks of Oregon architecture, one immediately envisions weathered wood structures resembling Willamette Valley farm buildings. The Oregon architect of the current generation most sympathetic and skilled with this vernacular is Saul Zaik of Portland. His residences, condominiums, and apartments are to be found throughout Oregon, and like his predecessors [Wade] Pipes, Brookman, Yeon, and Belluschi, a Zaik home is easily identifiable. The shapes of his structures are sometimes complex, but always the roof lines are simple, and the resulting building is an easily understood statement of its use and its site.”
But all of that was still to come when the Zaik arc began, first with a short stint in Portland, then a brief move to The Dalles to work with architect Boyd Jossey designing school buildings. He returned to Portland and the job with BSOM, his first project being an Army Air Corps base, where he designed everything from the officers’ quarters to the cold storage building to the runway lights. All along he was moonlighting, doing small houses for the aforementioned friends and acquaintances. Zaik married in 1955, and by the following year, as he reached his thirtieth birthday, he had enough work lined up to leave the big firm. Thus, in 1956, in a little Victorian rental house on the margin of downtown Portland, the so-called Fourteenth Street Gang was born.
The amazing group of young UO architecture alums included Zaik, William Fletcher ’50, Donald Blair ’51, John Reese ’49, Frank Blachly ’51, Alex Pierce ’54, and designer George Schwarz ’55. They shared space, ideas, laughs, and the occasional adult beverage. Sometimes they worked together on projects, but they all had individual practices.
It was during this period that Zaik designed the house that put him firmly on the map. Philip Feldman, heir to a large soap company, came to Zaik wanting a house on his property in the southwest hills of Portland. What emerged was a clean, sophisticated structure with floor-to-ceiling windows, vertical cedar siding, and a low-slung gable roof with broad, sheltering eaves.
“It is extremely modern in using very flush surfaces and wide panes of glass,” Portland architect Don Rouzie, one of Zaik’s longtime collaborators, told Libby and Zaikoski. “It is very simple. It doesn’t jump out at you as being this terrific thing. But you get in there, and it’s just awesome. You realize what Northwest Regional means.”
After its completion in 1957, the Feldman house received numerous architectural design awards and achieved a fair amount of renown for Zaik. More than half a century later, the house was chosen as the audience favorite after being featured on a tour of Portland’s most interesting mid-century and present-day contemporary homes. It seems people (still) found it delightful to the eye and uplifting to the spirit.
In 1959, Zaik created a house for a very demanding client: Saul Zaik and family. He has lived in it with his wife for half a century now, and his kids grew up there. He still thinks it is some of the best work he’s ever done.
“It’s kind of falling apart now,” Zaik says, laughing. “It was really just an idea I had about living, which was that each person needs about 500 square feet in which to live comfortably. I look at my family today and wonder if we shaped the house, or the house shaped us.”
Zaik’s home is another deceptively simple design, separate pavilions working perfectly with the wooded site to make light and space come alive inside.
“Zaik’s work is truly timeless, and rooted in every site he built upon,” according to UO architecture alum Corey Martin ’06, a principal with Portland’s Path Architecture and one of Zaik’s fans. “Fifty years after it was built, his personal residence is better than most new work. It is so simple yet dynamic, sophisticated, and humane.”
In 1960, Blair and Zaik left the Fourteenth Street Gang to form Blair Zaik Architects, and the arc of Zaik’s rise pitched up. While he continued to design a string of outstanding houses that remain as Northwest Regional icons today, Zaik also began a long string of successful commercial projects.
“Two things really got us going back then,” Zaik says—and whenever Zaik speaks of one of his projects he virtually always uses the first person plural, ever willing to acknowledge the collaborative side of architectural design. “U.S. Bank began to hire a few young Turks to design branch buildings, and we got some awards and publicity for those. And then John Gray called.”
In the early 1960s, Gray, who had taken a small Oregon saw chain company and turned it into the world leader, decided to try his hand at developing resort and residential properties in what was then a radical way—with respect for the natural environment. He was at work on Salishan, his Oregon Coast development, when he discovered Zaik. Gray asked him to design the Longhouse Condominiums on the beach.
“John was always very quiet,” Zaik remembers. “He would hire us to do a project, then go away and let us do our work. That kind of developer has gone away, I think! John Storrs was designing the main lodge, and he was very friendly, in a sarcastic kind of way. Whenever he looked at our drawings he would say something like, ‘Why are you using floor-to-ceiling windows? Little kids will crash through them!’”
Happily, no youngsters plummeted through the glazing, and over the years the work with Gray led to some of Zaik’s signature creations, designing the Ranch Cabins and the Meadow Houses at Sunriver in central Oregon, as well as the Bluff Condominiums back at Salishan. He also designed several homes in the two resorts, including residences for Phil Knight and Bill Naito.
In 1970, Arnold Zidell, a wealthy and slightly eccentric shipyard owner, offered Zaik an intriguing challenge. Zidell had a near-vertical piece of property overlooking all of Portland and a 100-foot-long, 3-foot-thick steel ship’s mast he had salvaged from a decommissioned vessel. He wanted Zaik to design a round, rotating house on top of the mast, sort of a miniature Seattle Space Needle. Zaik looked at Zidell for a minute, then said, “Sure. That sounds like a lot of fun.”
“Arnie was a far-out guy,” Zaik adds today, “but that really wasn’t the oddest request I’ve ever had as an architect! It was pretty simple, actually.”
As a skier, Zaik had seen enough chairlift towers to know how to use the mast—just sink a big concrete foundation to bedrock and bolt the mast onto it. Then hang the weight of the house from the top of the mast, cut to sixty feet, with a structure of steel trusses. As for rotating, the structural engineer counseled that it would be “imprudent.” What emerged was an octagonal two-story house with a ground floor nearly fifty feet in the air. The now-famous house likely would had earned Zaik several awards—had the publicity-averse Zidell ever allowed him to submit it.
Zaik begins to laugh as he describes the Zidell house. “It would be just impossible to do that today,” he says, imagining the apoplectic reaction that would paralyze the city planning office should someone propose building a house on a ship’s mast in 2010. “There are so many codes these days, that thing would be held up with a hundred steel cables and who knows what else—full-time helicopters maybe—of course, they’d throw you out if you even suggested the idea!”
Zaik wasn’t just a Northwest Modernist—he also had a deep affinity for the workmanship and style of circa-1930s National Park Service buildings, so he was thrilled to take on the expansion and renovation of Mount Hood’s landmark Timberline Lodge, built in 1938 by the Works Progress Administration. His 1968 addition to the lodge blends perfectly with the building’s original aesthetic, but a closer look reveals hints of a more modern form with larger windows and extended roof planes. Zaik also oversaw restorations at Crater Lake Lodge and the Vista House at Crown Point in the Columbia River Gorge.
From residences and vacation homes to apartments and condos, from medical and commercial buildings to Oregon State University’s first computer center and several schools, Zaik’s work stands throughout Oregon. He has designed and built so much in this state that the odds are very high that you have seen—or even stayed in or worked in—one of his buildings. How then, can he be an invisible man?
Firmitatis
At eighty-three, Zaik still goes to the office each day. He’s happy to discuss the good old days, but whenever the phone rings, he’ll just about leap to get it.
“Could be a new client,” he says, and you can tell that, just as he still loves hiking and skiing, he still has the same fire for a new project, a new design challenge. He’s working on a few projects, but there’s always room for more—a rare opportunity for someone shopping for an architect: one of the legends of Northwest Modern architecture is still very much a going concern.
But Zaik confesses to feeling a bit like an invisible man now compared to the high profile he used to hold in Northwest architecture. He mentions it in passing and with good humor, but it’s clear that Zaik has little interest in fading away to join the pantheon—he’d rather book some gigs.
“Some of my best friends over the years have come out of doing houses,” he says, then laughs, “That’s mainly what’s keeping me going these days . . . repeat business!”
It isn’t the money he’s after; he’s driven instead by endless energy and an undimmed passion for design. Even budget issues don’t deter his drive.
“I’ve always loved the challenge,” he explains, “whether it’s the site or the client or the budget. From the beginning, if somebody came in and said ‘I want to build a house for a hundred bucks,’ I’d say, ‘Let’s go!’ But today the hardest thing is dealing with the city and all the codes. That really bothers me. They set such rigid standards for design, unrelated to the individual project. To me, the site always came first: how can I use it, how can I enhance it? It’s much tougher today to do interesting things with houses, but it can still be done.”
He follows everything that’s going on with new young architects and green technologies, particularly cheering on the sustainably designed urban infill projects that are the latest trend. But Zaik worries about what the economic future holds for the graduates coming out of architecture schools.
“We never made a whole lot of money,” he says, “but we managed to always find work and survive comfortably as a small firm. I don’t see that happening so much in the future. It’s very hard these days to start up with no cash like I did! What happens to all these kids we’re turning out? I always used to tell young architects that the way to get established was to do a great building that gets noticed. Where do they get the opportunity to do that now?”
It may have been easier back when Northwest Modernism’s most visible invisible architect began his arc, but if the hundreds of Saul Zaik-designed buildings that grace our state prove anything, it’s that whatever and whenever, talent will rise.
Todd Schwartz ’75 is a Portland writer who once had thoughts of becoming an architect—until a somewhat disastrous high school career day at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. But that’s another story.
Web Extra! See examples of Saul Zaik’s work here.
