John Yeon Landscape: Design Conservation Activism

John Yeon (1910-1994) devoted his life to designing and preserving the spectacular terrain of the Pacific Northwest. John Yeon Landscape explores his roles as planner, landscape architect, and conservation activist. The son of a lumber baron who raised the money for and oversaw the construction of one of America's first scenic highways, the Columbia River Gorge Highway, Yeon tackled conservation causes with the eye of a landscape designer. He single-handedly protected two of the most prominent features of the Oregon Coast: Neahkahnie Mountain and Chapman Point. Stemming from an intimate understanding of both landscape and the timber business, Yeon's writing and advocacy played an important role in the establishment of Olympic National Park. And in the Columbia River Gorge, he led a national committee dedicated to its conservation as well as buying 78 acres of land there, transforming it into the Shire. This private, picturesque landscape showcased the beauty of the gorge and even served as the birthplace of the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Act.

Randy Gragg is the executive director of the John Yeon Center for Architecture and the Landscape, University of Oregon. He worked for 17 years as an architecture critic for the Oregonian and has written on architecture for the New York Times, Harper's, Metropolis, Architectural Record, and numerous other publications. He was a 2006 Loeb Fellow at Harvard University and a 1995 National Arts Journalism Fellow at Columbia University. A recipient of the Life Magazine Alfred Eisenstaedt Award, travel and editorial photographer Susan Seubert is based in Portland, Oregon, and Maui, Hawaii. She has received awards from the North American Travel Journalists Association for excellence in photography. In addition to being widely published and exhibited, she also lectures regularly about her work at such institutions as Harvard University and the Portland Art Museum. Bowen Blair is an attorney who served as founding executive director of Friends of Columbia Gorge and worked closely with Congress and the governors of Oregon and Washington to develop the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Act. Blair founded the Trust for Public Land's Oregon office and started TPL's national program to return conservation lands to Native American tribes. He currently serves as the chair of the Columbia River Gorge Commission and is writing a biography of Nancy Russell. Kenneth I. Helphand is Philip H. Knight Professor of Landscape Architecture Emeritus at the University of Oregon. He is the author of Colorado: Visions of an American Landscape, Yard Street Park: The Design of Suburban Open Space (with Cynthia Girling), Dreaming Gardens: Landscape Architecture and the Making of Modern Israel, Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime, and the forthcoming Lawrence Halprin.