Giving Structure to Our Lives

“At the End of the Century: One Hundred Years of Architecture,” which opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Geffen Contemporary Sunday, is an overwhelming show. An overview of the most prolific century in architectural history, it jams together hundreds of the most compelling visions architecture ever produced, from brilliant, jewel-like houses to vast Utopian cities.

To sort it out, though, you will probably need to take along a hefty guide to modern architecture. Curated by former MOCA director Richard Koshalek and former MOCA curator Elizabeth Smith, the show includes more than 550 original drawings, 250 photos and 150 models, culled from collections as diverse as Moscow’s Shchusev State Museum of Architecture, Paris’ Foundation Le Corbusier and Montreal’s Canadian Center for Architecture. Never has so much work been amassed for a single architecture exhibition.

Such an unwieldy collection is bound to frustrate those looking for an orderly summary of Modernist history. Projects representing a variety of periods, styles and critical positions are mixed almost at random. Major Modernist themes--mass housing, say, or Utopian city planning--are picked up in early sections only to be dropped and then picked up again. There is little accompanying text to guide you through the twists and turns.

When the exhibition opened in Tokyo two years ago, curators tried to give it a sense of narrative by breaking down the exhibition into a sequence of conventional galleries on three floors. They failed. In the current installation, the curatorial staff seems to have conceded to the messiness of the endeavor: The warehouse-like Geffen becomes a warren of labyrinthine rooms, packed with some exquisite work.

The result is a show that sets your head spinning. What you cannot escape, as you drift through these galleries, is the stunning variety of creative visions that the century produced, and the sometimes surprising threads that bind the works. In the end, the show’s unwieldiness becomes its greatest strength: It allows you to make intellectual leaps that you might not otherwise have made.

One of the early pleasures of the show is a series of urban schemes that mark the emergence of Modern Utopia. Among the first images you see are four delicately rendered watercolors of Tony Garnier’s La Cite Industrielle, designed in 1901-17 and never built. Set along a river in the region of Lyon, France, the design is a landmark of urban planning. Its open layout of parks and low-density housing, humane scale and aggressive political agenda--private property, police and even property walls were banned--embodied the Modernist belief that architecture could not only transform society, it could heal man’s inner spirit.

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Only a few yards away is a model of Le Corbusier’s 1930-33 Plan Obus, for Algiers. Elegantly crafted, the model is marked by the long, sinuous line of a freeway that loops through the design, with a series of narrow housing complexes stacked both above and below. The city’s inhabitants could then plug small personalized housing units into the viaduct’s repetitive concrete frame. Seen alongside each other, the two projects--Garnier’s rational and idealistic, Le Corbusier’s wildly romantic--sum up the wide range of sensibilities that defined the Modernist quest for a model society for the future. Together, they instantly demolish the cliche of Modernist planning as sterile assemblages of concrete towers and dead plazas.

Wander deeper into the show and that image gets darker. A section titled “Politics of Monumentality” contains an array of authoritarian schemes, from Konstantin Melnikov’s 1934 design for a Commissariat of Heavy Industry in Moscow to the Great Hall of Albert Speer’s 1940 plan for Berlin. The megalomaniac scale of Speer’s Dome--the architect worried that rain clouds would form in its interior--is matched only by the pomposity of its classical forms. Melnikov’s design is more seductive. In one of the most beautiful drawings in the show, a gigantic gear frames a view of a long, grand stair that recedes into the distance, leading up to a gargantuan tower with a squatting caryatid on its cornice. A few scattered figures, elegantly dressed, stand in the foreground as if on an afternoon stroll. It is only as you begin to grasp the scale of the building that you realize it is a vast machine, capable of grinding humanity down to nothing.

Opposite Speer’s Dome, but in a section titled “Devastation and Reconstruction: The Rebuilding of Cities,” is a much later drawing of the 1958 Berlin-Haupstadt plan by Alison and Peter and Smithson, the British architectural team that rose to prominence in the ‘50s for their devastating attacks against conventional Modernist planning formulas. An attempt to come to terms with what they called the “ruined” historical city, the drawings depict an asymmetrical pattern of elevated pedestrian walkways and plazas, superimposed over Berlin’s existing city grid--a literal layering of complex, interweaving desires.

It is just such seemingly random juxtapositions that keep the mind ticking as you walk through the show. Compare, for instance, Walter Gropius and Conrad Wachsmann’s 1942 design for a “Packaged House” with A. Quincy Jones and Frederick E. Emmons’ Case Study House #24 and the Los Angeles-based Wes Jones’ recent design for “Sub-’urb 2025,” all of which are set within view of one another. Gropius and Wachsmann’s design suggests the compact efficiency of a sleekly designed trailer home, complete with a mini-terrace and butterfly roof to let in ambient light. A model of affordable mass housing, it could be assembled in a day. Case Study House #24, never built, takes the postwar industrialized home and sinks it partly underground, embedding it in a bucolic, natural landscape and creating a more idyllic sanctuary.

Jones later takes those ideas and creates a more fetishized view of suburbia. By pushing the suburban stereotypes to an extreme--the monotony of its landscape, the cult of the car--the design achieves an eerie beauty. Rows of identical, machine-like houses are submerged underground, each facing a small private garden. The earth’s surface becomes a grid of roadways and scattered trees; the only indication of life below, the carefully spaced satellite dishes and rooftop driveways. The car, in effect, replaces the facade as the dominant emblem of suburban identity.

There are many such moments here. A ‘30s-era book titled “Freedom of the American Road” is displayed across from an image of Adolf Hitler cruising down a new autobahn, the pride of a militarized Germany. Gaudy images of Las Vegas are grouped together near a gallery of ‘60s schemes that sought to transform urban centers into frames for spontaneous festivals of play. These drawings--including Ron Herron’s 1964 “Walking City,” looking like an enormous, mechanized buffalo--hold up so well that they are more than a match for Vegas’ splashy hedonism.

No doubt, some critics will point out that there are just as many inconsistencies here. Why, for instance, Daniel Libeskind’s Berlin Museum and Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao--two masterworks that defined architecture at the close of the century--in a section titled “Structural Expressionism”? Neither the zigzagging exterior of Libeskind’s building nor the exuberant, amorphous shapes of Gehry’s, however beautiful, were generated by a desire to explore new structural techniques.

But such lapses can be overlooked. What’s a little more disappointing--especially in the context of Los Angeles, a city more accustomed to peering toward the future than dwelling on the past--is the lack of any strong view of where architecture is going. As Bilbao and Berlin suggest, we are at the beginning of a creative explosion in architecture that could soon match the imaginative leaps that marked the early part of the century. Many of these experiments are taking place in Los Angeles, if not in built form, then in the abundant number of creative studios that have taken root here.

The best advice is to ignore these glitches and simply free-associate, drifting toward the projects that draw your eye. But go--and go often. The drawings alone are worth the price of admission.

* “At the End of the Century: One Hundred Years of Architecture,” MOCA at the Geffen Contemporary, 152 N. Central Ave., downtown Los Angeles, (213) 626-6222. Tuesday-Sunday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.; Thursday, 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Ends Sept. 24.