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Lessons from Bernard Rudofsky: Life as a Voyage,
edited by Architekturzentrum Wien
Birkhäuser, 2007
Bernard Rudofsky is not a household
name like his most famous book, Architecture
Without Architects, even though the Austrian-born
architect/designer/critic/curator authored eight other books,
ranging on subjects from clothes to pedestrian streets.
Perhaps this owes to the fact his achievements as an architect
and designer haven't had the longevity of his books, and
his most well-known books tend to downplay authorship, even
though his subjective prose peppers illustrations on vernacular
architecture, urbanism, and fashion. In other words, Rudofsky
embraced and expressed the ideas of others; he was not naive
enough to believe that any ideas he could develop would
be original. If anything, he was highly critical of such
a stance, one behind the embrace of technology rooted in
Modernism. While Rudofsky's architecture was formally aligned
with Modernist contemporaries mid-last century, he never
abandoned what came before; a humbling idea at the root
of his work, and one reason he deserves to be a common name.
This book, edited by Architekturzentrum
Wien in association with The
Getty Research Institute and a companion to an
exhibition (PDF brochure) that started at the former
in 2007 and ended at the latter one year later, is an illuminating
account of one man's voyage, in more ways than one. Born
in Austria, Rudofsky called many other places home, most
notably Greece, which he lovingly portrayed in numerous
watercolors and which strongly influenced his ideas on the
vernacular, and Japan, on which he wrote one of his books.
His semi-nomadic existence is one of the characterizations
found here, running seemingly at odds with the energy he
gave to "the art of dwelling," one rooted in Mediterranean
courtyard houses but exported to places as far as Brazil.
Through the analysis of Rudofsky's residential designs,
penchant for travel and other subjects, we discover a common
strand in all of his undertakings: "that sensory pleasure
should take precedence over intellectual pleasure in art
and architecture."
This direct quote of Rudofsky's illustrates
how even while designing with flat white walls he could
be at odds with Modernism. His embrace of courtyards (he
believed all rooms should have direct access to an outdoor
room), among other beliefs, placed the tactile and the phenomenological
over the abstract. Even the aerial formalism of Architecture
Without Architects -- the author additionally presenting
places he never visited or that no longer existed -- has
an almost tangible sense of the place coming across in the
images and the text. A similar thing can be said about this
book, in relation to Rudofsky himself. The combination of
lengthy essays, sketches, architectural drawings, photographs,
and book and magazine excerpts, all thoughtfully composed
in a beautifully-made book, gives some valuable insight
into a unique personality the likes of which the world of
architecture hasn't seen since, but it should surely welcome.
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