‘Robert Adam’ Draws Insight Into Architect’s Creativity

If you want to experience architecture, there’s no substitute for the real thing. If you want to find out how an architect’s mind works, there’s nothing better than drawings. That’s the reward of browsing “Robert Adam--The Creative Mind: From the Sketch to the Finished Drawing” at the UCLA Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center.

A style of show too uncommon in these parts, this elegant 66-work traveling ensemble fairly drips such currently unfashionable values as connoisseurship and esteem for the classical tradition. At the same instant, the exhibition is a timely reminder of recent Postmodernist eclecticism and the vitality of contemporary L.A. architecture. It is in fact intended as a kind of wry pendant to the Hammer’s recently opened main exhibition “Designing Disney’s Theme Parks: The Architecture of Reassurance.”

If the juxtaposition was intended as a study in contrasts, it backfires a bit. Both surveys reveal playfully inventive ways of revitalizing the past.

Adam was born decently affluent in Scotland in 1728. His father, William Adam, was the most famous Scottish architect of his day, notwithstanding the wag who said that was because he was virtually the only contender.

Robert Adam eventually became an acknowledged genius and a dominant English Neo-Classical architect, rivaled only by the slightly older William Chambers. Adam maintained a large London office that remained oversubscribed until the day he died in 1792.

His fame rested on his invention of an influential new style of decoration. Such examples as a design for a dressing room for the Countess of Harrington show motifs based on Roman models. Later detractors referred to them as “gingerbread” or “snippets of embroidery.” Today their light, intimate, floral touch evokes the style that was the contemporary art of the time, Rococo. In his own context Adam was a Modernist.

He attained maturity via the Grand Tour. In those days a few years spent soaking up the hallowed classical past in Italy was the act that turned callow plebeians into scholars and successful gentleman artists. Adam embarked on his at age 26, passing four years cultivating the right people, studying everything from ruins to Palladio and drawing.

His rendering of a classical capriccio with a triumphal arch in a garden has the ironic wistfulness of a young man. The most surprising image in this section, however, is an architectural fantasy Adam acquired from Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Why would a starchy Neo-Classicist want a work by such a dark, apocalyptic visionary? The only answer that comes readily to mind is that Adam wasn’t really a conventional designer.

The hypothesis is born out by the rest of the exhibition. Elevations like his design for a small public building screening a circular Pantheon-like structure look rather boringly symmetrical. The model of another unrealized building reminds us, however, that symmetrical structures only stay that way as long as we face them dead-on. Seen at oblique angles they take on a dynamism Adam dramatized by working facades in various levels of depth and texture. He liked, for example, putting heavy rustication on ground levels while optically lightening mass closer to the top.

He continually surprises. A trademark work such as a section through the breakfast room at Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire, balances the giggling serenity of his decorative motifs with the grand gesture of a tall arched window. The next thing you know he’s sketching a picturesque little peasant hut or doing a serious rendering for a proposed office complex at Brampton Bryan in Herefordshire. It looks for all the world like the ruined battlements of a medieval fort. Come to think of it, all those 18th century English architectural follies suggest prototypes for Disney’s theme parks.

In the nearer term, however, Adam’s brand of archeological eclecticism helped set the stage for the subjective 19th century Romantic movement. That made Adam an innovator in his own time and a pioneer of the future.

Adam’s office always employed a fairly large staff of copyists and draftsmen. Several are represented here, including Robert’s slightly younger sibling, James. The latter remained a secondary figure due to his preference for having fun and spinning theories, but his designs of capitals for the British and Scottish orders show real brilliance.

Works on view were selected from London’s Sir John Soane Museum and mark the first time they’ve been seen outside its confines. Glasgow University professor Alan Tait acted as guest curator and wrote the gracefully literate catalog. Presented here under the auspices of UCLA’s Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, the show premiered at New York’s Frick Collection and will move on to Washington, D.C., and Edinburgh.

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* UCLA Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., through July 12, closed Mondays. (310) 443-7000.