The buildings depicted in French photographer Frèdèric Chaubin's work look at once fantastical and uncannily familiar-most definitely not the stock stuff of the collective architectural conscience but tinged nonetheless by certain stock forms. One sees in these buildings traces of Le Corbusier's sculptural treatment of concrete; Eero Saarinen's futuristic organicism; even Gaudí's brand of ludic baroque. But each emerges from a singular, and quite apart, geographical and political environment-the countries of the Eastern Bloc at the Cold War's end-and accordingly each functions outside of the mainstream of modernist architectural discourse. Each, in other words, is an architectural reality unto itself, conceived apart from explicit cultural dialogue with the centers of modernist artistic production.

Storefront for Art and Architecture's spare, cerebral presentation reminds us of this very fact: On a temporary wall Chaubin's photographs unfurl chronologically, while on the floor a timeline ticks off the concurrent developments in architectural and political history. The publication of Robert Venturi's Learning from Las Vegas (1972), Frank Gehry's design for his own home in Los Angeles (1978), the ubiquity of corporate modernism in the 1980s-these seminal moments in postmodern architectural history set the tone for a disciplinary standard of which the works depicted here seem blissfully unaware. Buildings like Igor Vasilevsky's Druzhba in Yalta, Ukraine (1985) and G. Chakhava and Z. Dzhalaganya's Ministry of Highways building in Tbilisi (1977) appear more influenced by science fiction and expressionism than architectural history proper. That they still come across as serious and compelling architecture seems the show's point: In architectural history, as in art history, there remain repressed narratives which prompt alternative modes of research.

- Nico Machida 

(Images top-bottom:  (top image Storefront for Art & Architecture announcement); Frèdèric Chaubin, Druzhba (Yala, Ukraine) 1985, Arhitect Igor Vasilevsky;  Frèdèric Chaubin, Roads Ministry (Tbilisi, Georgia) 1986.  All i mages courtesy of Frèdèric Chaubin & Storefront for Art & Architecture)