LESSONS FROM BERNARD RUDOFSKY

The architect Bernard Rudofsky (Suchdol nad Odrou, Moravia 1905–New York 1988) was at the margins of high modernism but nonetheless shared the obsessions of the age. Like his more famous colleagues, he advocated for a reformed lifestyle suited for modern individuals. Yet, unlike some of his heroic counterparts who embraced industrialization, he shunned the dream of an efficient reengineering of the human environment made possible by the machine. Nor did he wish to follow formalist programs for a new architecture, like that prescribed by the proponents of the International Style. Instead, he relied on the lessons provided by the collective wisdom of generations of form-makers and users, one he saw encapsulated in traditional design.

Rudofsky’s “primitivism” was hardly a novelty in modernist circles. Since the Enlightenment, critics have used pre-modern or foreign cultures as counter examples to the shortcomings of their own societies. In the visual arts, the quest for origins was a crucial catalyst for much of the avant-garde, and important architects such as Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and José Luis Sert studied traditional buildings to hone their revolutionary agendas. The indigenous would be an even more crucial motor in Rudofsky’s intellectual enterprise.

Rudofsky relentlessly confronted the familiar and the “other” throughout his life. These contrasting positions underpinned his activities as writer, photographer, designer, and architect alike. They informed his wide-ranging analysis of material culture that covered territories as diverse as clothing and urban form. In apparel design, he wished to replace the extravagance of Western fashion with a more reasoned approach. His designs for shoes and clothing celebrated a body freed from illogical and unhealthy garments produced by a perverse fashion system. He countered his historicist, Beaux-Arts training at the Technische Hochshule Wien, where he had graduated in 1928, by studying vernacular structures of foreign civilizations. Thus he championed indigenous Mediterranean buildings and traditional Japanese houses as models to emulate. Rudofsky’s lifelong commitment to the study of native buildings and their settings culminated in the seminal exhibition that he curated at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1964, Architecture Without Architects, an immensely popular event that definitively established his reputation as a relentless critic of the vacuity of modern life.

An elegant exhibition organized by the Architekturzentrum Wien and the Getty Research Institute (GRI) in association with the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) outlined Rudofsky’s career and theoretical interests. Its cocurators Monika Platzer, curator of the Archive/Collection at the Architekturzentrum, and Wim de Wit, head of Special Collections and Visual Resources and curator of Architectural Collections at the GRI, masterminded the staging of objects. A lavishly illustrated catalog accompanies the exhibition. It comprises an introduction by Platzer and essays by Maria Welzig, de Wit, Andrea Bocco Guarneri, and Felicity D. Scott that were presented originally at a 2005 symposium held in Vienna on the occasion of the one hundredth anniversary of Rudofsky’s birth. Documentary sections devoted to Rudofsky’s photographs, the books he authored, and reprints and translations of some of the architect’s articles in domus complete the publication.

Two introductory galleries preceded six main sections at the CCA. The first gallery featured suspended reproductions of some of Rudofsky’s iconic drawings and photographs, a display strategy that mimicked one favored by the architect in his own exhibition designs. Copies of Rudofsky’s principal publications were made available to the visitors in the second introductory gallery, which included a display of projected images from Rudofsky’s travels and brief chronologies of his life and that of his wife and collaborator, Berta Doctor. 

Sections one and two, “Life as a Voyage, Travel as a Lifestyle” and “Sensuous Austerity: The Mediterranean and Japan,” illustrated the crucial role foreign cultures played in Rudofsky’s intellectual development. The curators paired watercolors and sketches from his student years with turn-of-the-century Viennese publications that expounded the architectural beauty of Capri and provided an intellectual context for Rudofsky’s early infatuation with Italy. [1] His powerful, abstract watercolors of Theran villages (some of which the architect had exhibited at the Künstlerhaus in Vienna in 1931) revealed his particular fondness for the Mediterranean vernacular. Documentary photographs that illustrated his doctoral thesis on Cycladic structures, “Eine primitive Betonbauweise auf den südlichen Kykladen, nebst dem Versuch einer Datierung derselben” (A primitive concrete building technique of the southern Cyclades, and an attempt to date it), completed in 1931 at the Technische Hochschule Wien, complemented the watercolors. The Mediterranean also figured in Rudofsky’s brief collaboration in the 1930s with the Italian architect Gio Ponti. This association, featured on another wall of the gallery, resulted in several projects for hotels. The images presented at the CCA, all taken from publications, documented a 1937–38 scheme for an ideal hotel (albergo ideale) and the unrealized 1938 Hotel San Michele in Capri. Rudofsky’s other great love, Japan, was featured in a long case with two of the architect’s travel sketchbooks and contemporary publications, including Tetsuro Yoshida’s Das Japanische Wohnhaus (1935), Bruno Taut’s Houses and People of Japan (1938), and Walter Gropius’s Tradition and Creation in Japanese Architecture (1960).

A sixth section, “A Natural History of Architecture,” concluded the exhibition. Suspended from the ceiling were original panels from Rudofsky’s acclaimed MoMA exhibition, Architecture Without Architects. A long case with publications in praise of vernacular building and others questioning the fate of the modernist city highlighted the postwar crisis in the ideology of modernism that unfolded at the time of the MoMA presentation. [2]

To complement Rudofsky’s inquiries about the body, the curators amusingly revisited a selection of images of bodily transformations featured in Are Clothes Modern?. They displayed Rudofsky’s vignette of “foot molds” next to Adidas basketball shoes, showed the analogy of an x-ray image of a Chinese banded foot to that of a woman wearing high heels, stressed the uncanny similarity between the earrings of Santa Cruz islanders and a Motorola v600 Bluetooth earpiece, and juxtaposed frightening diagrams of head- deforming techniques with a chronological chart plotting the popularity of plastic surgery interventions mimicking the eyes, noses, and lips of famous movie stars. Dispersed throughout the exhibition spaces, in the thresholds of each gallery, these paired images underlined the pertinence in today’s commercial culture of Rudofsky’s dissidence with fashion.