ART REVIEW : ‘Unbuilt Architecture’: Better Things Left Unsaid

Someone had a great idea. Why not call up prominent architects and get hold of their unsuccessful competition entries--designs for buildings that, for one reason or another, did not appeal to the potential client?

Actually, that is half of a great idea. The other half involves explaining what these projects were, who sponsored them, what controversies they created (if any), who won the competitions, and for what reasons.

Architecture, after all, is not created out of the clear blue sky. Buildings are designed and built because clients require them--clients with specific needs and wants and budgets.

“What Could Have Been: Unbuilt Architecture of the ‘80s,” at the Modern Museum of Art in Santa Ana through June 10, offers viewers 51 architects’ renderings and 19 models of buildings that were never realized.

But nowhere are the viewers apprised of the context of these projects. There is no catalogue. The handout that passes for a brochure contains only a list of architects and projects and an ingenuous paragraph by exhibit curator Peter Jay Zweig.

What the exhibit does offer viewers is a bewildering range of postmodern thinking, from the inventive (James Wines’ Highrise of Homes, a way of giving cramped urban apartment-dwellers the illusion they have bought into the American dream) to the absurd (Milan-based Nathalie du Pasquier’s cutesy, multicolored struttura multi-usi).

An array of superstars is represented here, among them Cesar Pelli, Helmut Jahn (both represented by losing entries for the Columbus Circle competition in New York), Michael Graves, Frank Gehry, Philip Johnson and the firms of Skidmore Owings Merrill and Venturi Rauch and Scott Brown.

Most accessible of these for the lay viewer are Graves’ numerous spritely watercolor and colored pencil renderings, which offer an intimate guided tour of his Native American-flavored design for the government center of Phoenix.

Other drawings and models--for houses, shopping centers, a winery--are by lesser-known architects. Zweig even saw fit to include designs for his own “House of Walls” in the show--a tactic generally avoided by curators, for obvious reasons.

A few of the models and images are the work of artists working with architectural ideas.

Wenda Habenicht’s “The Shy Man’s Throne,” a project for the Artpart in Lewiston, N. Y., is a see-saw with little house-like structures on each end. Each one of these structures has a narrow seat, allowing its inhabitant to rise and fall in semi-privacy.

Alice Aycock is known for her large installations, which often have a machine-like aspect. Her model for the Roebling Monument, a kaleidoscope mounted over a concrete courtyard, looks like a giant telescope. What this particular form of homage has to do with John Roebling, a 19th-Century American bridge designer, is not immediately clear.

Peter Shire, who does snappy, hip work in ceramics, designed “Barbie’s Ivory Tower,” a balancing act of brightly colored forms with a yellow turret designated as a “space station.”

But the reason these artists’ projects were included along with the problematic architectural work remains as vague as most other aspects of this grab-bag show.

“It is our hope,” Zweig writes in the handout, “that the exhibit initiates a dialogue which liberates the imagination and asks, why were these architectural images not built?”

Why, indeed. Unfortunately, the imagination needs a bit more to feed on, and the walls of the museum are equally barren of useful information.

With the exception of texts that are integral parts of some of the drawings, the exhibit offers not a scrap of information about the parameters of the architectural competitions. Not a word about programs, budgets, sites or restrictions.

There is (to pick the most astounding omission) utter silence about the furious battle still raging in New York City in connection with Charles Gwathmey and Robert Siegel’s proposed additions to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum. (For some reason, the Modern Museum has seen fit to display only a 1952 Architectural Forum article about Wright’s original plans and why they didn’t conform to code.)

It is true that the Modern Museum didn’t organize “What Could Have Been.” The show was assembled by Peter Zweig (a Houston architect who teaches at the University of Houston) and circulated by Houston-based Exhibitions Inc.

Roberta Mathews, a partner in Exhibitions Inc., said recently that she had wanted to produce a catalogue but that the institutions on the tour (which include the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York and the Sheldon Art Gallery in Lincoln, Neb.) were not able to fund the project and that “the architects were not going to pay to have their sad story sung.”

Mathews did send each participating institution a packet of architect biographies and project proposals. But even if they were all reproduced somewhere--in a brochure, say--the information they offer is too self-serving.

Collecting these handouts is not the same thing as curating an exhibit, any more than asking people what they would like to say about themselves constitutes reporting the news.

The hole at the center of the exhibit is a discussion and analysis of the individual projects. What was it about these proposals that doomed them? Were they ahead of their time? Impractical? Too expensive? Threatening to preservationists?

And what, if anything, do the failures of these projects say about the state of contemporary architecture?

But Zweig’s inadequacies as a curator don’t excuse the Modern Museum from the responsibility of presenting an exhibit that makes sense and is not simply a collection of disparate objects. If chief curator Mike McGee chose to take this show, it was up to him to find a way of filling in the contextual details.

The Modern Museum has failed again to prove that its aims have much in common with those of respected art museums, which devote a great portion of their efforts (beyond collecting and preserving the art under their care) to interpreting the work they place on exhibition.

Museums do not exist simply to gather art objects and position them in big rooms. Museums are educational institutions. They endeavor to inform, explain and--yes--shape opinion and taste.

It is nice that the Modern Museum has planned an “architectural forum”--whatever that will be--for May 5. But a single community event does not make up for what is ignored in the galleries on a day-in, day-out basis.

“What Could Have Been: Unbuilt Architecture of the ‘80s” continues through June 10 at the Modern Museum of Art, Griffin Towers, 5 Hutton Centre Drive, Santa Ana. Gallery open 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Friday; from noon to 5 p.m. on weekends. Admission: free. Information: (714) 754-4111.