Thinking outside the `Box' of design

CAMBRIDGE -- A superb exhibit on architecture is now on view at the Harvard Design School.

Watch out, though. This isn't what you'd expect. It's not a show of new ideas or anything ``cutting edge." It's an exhibit of the work of the school in its heyday, and that heyday was back in the long-ago 1940s.

Then Harvard was famed as the first modernist school of architecture in the United States. It produced the most remarkable generation of architects ever to emerge from an American school.

Three leaders of that generation, now aged 83 to 90, came to Cambridge last week. At a symposium, they talked about their hopes and ambitions as young men. They were John Johansen, Ulrich Franzen, and Victor Lundy. I. M. Pei was supposed to come too, but he canceled. The other two, now dead, are Paul Rudolph and Edward Larrabee Barnes.

The early work of all six is on display in photo-murals in the school's lobby. Harvard calls the exhibit ``Beyond the Harvard Box." The point is to dispel the simplistic myth that these young modernists were merely imitating the so-called ``functional," box-like, flat-roofed buildings of European modernists like Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe (such as, for example, Gropius's notorious barrack-like dorms in Harvard's Graduate Center of 1948).

The show makes the point in eye-opening fashion. Johansen explores curvy, cave-like concrete shapes -- ``troglodyte houses" he called them. Franzen creates floating geometric roofs. Rudolph designs airy, porch-like Florida houses. Lundy invents churches with powerful upsweeping spaces. Pei produces a fortress-like pile in Colorado. Barnes plays angular 3-D games of geometry with wood, as in his classic Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine.

All six architects came to Harvard, in the first place, because Gropius was there. The founding director of the Bauhaus school of art in Germany, he'd arrived to head Harvard's architecture program in 1937. But all who spoke at the symposium agreed Gropius told his students not to copy him.

The talking heads of Pei, Johansen, Franzen, and Lundy also address you spookily from big monitors on a wall of the exhibit. Interviewed last summer, they touch on almost every aspect of architecture and of their careers. They're all fascinating. Another wall displays student work of the Gropius era. These designs do often look boxlike, but they look practical and thoughtful, too, in a way that the works of today's students, in love with the shapes they generate on their computers, are sometimes not.

Architecture, it sometimes seems, is a profession without a memory. ``These guys were totally eviscerated from my education," says Michael Meredith, who curated the exhibit. That was the fear, too, of Harvard's chair of architecture, Toshiko Mori, when she suggested an exhibit many months ago. She believes her students get so caught up in the trends and celebrities of the moment that they have little understanding of the history of their school, or of the fact that earlier generations were just as inventive, as radical, and sometimes as crazy as any architect today.

Strong as was the symposium, I came away with a feeling of sadness. It was set up so that each older architect was paired in a conversation with a younger one who teaches at the school. It quickly became clear that the older architects and the younger professors were not going to find a common language.

Some of the architects said they thought the school had become too intellectual. Judging from the comments of the professors, they were right. Where the older architects were direct, pragmatic, personal, and unpretentious, the professors kept getting themselves tangled in vague semi-philosophical abstractions. It was as if they felt a need to maintain a distance from physical reality.

Is this true of other professions? Would a trio of 80-plus attorneys have a problem communicating with a younger generation at the law school? I doubt it. But the law, unlike architecture, is not a field in which tradition is upended at regular intervals.

This may not be a show for the general public, but I can't imagine it not appealing to any fan of architecture. A free DVD -- replacing the usual printed catalog -- is available at the school.

Robert Campbell is the Globe's architecture critic. He can be reached at camglobe@aol.com.