ARCHI TECTURE

ON THE EDGE OF THE WORLD: FOUR ARCHITECTS IN SAN FRANCISCO AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY, by Richard Longstreth (The Architectural History Foundation and the MIT Press). Before modern architects began coating the earth's surface with a Pepto-Bismol of homogeneous glass, steel, and concrete buildings, their forebears often concocted regional brews mixing local building traditions, European precedents, and indigenous materials with new technologies. Historian Richard Longstreth focuses on the intoxicating contributions of four architects—Ernest Coxhead, Willis Polk, A. C. Schweinfurth, and Bernard Maybeck. The third in the American Monograph Series (preceded by The Almighty Wall: The Architecture of Henry Vaughan, by William Morgan, and Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, by Richard Oliver), this book similarly testifies to the richness of American regional responses.

-SUZANNE STEPHENS

PORTLAND MUSEUM OF ART, CHARLES SHIPMAN PAYSON BUILDING, PORTLAND, MAINE, I. M. Pei & Partners, architects; Henry Cobb, design partner. Like other museums going up now, the Portland Museum of Art eschews designs that amount to geometrical abstractions frozen in concrete and sticks to the same chunky materials and variegated features of historic models. It absorbs into its exterior an arcade, semicircular windows, a barrel-vaulted entrance. Inside, the architects have designed spaces with 20by-20-foot room-like dimensions, so visitors feel more

intimately connected to the works on view than they would meandering through bowdlerized-modern loftsized halls. Here walls are also tinged with muted shades of mauve, taupe, and ivory to highlight the Winslow Homers and Andrew Wyeths on display. Natural light seeps through ten louvered light monitors planted in the roof.

Despite such promising features the building still runs amok architecturally. The 67foot-high entrance wall lacks the mass, texture, and, most of all, the rhythmic punctuation of its classical antecedents. While mathematically thought-out proportions are evident, proportion without the rest of the elements leaves only an abstraction—a schematic diagram of a hoped-for image. Although the building sits prominently on a corner site, there is only one "facade"; along the long side, a series of boxy gallery spaces dribbles away in staggered formation.

Going inside the museum one finds the light monitors, 10 feet in diameter, are dramatic when placed over a onestory (10-foot-high) gallery, but they instantly lose impact in the triple-height Great Hall or the double-height thirdfloor gallery. Seven out of ten skylights look more like overhead lamps than ethereal domes.

Furthermore, the monitors don't occur in an expected spatial sequence. But then the visitor doesn't move in an expected sequence. Since stairs are tucked into the corners of the staggered blocks, one moves through the four floors of the galleries in a truly loopy fashion, in a quasi-spiral propelling one outward as one moves upward. But the path has no vistas, no dramatically composed spaces guiding the visitor.

The museum seems meant to be understood by bein looked at from above—fro bird's-eye perspective w the billboardlike front and the gallery blocks clustered in echelon formation make sense. But the visitor, of course, perceives architectural spaces on foot, from a worm'seye view. This is the same vantage point from which one views the artwork or, for that matter, the facade of the building. Therein lies the problem.

S.ST.

While Goethe said, "There is no patriotic art and no patriotic science,"

JEFFERSON'S M0NTICELL0, by William Howard Adams (Abbeville Press), with photos by Langdon Clay, shows the stunning architectural result of an artistic and scientific temperament bred with political ideals...