TELEVISION REVIEWS : ‘AMERICA BY DESIGN’

The process of design--how the places where we live, work, shop and play are shaped, and how in turn they shape us--is fascinating. It involves real estate, planning and politics, as well as architecture and life style. We tend to talk about it over dinners and back fences, debate it at zoning hearings and public meetings, look at it through peepholes in construction fences, and curse at it in traffic or when lost in a shopping mall.

How such a subject that is so pervasive, so vivid and so fraught with conflict can be made so boring is demonstrated in “America by Design,” a five-part public television series that begins tonight on PBS (8 p.m. on Channels 28 and 15, 9 p.m. on Channels 24 and 50).

To be sure, the series--indefatigably hosted by UC Berkeley architectural historian Spiro Kostof, and energetically, if unimaginatively, produced and directed by Werner Schumann--is informative. Explored in successive weekly programs is the evolution of the house (tonight); the changing work place (next Monday); the history of transportation (Oct. 12), the shaping of public places, including parks and public buildings (Oct. 19); and the misshaping of the land (Oct. 26).

Watching the series of hourlong programs--co-produced by Guggenheim Productions and WTTW of Chicago--would be a good homework assignment for a high school history or civics class or an introductory college course.

But it would be work. As someone who is enthralled by the design process and is entertained for hours by street scenes and construction projects, I found the programs for the most part tedious.

More inviting, perhaps because you could pick it up and put it down at will, was the companion book to the series, “America by Design,” written by Kostof and published by Oxford University Press.

Try as the series does to engage the viewer by offering a montage of shifting scenes in 30 states--from the dramatic skyline of New York City to the raw roof lines of a San Fernando Valley housing development, and by having Kostof deliver his narration in cars zipping along highways, or in an airplane above them, standing on a neighborhood sidewalk, on mountain trails and along waterfronts--the effect is numbing.

Not helping is a cliche-ridden musical score and script. Nor is Kostof a particularly charismatic narrator, looking in most locations like a lost tourist reciting a history book from memory. Good reading does not necessarily make for good television.

What we have is a history professor giving an ambitious, illustrated history lesson, trying to capture the sweep of the country in sweeping terms and sweeping scenes and getting lost in the clouds of words and pictures. And while Kostof talks a lot about we, the people-- “we are the ones who fill buildings, roads and the land with life, and so give an identity to the unique experiment that is America”--the series is devoid of people. It is, in a word, dry.

Like so many planners, politicians and architects today, Kostof fails to relate design to the lives of those affected except in the most general of terms. “In design,” he says, “the final measure of success rests not in shapes, but in the rituals our designs play host to--which means us.”

It is a nice thought, but in the America of Kostof and Schumann we meet no “us”--no farmers, no environmentalists, no architects, no homeless, no landlords, no tenants, no gentry, no speculators, no suburbanites, no zoning commissioners. Lacking their concerns and causes, placed in a historical context and illustrated in human terms, the series lacks the elements of drama that perhaps could have sustained it.

This is the second attempt within the last two years by PBS to tell the story of how America is shaped. The first was the eight-part “Pride of Place,” which concentrated more on architecture and its personalities, particularly those favored by host architect Robert A. M. Stern.

In comparison, “America by Design” is a definite improvement in scholarship and as an attempt to reach out to a broader public and make it more aware of the built environment.

Nevertheless, while “Pride of Place” fell victim to the pride of prejudice of a prissy host, “America by Design” falls victim to a lifeless script and a pedantic host.