Welles Residence - Pepper Pike, by Fred Toguchi, 1964.

If you grew up in the '70s or later in the suburbs of Cleveland, the term "modern residential architecture" might ring with the canned panache of a real-estate catalog, perhaps titled Today's Living or Contemporary Homes. The cul-de-sac developments of North Olmsted or Middleburg Heights are lined with house after house that would fit on such a magazine's pages - houses where ideas of simplicity don't exist on their own, but only to facilitate their mass production: split-levels and ranches that were essentially colonials stripped of their detail by commercial developers as they shifted into high gear through the '50s and '60s to supply affordable dwellings for post-war families.

What curators Robert Blatchford, Nina Gibans, Jim Gibans and Anthony Hiti have put together in their architecture show at the Cleveland Artists Foundation is something quite different. It's also something many of us in Northeast Ohio have completely missed, or if we did see it, mistook for some anomaly. Cleveland Goes Modern: Design for the Home, 1930-1970 shows an architectural movement that was just a little too adventurous in its abandonment of nostalgia, a little too new for Northeast Ohio, and indeed most of the United States.

Modernism in residential architecture - generally a Bauhaus emphasis on unornamented functional design where houses are made not by divvying up an ideal of dignified space into rooms that will fit therein, but instead letting the rooms and the setting in the landscape define the shape - never really caught on here. Our tastes are a little more traditional, conservative and nostalgic. Nor did it in most of the US. As Hiti says, there are some communities in California, especially around the Bay area, where modernist homes were built to be affordable, did achieve some popularity, and now are treated - both in the aesthetic appreciation and in the sale price - as historically and architecturally significant.

What Northeast Ohio has (and it's interesting to note that none of the houses in Cleveland Goes Modern are actually in the city of Cleveland) is a striking but small sample of very fine homes built for discerning clients who weren't buying from developers but working directly with architects. While there have been more architects working the modernist style even around here, the exhibit focuses on houses by Don Hisaka, John Terence Kelly, Robert Little, William Morris, Ernst Payer and Fred Toguchi, sometimes working for clients, sometimes designing their own dream homes.

And they are dream homes. It's a testament to the level of work done in Cleveland that many of the houses in the exhibit were featured in architectural and other design magazines. The house Don Hisaka designed for himself in Shaker Heights, for example, was recognized with the American Institute of Architects Honor award in 1970, was the subject of major features in Architectural Forum and Fortune magazine, and is one of two Cleveland-area homes featured in Carole Rifkind's A Field Guide to Contemporary American Architecture.

A fine color catalog for Cleveland Goes Modern works as a field guide to the subject in Cleveland, with photos illustrating not only the featured architects' work, but that of 18 others who also worked the style. Nina Gibans compares locating the homes to a hunt that went on for three years as the curatorial panel prepared the show. Most of them, as Hiti observes, are in outer-ring suburbs, and even hidden from view in wooded settings. They'd go out driving with architect George Dalton, looking for houses in their original form, knowing the general location of the house, perhaps the name of the street. "We'd go up a drive," Gibans recalls. "So often we'd learn that the house we were looking for had been demolished. People didn't recognize the value, and down they went."

As Hiti says, the houses - like the brutalist Ameritrust tower, designed by Marcel Breuer in 1971, recently put up for sale by the county after a contentious battle over its architectural significance and its fate - are caught in the blind spot of history: old enough to be out of fashion, but new enough not to be recognized as historically significant.

What the exhibit hopes to do is to shine a light on that blind spot so that people can understand it and recognize its value. One thing it illuminates well is the versatility of the ideas that comprise modernism. The idea that living space and setting should define a house - rather than having an idealized and ceremonial exterior shape define the rooms inside - often results in simple forms that look like building block construction, with intersecting planes and rectilinear forms, open spaces and big windows.

But within that description fit the likes of the Welles residence in Pepper Pike, designed in 1964 by Fred Toguchi, and the Gund residence, designed in 1965 by Don Hisaka. Both architects of Japanese descent, born in the '20s, were placed with their families in internment camps during World War II, both studied at the University of California at Berkeley, and both embraced modernism, but with markedly different results, at least as represented in this show.

Toguchi's Welles residence uses wood and a wood-shingled roof sloped on all four sides toward a steeper sloped section that juts up from the rest but doesn't quite come to a peak. It's very pagoda-like - a slight nod to very un-modern nostalgia - and the materials blend it beautifully with the wooded setting. By contrast, the Gund residence, also in a wooded setting, could have been built of white and transparent Lego blocks, pieces and planes cutting into each other here and protruding there, all set on stilts with daylight visible beneath so that the natural flow of the landscape is not interrupted by the hand of man.

What the houses have in common, though, is their functionality - open interior spaces with plenty of windows to let in light and views - and a defining respect for their settings. The way of living guides the architect's hand, rather than the architect's vision casting lifestyle into formalized compartments. In each case the architect's accomplishment is to organize the result into coherence and beauty. One result of that synthesis is that the strength of these houses - and in any architecture - is to be found in the three-dimensional experience of it, which as Hiti observes probably came across better in the well-attended house tours that were organized with the exhibit than in the photography that attempts to capture it all in the CAF gallery.

"I think from what we've been able to ascertain," Gibans says, "that people are very devoted to these houses once they have lived in them, once they have experienced their position with relation to the sun. People talk in terms of space - open space - and the use of glass. It's not a window as we see in traditional houses, but an entire glass wall in which outside and inside become part of each other."

Cleveland Goes Modern:

Design for the Home, 1930-1970

Through Nov. 24

Cleveland Artists Foundation

Beck Center for the Arts

17801 Detroit Ave., Lakewood

Panel discussion

"Modernism from the Client's Standpoint"

6-8 p.m. Thurs., Nov. 15

Call 216.227.9507