ARCHITECTURE EXHIBIT MISSES GOAL

For many museum goers, the taste for architecture exhibitions is an acquired one. Often, only professionals are interested in them.

Usually, you see copies of blueprints, some photographs and, if you’re lucky, some well-made models of a scale that allows you to visualize the finished works. Models, especially, help lay people to make sense of the technical information, as do texts.

Architecture, like any other art form, must be experienced firsthand to be appreciated fully. The thrill of great architecture is equal to that of any other art form--drama, music, dance, literature.

An exhibition of related documentation has the same relationship to architecture as a slide show has to an exhibition of paintings. Nevertheless, the experience, distanced from the real work though it be, can be pleasurable and instructive.

“Eccentric Places: The Architecture of Imagination” now at the Art Gallery at San Diego State University falls short in achieving either of these goals. Like Horton Plaza in downtown San Diego, it is colorful and celebratory. But also like Horton Plaza, the surfeit of visual stimuli causes discomfort and confusion.

The exhibition purportedly “focuses on poetry in architecture, as expressed in current works by an international selection of innovative architects.

Whatever “poetry” might have been present, however, has been overwhelmed by an overdesigned installation. The gaudy extraneous structures, exotic materials and cutesy effects make the exhibition’s contents secondary in interest. And essentials such as proper lighting and legibly printed texts at eye level have been neglected. The installation does not serve art here. Art serves the installation.

“Eccentric Places” represents (with varying degrees of success) 16 architects and firms. Small photographs and drawings are inadequate to convey the experience of the great Isamu Noguchi’s “Japanese American Cultural and Community Center Plaza” in downtown Los Angeles and “California Scenario” in Costa Mesa.

With all the recent attention that it has already garnered, do we need more exposure to Arata Isozaki’s plans for the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art? On the other hand, the work of Andrea Branzi appeared intriguing, but the material regarding it was so insubstantial that it was difficult to conceptualize and visualize. Still, there seemed to be some poetry there.

Still, it was possible to glimpse the tracks of the fugitive muse elsewhere.

Tom Grondona is well-represented in the exhibition with three models, including the wildly decorative (yet functional) Claudia’s Hot Buns with its unforgettable “fragrance funnel” pouring the perfume of cinnamon into Horton Plaza. Another Grondona work, “Morgan’s House of Furniture,” is not a retail outlet but a residence composed of parts, resembling on a very large scale a chair, table, bed and chest of drawers. Grondona, long a rogue architect, has, unlike many others in his profession, always been a “total artist.”

The models of Glen Small, including the “Green Machine,” an experimental low-income housing project, which is a hill-like frame for supporting mobile homes, and the “Hong Kong Peak Competition, a dragon-shaped residential structure, evince design genius combined with sensitivity to both human and environmental needs.

Also well-served by models, if not the exhibition in its totality, are James Hubbell, Rob Wellington Quigley, Eric Own Moss and Kendrick Bangs Kellogg.

Reduction of the exhibition by half the number of architects would have allowed a fuller exploration of those remaining.

The catalogue is a useful, photocopied documentation with descriptions of projects and biographies of the architects. It lacks, however, a curatorial essay expressing the exhibition’s theme. What is “poetry” in architecture--other than a buzzword?

The problem is that there are no intellectual and aesthetic justifications for the exhibition, although viewers might try to guess at a few. The show is simply a mixed bag of the curator’s personal selections. All are gifted architects, but they are not well-served by this exhibition.

The guest curator for and designer of the exhibition was SDSU Prof. Eugene Ray.

The exhibition continues through Feb. 26.