TV REVIEW : GLORY--AND INFAMY--OF U.S. ARCHITECTURE

Just like the sweep of American architecture it explores, the eight-part PBS series “Pride of Place” that premieres Sunday night at 10 on KCET Channel 28 is confused, clumsy and parochial. It is also stirring and provocative.

Here in their glory, and a few in infamy and others in obscurity, are the monuments of man-made America, reflecting the nation’s shifting tastes, cultures, politics and commerce, and the visions of its architects.

On what seems to be a perpetual, brilliant sunny spring day in episode after episode, we are taken on a marvelous visual tour from sea to shining sea, albeit with the East Coast and New York City in particular sharp focus. Many of the views also are from a helicopter, and while that’s not exactly how people experience buildings, they do offer a certain dramatic panorama.

What numbing rain falls on the episodes is from a strained and inconsistent narrative delivered in a supercilious tone by Robert A.M. Stern, a practicing architect, teacher and writer. Stern also conducts intermittent foggy interviews in which he displays more a pride of peers than a pride of place.

It is also no service to architecture--the impact of which this Mobil-funded series purports to celebrate--that Stern and those he interviews tend to view structures as primarily historical and aesthetic objects rather than structures housing particular human activities, such as working, worshiping or raising a family.

At best in this privileged view of America we see people very much in the background playing tennis at a country club, ice skating in a shopping mall, cleaning a boat in a backyard and generally at leisure. In Stern’s world, it is the buildings and their designers that talk, not the people that use them.

While there is no doubt that architecture serves myths, as Stern repeatedly states, it also serves people. Their voice is strangely missing in this effort to raise the public design consciousness. What we have instead are many of architecture’s current personalities and arbitrators.

Particularly embarrassing are Stern’s cerebral genuflections to his former professor at Yale University, historian Vincent Scully, and to his professional patron Philip Johnson. With critic Paul Goldberger whom he takes out of the familiar streets of New York City and plucks down in a shopping mall in Houston, Stern is dutifully obsequious.

In the unfortunate baneful tradition of public television documentaries, the interviews, when not self-serving, are often obtuse and confusing or, worse, smug and condescending. And when Stern and architect Peter Eisenman discuss Eisenman’s pretentious dialectical design of a house in Connecticut, the episode on “Dream Houses” that had been so engaging collapses under a crush of pedantic babble.

And one must question why of all the illustrations of attempts to create a “sense of place” Stern picks the Winter Garden in downtown New York City that has not yet been completed. We hope it was not just a rationale to conduct a back-scratching interview with architect Cesar Pelli when there are so many similar developments that already have been time and user tested.

The titles in this effort (presented by South Carolina ETV) do make it very clear that the series is Stern’s personal view of architecture. And Stern is at times witty and informative.

But this offers little relief from the architect’s punctilious on-camera presence that tends to detract from the stunning pictorial survey directed by Murray Grigor and produced by Malone Gill Productions.

And for someone who takes umbrage at the insidious impact of the automobile on the city, Stern certainly appears to enjoys cruising in an open red convertible. So much so that in one episode we see Stern in the car discussing at length Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West, where we presume he is headed, but the only glimpse of the landmark is the driveway, seen from several hundred feet above.

While celebrating the style of architecture, “Pride of Place” only begins to hint at its spirit, and its impact in the shaping, and misshaping, of America. One would have hoped for a little more from eight one- hour episodes.

Yet there is Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House, William Van Alen’s Chrysler Building, Addison Mizner’s Boca Raton and Michael Grave’s San Juan Capistrano library and hundreds of other delights to savor. The narration and interviews may drone on and on, but it is the architecture that perseveres.