ART / CATHY CURTIS : Arts Center a Paddle Short for ‘Streams’ Journey : San Juan Capistrano facility may have aimed a little too high for its current exhibit ‘Historicism and Modernism, Twin Streams to the California Dream.’

Exhibitions at the Decorative Arts Study Center in San Juan Capistrano are getting more ambitious--maybe too ambitious for the institution’s current resources. The current offering, “Historicism and Modernism: Twin Streams to the California Dream” (on view through Nov. 9), deals with a huge chunk of architectural history that involved some very big names, from Julia Morgan to Richard Neutra, Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen.

Photographs, drawings and models spotlight homes designed by architects between 1915 and 1965, the penultimate year of the so-called Case Study Houses that were produced under the aegis of Arts & Architecture magazine.

The show does have a number of problems, however. Some are symptomatic of a young institution operating on a modest budget, without an in-house curatorial and design staff to contribute expertise and experience. Others have to do with making architecture interesting and understandable to a lay audience.

The exhibit--curated by Irini Vallera-Rickerson, who teaches UC Irvine Extension classes in architecture--suffers greatly from the lack of a clear focus. Vallera-Rickerson writes in a brochure statement that “historicism focuses on a romantic vision of the past (while) modernism focuses on the ideal of architecture as a social art.” She claims her overview “raises an important question, ‘Where do we go from here?’ ”

The wall texts in the exhibit don’t explain just how we got from the romantic past to an era of modernist innovations, however, or how either era has influenced the architecture of our own time. Photographs (a number of which are unlabeled) and contemporary magazine articles often seem to have been selected simply because they were available, rather than because they helped to tell a story or make a point.

The catalogue, which has poorly written contributions by various people whose affiliations are not identified, is a disappointing hodgepodge of miscellaneous information on individual architects and projects. The concept of “modernism” is never explained, while a turgid essay about “historicism” takes forever to make two simple points:

1) Why did 19th- and early 20th-Century Californians go in for imitations of the historical styles of Italy, Spain and England? Because these people were “aesthetically insecure.”

2) The California climate, customs and available local materials were often very different from the European originals, obliging architects to summon up ingenious ways of modifying historical styles.

Alas, we never get any more concrete information on these topics. “Historicism” gets a once-over-lightly in the first gallery of the exhibit, with photo panels of a few architects’ projects, from Morgan’s work on William Randolph Hearst’s palatial San Simeon castle to Wallace Neff’s own cozily baronial home in San Marino.

But what is it about these homes that we should bear in mind? Why are we looking at these particular buildings rather than others designed by the same architects? Which elements of the homes were borrowed from other cultures, and how were they modified? Should we take some catalogue writer’s word that architect George Washington Smith “did a great job on (sic) incorporating” the architectural elements his clients purchased abroad?

Moving precipitously into the modernist era in the next gallery, we get samples of famous furniture by famous architects. This was a good idea: Furniture has a full-scale immediacy that models and photographs lack.

So here’s the comfy-looking armchair Rudolph M. Schindler made from leftover pieces of redwood around 1930, the low-slung molded plywood lounge chair in a curving, lima-bean shape that Eames designed in the late ‘40s and the molded plastic pedestal chair, aloof and pristine, that Saarinen made famous in the late ‘50s.

Vallera-Rickerson missed a good opportunity to use these miniature pieces of architecture as introductions to the architects’ designs for built projects. Instead, the catalogue provides more mental snack food and unexplored ideas.

Schindler “was fascinated by space” (gee, aren’t all architects?), made furniture units that could be rearranged in a modular way and was “a bridge between the Arts and Crafts movement and the machine-oriented ideas of the emerging International Style” (neither of which is further described). Eames had a “fascination with production and (an) absolute comfort with technology.” Saarinen (“unlike other modern architects of the day”) thought about “comfort and function as well as aesthetics.”

The show more or less redeems itself in the final gallery, which contains smartly displayed models of some of the Case Study Houses and photo-blowups of exterior and interior views. These experimental single-family houses were designed between 1945 and 1966 by various modernist architects, including Richard Neutra and the team of Eames and Saarinen. For the most part, low-slung, structurally simple dwellings (with open living areas and lavish use of glass), they took excellent advantage of the contours and view possibilities of their sites.

But in view of the fact that this topic was amply explored a couple of years ago at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (“Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses”), it might have made more sense this time to limit the presentation to just two or three of the houses, illustrated and discussed in more detail.

Then there might have been room for text panels to draw some much-needed overall conclusions. (How, for example, did the utopian vision of the architects jibe with such practical matters as affordability, durability, client taste and changing lifestyles?) The remaining wall space could have been used to show how such popular Case Study practices as blurring the distinctions between indoor and outdoor space were continued--or rejected--by other architects in subsequent decades.

Ultimately, “Twin Streams” comes across as a sort of tour guide’s spiel rather than a useful survey. Given the limited gallery space, a better case could be made for a more vivid exhibition with a well-defined point of view--allowing viewers to see just how architecture relates to the lives and ambitions of real people.

* “Historicism and Modernism: Twin Streams to the California Dream” remains through Nov. 9 at the Decorative Arts Study Center, 31431 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. Galleries are open from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. There is a $3 suggested donation; admission is free the last Friday of each month. (714) 496-2132.