Rudofsky’s 1964 show at New York's Museum of Modern Art heralded the crumbling of architecture's modernist monopoly and the West's cultural complacency
I can’t be sure of the impact of Bernard Rudofsky’s Architecture Without Architects: A Short Introduction to Non-Pedigreed Architecture in 1964, but when I encountered it, as I struggled in the conceptual mire at the Bartlett, it was a huge blast of fresh air. The exhibition’s unprecedented triumph – it travelled from New York’s Museum of Modern Art to 88 venues over 11 years; the catalogue sold over 100,000 copies in the States alone – suggests similar exhilaration, despite contemporary disparagement and subsequent neglect.
Born in Moravia in 1905, Rudofsky trained as an architect – his Casa d’Oro (1937) made it to the cover of The Architectural Review – but a move to New York in 1941 effectively ended his practice. His doctoral thesis had explored barrel vaults on the Cyclades, sparking a lifelong admiration for Mediterranean architecture, matched by a passion for Japan’s ‘harmony of life’. These, he felt, were architectures that emerged from and encouraged sustainable lifestyles, respecting the sacred in the everyday.
Kicking off a rich vein of displays at MoMA, he famously ridiculed Western clothing in Are Clothes Modern? (1944), pairing modern images with ethnographic equivalents. But Architecture Without Architects was the bomb. Rudofsky gathered 200 black-and-white photos from anthropological, diplomatic and even military sources, mounting them on large aluminium panels with a scattering of laconic texts.
These entrancing examples of anonymous architecture – Sudanese granaries, Peruvian amphitheatres, Spanish hill towns – were hung at unexpected angles matching those of the original shots. With this crowd of decontextualised images, Rudofsky hoped to communicate his belief that truly humane architecture responded to its cultures and climates. He was not alone in exploring the indigenous, but this was a powerful manifesto. It was a call to seek answers outside traditional narratives (‘little more than a who’s who of architects who commemorated power and wealth’), contrasting ‘the serenity of the architecture in so-called underdeveloped countries with the architectural blight in industrial countries’.
Close inspection revealed the project’s anachronisms, contradictions, perhaps even its primitivism, but of more concern to contemporary critics such as the American Institute of Architects was the perceived onslaught on modernism at the very institution where it was first enshrined. Satirical comparisons between ‘primitive’ and ‘modern’ were certainly present, but Rudofsky’s inquest into American life went further: this was a deliberate provocation aimed at overturning Western complacency around cultural superiority.
Rudofsky claimed he had first chosen the vernacular as ‘a particularly suitable vehicle for what I call unteaching’. In later years, this approach became increasingly acerbic, with diminishing returns – despite those who label him as postmodernist, he was more suited to dismantling theories than constructing them. He also admitted he had ‘always been allergic to abstract language’. Without the camouflage of academic jargon, his over-frank observations exposed him to charges of being a populist iconoclast, not a serious thinker: conceptual bullshit has its uses.
But Rudofsky clung fast to his role as ‘the critical salt of contemporary living’. And, with academic life so weighted toward parochialism and verbal excess, we could do with more of such direct, principled prose.
First published in Icon 161, November 2016
A full PDF of Architecture Without Architects is available for download on MoMA website