Domus as a launch pad for an Austrian maverick

An exhibition at the Getty Research Institute in LA and the companion book from Birkhauser are both entitled Lessons from Bernard Rudofsky.

An exhibition at the Getty Research Institute in LA and the companion book from Birkhauser are both entitled Lessons from Bernard Rudofsky. They are as provocative as their subject: a modernist architect who championed the vernacular, a wickedly observant traveller, and an iconoclast with an original opinion on varied aspects of design and human behaviour. Like Le Corbusier, he was a northerner (from Vienna) who found inspiration in the south. “The Mediterranean taught Rudofsky and Rudofsky taught me,” declared Gio Ponti. “[We] were friends, designed a great deal together, and built nothing.” However, they did enjoy a fruitful collaboration at Domus in 1937- 38, and that gave Rudofsky the opportunity to express ideas he would flesh out over the next 50 years.

The exhibition, which was previously shown at the Architekturzentrum in Vienna and the CCA in Montreal, has been compressed to fit the small galleries of the GRI. Curator Wim de Wit heeded Rudofsky’s expert advice on installing a mix of travel sketches, photographs, plans and documents from the Getty Archives. There’s a constant sense of surprise, and the exhibits are layered over blow-ups that add another dimension to the display. Rudofsky was a restless polymath, but he kept returning to a few basic themes and the exhibition brings the man and his work into sharp focus. It portrays him as a rational sensualist, proposing buildings and clothes that would protect the body without imprisoning it.

As a 24- year-old engineering student, he spent three months on Santorini preparing his thesis on concrete vaults, while painting the cubist hill towns. That experience launched a life-long pursuit of truth and beauty in “primitive” buildings. The photographs he took on his travels inspired the landmark exhibition and book, Architecture Without Architects. First proposed in 1941 to the New York Museum of Modern Art, which initially found the idea heretical, it was finally presented there in 1964. But MoMA was eager to hire him from the start, and he began his long association with the 1943 exhibition, “Are Clothes Modern?”, exposing the absurdities of fashion, and particularly of conventional footwear. He created strappy sandals to liberate the feet and ironically they were embraced by the fashionistas he had mocked. One of his 1940s’ designs has been brought back into production and still looks timeless. To demonstrate his concept of healthy living in harmony with nature, Rudofsky designed a succession of cubist courtyard houses. “Architecture is not just a matter of technology and aesthetics but the frame for a way of life – and, with luck, an intelligent way of life,” he declared. The Casa d’Oro overlooking the Bay of Naples and the Casa Arnstein in Sao Paolo have been lovingly preserved. In Brazil, to which he fled in 1938 to avoid military service in Nazi-occupied Austria, and in the US, where he lived until his death in 1988, he continued to design houses for himself and others, but his passion was to challenge received wisdom. He saw things that others missed.

Returning to Rome in 1946, he photographed the abandoned buildings of EUR as though they were ruins of the ancient world. A two-year stay in Japan in the late 1950s generated The Kimono Mind, an unsparing account of the qualities and deficiencies of that society. Rudofsky was born in 1905, and was under-appreciated during his long and productive life. The exhibition demonstrates that his ideas are more relevant today than ever before. Monika Platzer, who edited the handsome companion book, with its scholarly essays and abundant illustrations, observes: “[He] was a virtuoso of the art of living, a non-conformist who resisted – indeed refused to accept – the accelerated pace of his time. He was at home nowhere and everywhere.” Michael Webb

11.03-08.06.2008
Lesson from Bernard Rudofsky
The Getty Research Institute
1200 Getty Center Drive, Suite 1100
Los Angeles, CA 90049-1688
http://www.getty.edu/research/exhibitions/

Latest on Art

Latest on Domus

Read more
China Germany India Mexico, Central America and Caribbean Sri Lanka Korea icon-camera close icon-comments icon-down-sm icon-download icon-facebook icon-heart icon-heart icon-next-sm icon-next icon-pinterest icon-play icon-plus icon-prev-sm icon-prev Search icon-twitter icon-views icon-instagram