New Haven Independent

The result: a vision of the world and the city filled with design and drama.

Through the Architect’s Eye — New Haven & the World is a sampling of the work of some 40 local and Latin American architects’ photographs. On view until Oct. 23 in the atrium of City Hall, the exhibit is one of many cultural events mounted by Arte to help mark national Hispanic Heritage Month in New Haven.

The exhibit, which draws together images from around the globe, presents a visual world tour for visitors to City Hall, who can glimpse what it is to see the world through an architect’s eyes. The photographers have also turned their lenses on New Haven, offering a new vision of the familiar.

Some architects, like Caesar Pelli, offer only one picture, and others many. Yet they are not grouped by photographer, so judging an ensemble of a single photographer’s work is neither possible, nor really the point of this exhibition.

Arrayed on screens that run on both sides of City Hall’s main passageway, a most appropriate venue, the exhibit feels like a travelogue for people who traverse the corridor. Images range from Argentina to India, from the Andes to Stony Creek.

One female Bartleby from the bowels of the city’s bureaucracy paused on her journey through the atrium. She took in images of a house on a rocky point, a sea shore, boats in a harbor, and a toreador flashing his red cape in graceful action. “I’d like to go there, there, there, and there,” she declared before trudging back up the steps to work.

Not surprisingly, the traveler/architects’ pictures are primarily in color, not black and white. The more than 180 images also tend to favor dramatic contrasts between a foreground and background. The natural environment as a subject comes in second to the built, such as building facades, bridges, lighthouses, and rooftops.

When they have chosen landscapes, the architect/photographers are enamored of following furrows, roads, and other features as if they are discovering how nature has agreeably decided to reveal herself as draftswoman.

I especially liked Walter Chabla’s Espiritu de Muelle with its army of pilings — manmade against nature — morphing into a kind of abstract board game.

A similar theme is found in Dots, by Fernando Pastor, one of the organizers of the exhibition. The image is exceptional not because it’s highly composed and designed, but because it verges on a kind of abstraction, one that is made agreeable by the presence of the nifty shoes.

What is there about images of the humble shoe that makes everybody seem to like them? Especially these heroic hush puppies in danger of being swallowed by legions of antiseptic anonymous dots?

In addition to international images and speckled abstractions, the exhibit features a number of images of New Haven, re-imagined through architects’ cameras.

This photo of the Louis Kahn music barge entertaining Fair Haveners is almost like keepsake postcard with a barge graced by the perfect timing of a rainbow.

Far less homey are the images Enzo Figueres provides. He gives us the Angel of Peace on East Rock at one of her most dramatic, liminal moments. She could be anywhere and in fact appears in danger of launching into the cumulus behind her. In his view, she is presented almost as an Angel of War.

His two images of piers running out into the harbor at Nathan Hale Park are likewise sunset views, threshold moments, and make New Haven seem like an exotic far away place. Which is, I think, a real service.

It was nice for a reporter’s tour to end with Jose Luis Cabello’s “Chapel and High.” The winged green street signs seem to be making a statement about the Starbucks facade behind them, as if to say that while stores come and go, the street remains.

The exhibition, which remains on view through October 23, is viewable Monday through Friday, nine to five.

A related event, including remarks by some of the photographers in this show, will be “Art and Culture from a Latino Perspective,” October 23 at 5:30 at the Knights of Columbus Museum.

All of the photos in the exhibition, and more besides, are on sale. Contact Arte by email or at 469-4536.