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TODD EBERLE GIVES MODERN ARCHITECTURE ITS CLOSE-UP

Todd Eberle acknowledges that what he loves about modernist architecture, the chilly, "machine-like precision modernism threatened to bring," is exactly what puts some people off. But the luminous images in his first solo museum show, "Todd Eberle: Architectural Abstractions"— on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modem Art this month—will persuade them to take another look. In 13 photographs, Eberle, aV.F.photographer-at-large, follows the motif of M the grid, common to virtually all modern archi-

tecture, in blown-up details of famous buildings, from Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple, in Oak Park, Illinois, to Yoshio Taniguchi s Museum of Modem Art, in New York. There are no exteriors here. All of the prints depict normally unnoticed areas of these buildings: part of the ceiling between two elevator banks in New York's Lever House, a window grille in Wright's Johnson Wax Building, in Racine, Wisconsin. What's more, he says, "the buildings have the illusion of perfection, but some of the lines tremble and others are slightly off. Nothing is exactly lined up. I let these imperfections stand because they reveal the human aspect." Enlarged, the photographs look like paintings by Agnes Martin or Piet Mondrian. Leave it to Eberle to part the glass curtain of modern architecture and find the art there.

DANIEL KUNITZ