Robert Oshatz
Every one of the Portland-based architect’s signature structures—from the floating Fennell Residence on the Willamette River to the Chenequa Residence, tucked into a West Wisconsin hillside like a hidden treasure— started with a program and a problem.
The program is what the client brings to the project. It flows from the client’s interior world. As Oshatz describes it, the program has an emotional component, something that informs color motifs, how lines are drawn, the layout of floor plans. It often has a spiritual aspect that will instruct orientation, structural form, environmental integration. The program might include a social compact that dictates how the building is constructed and how it uses its energy. There may be wish lists: morning sun, view corridors, natural light to warm and natural shade to cool.
And there’s almost always something in the program that is even more sublime, such as in the case of the Miyasaka Residence in Obihiro, Japan, a functional and whimsical wonderland born of the quest to design a residence that combines the comforts of Western living with the traditions of a Japanese castle.
The problem is realizing the program within the opportunities and limitations of the structure’s natural environment and in a way that will be felt, over the long haul, at least as much as it is seen. After all, people “feel” at home; they don’t “see” at home.
For Oshatz, the problem is all about connecting the interiors—the client’s and the building’s—with the exterior. And despite his many unforgettable forms, Oshatz says the way he thinks about architecture borrows from a “very traditional” approach to problem solving.
“I design from the inside and work out—the exterior becomes an extension of the interior space,” he says when reached in Thailand, where he was on a mid- March furniture-hunting excursion with a longtime Japanese client. “You’re never done,” he jokes. “Every project becomes like a child to you.” He continues:
“It’s kind of like the human body. You have the important elements of the human heart and all that makes up the interior of a person, and you have the skeleton and membrane that protects it. You can’t change the interior without changing the exterior.”
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SPEAKING less metaphorically and more practically, Oshatz says to think of it like this: Say a client wants
to wake up in the morning and have the first thing they see be a rock formation on the west end of the property. They may also want eastern light with that western view, and no air-conditioning, even though the western view might be the hottest on the property.
“My job is not to say one or the other,” explains Oshatz, “but to solve the problem in a beautiful way. “
His secret weapon?
Poetry, of course.
“Every site has its own unique sense of poetry,” muses Oshatz. “You take that beauty and bring it into the building. My purpose is to build a structure that’s at peace with the environment and at peace within.”
It’s a cliché, of course, to say that good architecture is at home in its environment. Oshatz pushes that cliché toward something more transcendent. His structures— striking compositions of undulating lines, geometric flourishes and whimsical adornments made primarily of wood and stone—feel as if they have sprung from the very ground (or, in some cases, the water) on which they’ve been built.
The Chenequa Residence, for example, strategically wrapped around a western-Milwaukee hillside, barely registers on the driveway approach. But from the slope side, the house appears to grow out of the wooded incline like an elegant mushroom rising from a forest floor.
He is the master of an organic architecture language, communicated within in the gentle curves of the Fennel House on the Willamette River, reflecting the soft, rippling waves of the water it sits beside. “That structure,” says Oshatz, “would look funny on land.” And his famed Wilkinson Residence, nestled in a bit of Portland forest, has been called a tree house, “but it’s not” says Oshatz, “it’s just built among the trees.” The language, as it turns out, is site-specific, unique unto itself.
“Every piece of land has its own sense of poetry,” he repeats for emphasis, as if this alone serves as explanation of the particular genius of seamlessly adding man-made lyrics to nature’s songs.
Oshatz may have started young, very young, but that doesn’t mean this architecture thing wasn’t an accident. Tall, rangy and appearing fit well into his 60s, Oshatz said he started down this road at age 13, “when I realized being the best athlete on my own block wasn’t going to be good enough.”
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HIS CHILDHOOD block was Melrose Avenue in LA “when it was a dead little street with nothing on it.” Oshatz graduated from Fairfax High, which he says didn’t seem remarkable at the time. However, a “Who’s Who” of Fairfax High grads would include everyone from Herb Alpert to Jack Kemp to James Ellroy, as well as most members of Guns N’ Roses and all Chili Peppers past and present, except, of course, Chad.
When an academically indifferent Oshatz hit the 7th grade, shop classes made a welcome appearance on the junior high curriculum. One of them was mechanical drafting. “For the first time in my life, I did something well in school,” say Oshatz, who speaks with a combination of wry humor and pedagogic flair that recalls Phil Jackson.
Oshatz’s teachers suggested he think about being an architect and, as he puts it himself, “because it was the first time I’d been praised, I said ‘yes.’”
He took his teachers seriously. During his freshman year of high school, Oshatz went into a small, neighborhood firm and asked the architect if he could hang around, clean up, do odd jobs, absorb whatever lessons that could be soaked up by osmosis.
The architect took to his young protégé and before long Oshatz was going to school from nine a.m. until noon, followed by work at the firm for four hours every day. It was here that Oshatz received a hands-on education in building the kind of utilitarian apartment complexes that were popping up all over postwar Los Angeles.
“I was learning how a building went together,” says Oshatz. “At the time I started, I thought I was working for the greatest architect in the world.”
Oshatz says he learned architecture in “reverse order,” meaning he grasped the basics of building and construction before he was exposed to the finer aspects of design. “If I didn’t work for this guy, I would have just gone to college and just learned design.”
He says the comparatively workaday experience was a blessing, even as other architects he worked with in those early days started exposing him to Frank Lloyd Wright and the idea of architecture as art.
“I think it was better that way,” remarks Oshatz, still alert and engaged despite the hour growing late in Thailand. “When you’re designing a structure, you don’t want to design something that is impossible to build. It’s nice to do visionary work, but it’s nice to do visionary work that’s capable of being built.”
Oshatz got his bachelor’s degree in architecture from Arizona State University in 1968, during the Summer of Love and at the height of anti-Vietnam War fervor. “Everyone was running around trying to find the firmaments of this and that,” says Oshatz. “It was very interesting times.”
One of the firmaments Oshatz himself followed led him to a judge in Portland who was reportedly favorably disposed to young men such as himself, registered as conscientious objectors to the war in an attempt to avoid being drafted.
While waiting for his case to wend through the military bureaucracy and the local courts, Oshatz began settling into Portland, working, making friends, building a life. His case was eventually dropped and he never got drafted. By 1971, he started his eponymous firm.
In the 40 years since, Oshatz’s work has indelibly imprinted the various geographies of Oregon, the Mountain West, the vast Midwest, Japan and beyond. And though his designs seem dramatic in detail, in context they are only as dramatic as the landscapes into which they are integrated and often subsumed.
He’s been labeled a practitioner of organic architecture, but when I ask him about this Oshatz demurs. “It means so many things to so many people,” he says.
In America, the term generally carries the imprimatur of Frank Lloyd Wright and connotes buildings that appear to grow out of their environments, structures designed from the inside out.
Take even that with a grain of salt, warns Oshatz. “It was a branding method for [Lloyd Wright]. He was a forerunner of branding himself. You shouldn’t really get caught up with it. Good architecture is good architecture no matter what it is.”
Oshatz insists he subscribes to no dogma and tries not to rely on precedence. “Some architects will design the same building over and over again, trying to get it right. I want my houses to reflect the particular environment that it’s in and reflect the personality of the client.”
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IT’S TRUE. No two Oshatz projects look anything alike, and yet they all are unmistakably of his hand. When pressed, Oshatz admits to, if not a style, at least “some underlying aspects” to his work. He prefers to work with natural materials—wood and stone—in ways that are “an honest use of that material.” And, he likes to tie the external and the internal together so that they feel like one element, everything related to one another to form “a total composition.”
His work may not have a signal style, but “it has a grammar,” admits Oshatz, and to him that’s what matters.
Forty years in practice and Oshatz still has projects going on all over the world. There’s a residence on the Southern Oregon coast, an affordable housing project in Japan, where he’s also designing a convention center and entertainment pavilion. His most intriguing project might be the one closest to home—his own subdivision that he’s calling “Royal 5.”
“It’s one of the most environmentally sensitive subdivisions in the city,” explains Oshatz. “It could develop into a very exciting project.”
The subdivision is on a wooded two-and-a-half acre plot near downtown Portland. Five lots will be sold individually and the homes built according to the program of each prospective client. Each lot represents five new physical and metaphysical problems for the architect to solve.
Needless to say, he relishes the prospect, delights in “going through the same things you did 40 years ago when it comes to starting a project—that heartache of thinking you’re washed up and don’t have any new ideas and then you work on it and an idea comes to you.”
It sounds daunting, solving all these problems, but Oshatz insists there are an infinite number of ideas that serve as solutions.
“You just have to bring that emotional idea to a logical conclusion,” he says before finally signing off, already late into the Thailand night and 7,530 miles from home.
