ART REVIEWS : High Road of Architectural Minimalism

Someday, someone will figure out how to assemble an architecture exhibit that really gets under our skin--or rather, that lets us get inside the skin of architecture.

That show will allow lay viewers to comprehend an arrangement of space as surely as if they were dancers moving on a stage. Until then, it looks like we’ll have to be content to stare dumbly at exquisite scale models, flat drawings and indecipherable plans, and ponder a clutch of rarefied ideas.

At the California Museum of Photography, “Geological Architecture: The Work of Stanley Saitowitz” takes the high road of elegant minimalism. Part of the “Architecture Tomorrow” series organized by the Walker Museum of Art in Minneapolis, the exhibit consists of a ramp-like structure on which the viewer strolls past very small wooden models of houses, wineries and other structures designed by the South African-born, San Francisco-based architect.

This promenade through Saitowitz-land is a pretty idea that has little do to with making the architect’s work clear. Each model rests on glass etched with words spelling out a few spare details--the project name, location and a terse phrase summing up the operative concept. Encountering the first few models smack at eye-level, a viewer is likely to miss the identifications entirely. Models for a park project in Indiana are inexplicably divided into two groups, defeating a viewer’s attempt to see how they would work together. Even the overriding concept of architecture conceived for a specific landscape is defeated by such austere formalism.

An arty videotape narrated in a drone by Saitowitz and a brochure that includes a few concrete descriptions--along with his runic remarks about “poetry,” “ideas,” “space” and so forth--do offer a few clues. The trio of barrel vaults forming the roof of Quady Winery in Madera, Calif. reflects the demarcations of different planting areas in the vineyards, for example, and the Goldsmith Residence in San Mateo County is a wall “carving out a court of light in the dark forest.”

But beyond these glimpses into Saitowitz’s thinking, the spatial feel of his structures remains unprobed and remote to the nonspecialist. The saving grace for viewers is that the Museum of Photography building itself was carved by the architect from the bones of an old S.H. Kress store. Conceived as “a camera in which people are the film”--surely a pun, since camera is Latin for chamber-- the museum is a tall, airy container of glass and metal.

Also on view are images by several photographers that document the rehabilitation of the building, and 100 years of photographs from the collection that show architecture as ancient as the Temple of Zeus in Athens and as modern as an American ballpark.

But there is no attempt to point out how differently these photographers regarded their subjects and what it means that attention has shifted from “high art” monuments to seemingly crasser subjects. Somehow, architecture as a vital subject eludes the grasp of this show. But maybe that’s too much to expect from a museum dedicated to an art form that doesn’t exist in three dimensions.

California Museum of Photography: 3824 Main St., Riverside, (714-784-FOTO), to May 12. Closed Monday.