What gives a work of architecture its unique identity? In architecture as in politics, debates about identity — regional, national, international — are fraught.
Founded in 1892 and housed since 1932 in a building designed by local luminary Pietro Belluschi, the Portland Art Museum recently opened its largest-ever exhibition devoted to a single architect. That architect was not Belluschi, but a man who’s first and best-known building — the landmark Aubrey Watzek House of 1937 — Belluschi was sometimes credited.  Quest For Beauty: The Architecture, Landscapes, and Collections of John Yeon, took up much of the museum’s ground floor. The exhibition was divided into two sections: at the center were models, drawings, photos, and videos illustrating around two dozen of Yeon’s projects, built and unbuilt, from the late 1920s to the early 1980s; to one side were pieces from his wide-ranging collection of European and Asian painting, sculpture, furniture, and decorative arts.
The elegantly installed show was accompanied by two books, one on Yeon’s buildings, the other on his landscape designs and conservation efforts in the Columbia River Gorge and on the Oregon Coast. Altogether they provided a handsomely illustrated case for Yeon’s significance as a planner, conservationist, preservationist, activist, connoisseur and collector, and as an architect who “drew an international spotlight to regional modernism in the Pacific Northwest.” 
This last achievement is central to an idea that is widely held and long-cherished but nonetheless sketchy. Yeon’s reputation as a regionalist dates to the late 1930s, when the Watzek House, designed for a lumber baron in Portland, Oregon, began to be featured in various publications and exhibitions, including some at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Indeed, for decades many have claimed that there is a more or less cohesive style which can be identified as “Pacific Northwest regional modernism,” marked by ample use of native woods, low-slung gable roofs evoking barns and other vernacular structures, and carefully wrought relationships between buildings and their natural landscapes. Along with Yeon, representative architects include Portland’s Belluschi and Seattle’s Paul Thiry.
But our confidence in the existence of such a style is shaken by Yeon’s own comments on the matter. No doubt, Yeon recognized the formal consistencies running through his work, and he admitted to long interest in the idea of regional “distinctions” in architecture. Yet toward the end of his career he raised serious doubts. “Whether there is or is not a Northwest regional style of architecture is debatable,” he said in 1986, “but what is certain is that lot of people want to think there is.” Yeon was famously modest, prone to understatement and self-deprecation, so downplaying his role as a stylistic leader would have been characteristic. In this case, however, modesty seems not to have been the issue.