Ideas To Build On -- Architects Robert Reichert, Mark Millett Designed `Sculptures To Live In'

``Architecture in the House,'' an exhibition of the work of Seattle architects Robert Reichert and Mark Millett, on view through March 11 at Seattle Art Museum, Volunteer Park. 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, until 9 p.m. Thursday, and noon to 5 p.m. Sunday. $2 adults, $1 students and seniors. 625-8900.

It is a sound idea for Seattle Art Museum to devote a Documents Northwest show to Northwest architects, in conjunction with the Frank Lloyd Wright show that continues at SAM through Feb. 25. But guest curator Glenn Weiss doesn't want to disclose why he chose the architects he did. And in a break with past practice for the Documents Northwest series, Weiss declined to write an essay for the show.

Weiss was director of Seattle's 911 Contemporary Arts Center from 1986 to 1988, and now is curator for architecture at the Institute for Contemporary Art (PS1) in New York.

Whatever his reasons, Weiss' choices are sound. Robert Reichert and Mark Millett are a generation apart, but both have created startlingly unusual designs for small homes that can be seen as sculptures to be lived in. Reichert is best known for houses shaped like giant wedges; Millett for small homes clad in galvanized steel.

Not everyone wants to live in a sculpture. Not everyone wants even to live next door to one. But seeing these designs, one is struck by the staid sameness of floor plans and rooflines and exterior choices that have persisted in the construction of houses in the past 40 years, during a time when other aspects of society have been dramatically revolutionized.

Reichert rocked a staid Queen Anne neighborhood in 1952 when, fresh from graduate work at Harvard with the renowned architect Walter Gropius, he built a home for himself at 2500 Third Ave. W.: a giant wedge painted with black-and-white supergraphics. He painted an elevation of that house on the museum walls for this show, and behind it, he raises the shape of a 17th-century British Queen Anne tower.

``The tower is a ghost design,'' he explains. ``I used it to show what was on my mind when I was designing the house. I'm a philosophical architect, and my philosophy is romanticism.''

The steeply pitched roof of that house, and the asymmetrical shape, with its plywood cutouts and randomly placed windows, was a sign of things to come. Although Reichert has gone almost without recognition, many architects internationally - including Robert Venturi - have adopted the use of similar devices.

Reichert is showing only designs from the 1950s and early 1960s in this show, but it has the flavor of history, because several of the houses no longer are intact as he designed them. Only the overall shape remains of his Queen Anne home. ``Subsequent owners have vandalized it in the name of remodeling,'' he said.

Reichert shows three alternative designs for the triangular Egan house, at 1500 Lakeview Ave. E., now in danger of demolition. But some of his designs survive intact. Reichert cites the excellent condition of the Torre house, at 5524 S. Dawson St., in Seward Park. He has reconstructed the entrance canopy of the Torre house for this show.

Millett was born in Illinois in 1947, the year Reichert earned a bachelor of architecture degree at the University of Minnesota. When he moved to Seattle in the early 1970s, many of his early houses were for artists, including his brother, Peter Millett and Peter's wife, sculptor Sherry Markowitz. An exterior wall of that house is re-created in the gallery: a partition ``shingled'' with large squares of galvanized steel, laid in an overlapping diamond pattern.

``Because so much of my earliest work was for artists, who had very little money, I came into making the most with the least,'' Millett says, ``creating maximum space for minimum cost. Basically, I design from the inside out, then decorate the box when I'm done. I'm especially interested in vertical spaces. I like elevation changes, so I make liberal use different levels.''

The house he designed for gallery owner Linda Farris at 321 24th Ave. E. is one continuous space that flows from level to level, allowing plenty of room for art.

The SAM show includes 80 slides of each architect's work - a fine way to see it in depth.