"Omnivorous," at West Virgina University, is a mini-retrospective of Paul Rosenblatt's solo and teamwork with his wife, artist Petra Fallaux, and architect Bill Szustak. Click photo for larger image.

"For about 10 years I did no art," Pittsburgh architect Paul Rosenblatt says while traveling through a tan landscape to West Virginia University's Evansdale campus. "I felt that the part of me that was an artist was channeled into architecture."

That began to change in 1995, when Dennis McFadden, then curator of Carnegie Museum of Art's Heinz Architectural Center, showed him Judith Turner's photoetchings of the marble statues produced in fifth-century B.C. Greece for the Parthenon. Turner focused not so much on the figures but the spaces -- the "ground" -- between them.

"She's interested in relationships between things, not the things themselves," Rosenblatt said. "They made those ancient works look utterly contemporary."

And they made him long to see them put back into an architectural context, but a modern, American one.

The result was a collaboration between Turner and Rosenblatt that marked a turning point in his career, which began to focus on producing art installations along with his client-driven architecture. For that first one, Rosenblatt created to Parthenon proportions (though considerably smaller) a walk-in temple of wood studs, plywood, fiberglass panels and vertically hung fluorescent lights. Turner's images floated above the exterior walls. Inside, where the altar to Athena, goddess of wisdom, would be, Rosenblatt placed a video monitor showing an owl.

"The Parthenon Project," which debuted at Carnegie Mellon University in 1996 and traveled to the Erie Art Museum, is included in the catalog to "Omnivorous," Rosenblatt's current exhibit at WVU. The catalog and half of the exhibit are a mini-retrospective of Rosenblatt's solo and teamwork with his wife, artist Petra Fallaux, and architect Bill Szustak. Together they form Springboard, the South Side design firm Rosenblatt founded in 2001.

Organized by Mesaros Galleries curator Robert Bridges, the exhibit explores the symbiotic relationship between architecture and art and is divided into two parts: mirror-image galleries flanking the entrance to the Creative Arts Center. The architecture side showcases five Springboard projects, including Butler's Maridon Museum, Doane Hall of Art at Allegheny College, a Pittsburgh Home & Garden Show pavilion for Duquesne Light, the Waterplay exhibit at the Children's Museum and the recently completed Make Your Mark coffee shop/art studio in Point Breeze. The work is minimally and straightforwardly displayed, with each project represented by a horizontal row of snapshot photographs and a plan. The plans are also interpreted as figure/ground elements in refined, columnar sculptures made from layers of resin.

Things get considerably more right-brain and messier on the art side, where Rosenblatt shows a riot of assemblages, paintings and a mobile he made mostly from scavenged, discarded, domestic objects and an architect's palette of industrial building materials: derelict chairs, cardboard barrel bottoms, broken radios, pieces of wood, corrugated metal siding, 1950s paint-by-number paintings and empty frames.

As in Springboard's architectural projects, a contemporary, interactive aspect coexists with historical references: Images from a visitor-guided computer are projected onto the back of an old cupboard, a new, wavy back that recalls the organic curves of the Waterplay exhibit and the business sign at Make Your Mark. Produced in the evenings, after his and Fallaux's two children are in bed and Springboard's clients have been tended to, these works, for all their allusions to electronic media, have the low-tech, tactile appeal of Russian constructivist sculpture of the early 20th century. It almost doesn't matter what the outcome is; as in process art, it seems to be the making that matters, as act of affirmation.

For Rosenblatt, the exhibit is "about looking at things with a different eye. Materials and colors and shapes and forms can give our eye pleasure."

It's not all about the eye. The "omnivorous" of the title refers to both the desire to consume everything our media-rich culture has to offer and the angst one feels over having to filter and make sense of it. It's the artist who decides what goes in the frame and what gets left out, but how do you choose? In the exhibit, the answer can be as simple as painting over parts of vintage magazine pages to force the focus on, say, an image of a homing pigeon and her chicks.

In life, an abundance of choices has been a lifelong luxury and challenge for Rosenblatt, who grew up the son of an architect and a writer in a Manhattan apartment full of books. Unsure what he wanted to do with his life, in his first, exhausting semester at Yale he took prerequisite courses for five majors. Eventually he double-majored in art and architecture, then stayed on at Yale for graduate work in architecture.

His highly regarded father, architect Arthur Rosenblatt, who died last year, had been New York City's deputy parks commissioner under Mayor John Lindsay before spending 19 years at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he was vice president of architecture during the Met's greatest period of expansion. The son of poor Russian immigrants, he also became founding director of the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.

"He had an enormous influence over what I do and the way I do it," his son said. "I learned a vast amount about how organizations work and decisions get made. If you worked closely with the community and tried to understand what different groups wanted and work through that process, you could find a way of resolving a variety of differences and do great things."

Rosenblatt came to Pittsburgh in 1987 for a position at his father's alma mater, Carnegie Mellon, where he now teaches a class called "Under the Influence," about the effect contemporary art and films have on architecture.

The exhibit, which continues through Friday, is accompanied by a substantial catalog, cleverly constructed by WVU's Juan Giraldo, with ambitious essays by Paul Krainak and Kristina Olson, who see Springboard's work as part of a welcome revival of the art of architecture.