Drawing distinctions. (View).

The vision of mid-town Manhattan plastering the horizon from the elevated train to Queens, provides a great, if hard to compete with, preamble to this exhibition. Yet once inside the big blue box that is MoMA's temporary home (AR October 2002), you find a simple but nonetheless cogent and enjoyable exhibition.

The display consists of 173 works of the around 200 which make up the Howard Gilman Collection of Architectural Drawings, assembled between 1976 and 1980 by the eponymous collector and his curator, Pierre Apraxine, and bequeathed to the Museum in 1998. It traces a narrow but richly productive timeframe, from the '50s to '70s, including works by Superstudio, Ettore Sottsass, Cedric Price, Leon Krier, Rem Koolhaas and Arata Isozaki among others, with iconic drawings representing key projects such as Ron Herron's 'Cities: Moving' and Aldo Rossi's 'San Vitele Cemetery'.

The works present a familiar but very readable trajectory of action and reaction. Thus the concept of Megastructures, growing from disillusionment with the failure of Modern Movement models to transform the world, is itself rejected in favour of relative contextuality, in turn paving the way for Post-Modernism.

This is architecture writ large, both conceptually and often literally - Superstudio's Continuous Monument was designed, in theory, to extend across the whole globe putting 'cosmic order on earth'. While it is easy to point out all the issues seamlessly glossed over by these utopian projects, the optimism and social engagement of the early 1960s visibly dissipates through the show. Even at a crude level the project briefs seem to reflect this - compare Cedric Price's phenomenal 'Fun Palace' for Joan Little-wood in London (1959-61) with Gaetano Pesce's 'Church of Solitude' in New York (1974-77), nearly twenty years later.

The general tenor shifts from social manifestos to hermetic poetics, as the inspiration of Lefebvre's 'festival of everyday life' quickly sours to the 'chimera of utopia' (described by Reyner Banham as 'a whitening skeleton on the dark horizons of our recent past'). This loss of faith is perfectly illustrated by Sottsass's 'The Planet as Festival: Design of a Roof to Discuss Under' (1972-75), showing Herron's Walking Cities reduced to beached hulks.

But today when architects are better known as celebrity interviewees and not theorists, and with shopping centres the nearest approximation to megastructures and mixed-use in cities a contentious planning issue, this exhibition reveals an exhilarating level of architectural and social vision.

The Changing of the Avant-Garde: Visionary Architectural Drawings from the Howard Gilman Collection, MoMA QNS, 24 October 2002 - 6 January 2003, www.moma.org