It is said that Bernard Rudofsky (1905–88) had eighteen different professions in the course of his life. Born in Austria, he was an architect and a designer, a curator, an author, a scholar, a painter, a photographer and much more besides. But above all he was an indefatigable traveller, which is why this book also bears the subtitle ‘Life as a Voyage’.
In quotations, photo spreads and essays together with facsimile reprints of the journal ‘Domus’ where he briefly worked as an editor in 1937, the book presents the work of Rudofsky in all its dazzling variety. All his life, Rudofsky searched for a timeless, humane style of architecture for human dwellings which would take full account of the needs and habits of everyday life. “The house has to become again what it was in the past: an instrument for living rather than a machine for living,” he stated in a lecture given in 1982. Rudofsky’s own oeuvre is rather thin on the ground: only a few residential buildings in Italy and Brazil, where he had fled from the Nazis in 1938. Like many of his contemporaries, the buildings demonstrate the impact of modernism, but Rudofsky’s modernism is mingled with forms taken from traditional Japanese architecture and traditional buildings around the Mediterranean.
“It is pointless for experts to discuss the finer points of residential architecture as long as we do not consider how its occupants sit, sleep, eat, bathe, wash themselves and want to dress.” This quote of Rudofsky explains his deep seated interest in how people dress, which led to him curating the exhibition ‘Are Clothes Modern?’ at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1944. Two years after the exhibition Rudofsky designed the eponymous ‘Bernardo Sandals’, which remained a top seller for over 20 years. In the exhibition in the MoMA, Rudofsky contrasted the designs of contemporary couturiers with traditional garments from various exotic cultures. He took a similarly iconoclastic stance in an exhibition which has probably become his most famous one: ‘Architecture without Architects’ – conceived as an act of homage to the talents of anonymous architects all over the world. Rudofsky himself commented on the exhibition as follows: “My study of non-pedigreed architecture is mainly a parable – a parable of complacency and of our inability to deal with our environment in a satisfactory manner.”
‘Lessons from Bernard Rudofsky’ shows Rudofsky to be a master in many areas: photography, architecture, and graphic arts as well as the art of turning a pithy phrase. Full-page photographs give evidence of Rudofsky’s eye for those details which speak to us of life. Every reader will have to decide for himself what the ‘lessons’ of Bernard Rudofsky are (to which the title of the book refers). One option, phrased as an exhortation, was – travel and learn through your own observations! For, as one of the many Rudofsky quotes in the book puts it, “getting to know strangers is one way of getting to known one’s self; learning something about the architecture of other countries permits us to see our own architecture in a new light”.