Festival dell'architettura

Abstract

The activity of Bernard Rudofsky draws the figure of an architect that creates a rich and complex vision of Living in the modern world, through the experience of travelling, curiosity and playing. An architect that in critical terms gets close to different cultures and from them he structures a projectual experience and a teaching practice centered on confrontation and discovery. Professor, architect and exhibition designer, in each different occasions he is able to teach and learn from others.

The works, the intellectual discourse, the professional effort of architect Bernard Rudofsky (1905-1988) are to be considered a lifelong reflection on the function of travelling, playing and curiosity as tools to educate, to improve and to understand the role of architecture in everyday life; to him, indeed, do not exist technical problems in terms of building design, but only cultural disputes1, to him "the face of a country, of a city or town, is not the result of a design program; it is the reflection of a way of life”2; “Every society has the architecture it deserves”3, the most relevant aspect is the role played by his incessant research aimed to learn from others.

Bernard Rudofsky, was born in Moravia, into a German speaking family, originally from a Polish region under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a multicultural empire with inhabitants speaking a vast variety of languages which, as he declares himself: “My native country, […] was a pastiche of a dozen nations, each with its separate language and the native architecture was just diversified. Thus I had the chance to learn at first hand that there is not just, one way of living that leads to happiness”4.

Since the early years of the 19th century architects were used to the experience of travelling as a way to culturally educate themselves, the Grand Tour. Visiting sites of ancient ruins, artistic town and cities and their architecture, was the consolidated practice to learn the lesson passed on through the cultural and artistic heritage built by ancient and modern masters as well. On the footsteps of that experience is critically placed Rudofsky's research, which will turn travelling into a way of life: Life as a voyage, travel as a lifestyle5. Travelling is to him a practical way to discover, investigate and comprehend the architecture and customs of different civilizations. Travelling is the only chance possible to a direct knowledge of almost unknown architectures, customs and practices, way of life that distinguish peoples and civilizations of different cultural and social identities and which were part of study no yet explored.

Rudofsky was conscious of the fact that that kind of knowledge could only be acquired in those circumstances and no others, and most of all they became a tool of confrontation: “Meeting strangers, is one way of getting to know ourselves; learning about other nations’ architecture enables us to see our own architecture in a new light. Confrontation surely is one way to come to terms with the world, with our environment, our companions, ourselves”6. However if from an educational point of view travelling and an healthy sense of curiosity are Rudofsky’s fundamental tools, so is the role sustained in the teaching process by recreational practices, so much so to be an ongoing reference point in his profession. Rudofsky analyzes in depth many a teaching issue, suggesting an alternative way to the institutional ones, and putting in center place recreational and practical experimentations, as aspired by Johan Huizinga7. Rudofsky notices as, in the contemporary era, playing practices have turned into obsolete ones, and he asserts that modern society, through education, has made fellow men unable to grapple with new activities that they have not been thought, playing is just one of them. Hence the drifting of teaching children how play. Rudofsky observes the spontaneity of playing in children from primitive societies, in complete contrast with the reality of western society’s prep schools, where children are urged pushed to play in an organized manner, often with the interference of the teachers themselves. In order to meet children who are free from the psychological constraints of mass produced toys and organized fun it is necessary to cross over the western society into a wilder kind of world, where sense of curiosity and imagination are not weakened by programmed activities and where children “never felt the breath of the child psychologist on their neck”8.

And since the early years in the life of children are those ones of discovery, the image that they conjure up of the world comes from personal observations and experience by trials and errors. “With Nature as their inexhaustible toy shop, children in primitive societies get far better ideas of how to have a good time than the most zealous kindergarten teacher”9.

It is in such a way that Rudofsky metaphorically explains his criticism of the architect’s contemporary condition, who has lost the ability to figure out different ways to design and to live, the only references are the ones learnt or imposed by dominant professional trends and established institutions. The architect find it difficult to assume his or her own point of view, he or she takes shelter into the job where the questions to which give an answer are determined by the client’s requests.

Rudofsky is called by many colleges to teach courses, but he does accept these invitations only on the condition that they should be classes aimed to un-teach10. The learner and the academic attitudes in Rudofsky are one and the same, learning and teaching are inseparable processes in an individual’s development. In his teaching practices he articulates a reflection aimed to stimulate a certain sense of curiosity by looking at the unexpected. The wish is for the profession to go back to be playful not just only work11. “If somebody would ask me how to enlarge, or to improve, the education of the student of architecture; how to offer him a more direct experience than the one he gets in school, I would suggest that he be provided with an experimental yard, a Bauhof, a place […] outdoor, where he could make architectural models, not 1:100, or 1:50, or 1:20, but full scale, one to one”12. Rudofsky expresses the usefulness of a workshop where to experiment with different materials. “This experimental workshop ought to be equipped with every hand tool and machine tool; with every natural and synthetic material that is in use by the building industry, but also with samples of materials that are not available on the market, such as bamboo, reed, certain fibers, etc. With these materials you ought to work freely, invent and re-invent building techniques, and find out how to use them for practical application, or merely experiment with them for the hell of it, in order to explore your own abilities and imagination”13. He does indeed wish to stimulate the wits of the future architects through the practice of designing, experimenting, playing and having fun, rather than suggesting indications of method, and in the course of his lessons he quotes as an example the playfulness of his experience with Nivola during the planning of the garden for the latter’s home-atelier in Long Island. As witnessed by Ruth Nivola, when Tino and Bernard work together, without a plan and final drawings, but rather with a few bricks, some blocks of cement and some poles, they build a house: “it was a little like children playing in the garden”14.

It is mainly in his activity as a curator though, that Rudofsky establishes an active dialogue with the public, by reaching for the front seat audience of laymen. He attempts to free issues linked to specialists topics by including them in a sort of discovery trail. He is not so much interested in teaching by passing on precise notions, but rather by inspiring curiosity into the public, and by doing so removing that same public from the control of the more mainstream critical apparatuses.

His goal is to stimulate critical reasoning. His ones are “Exhibition with a point of view”15, “Shows with a Personal Vision”16, where he wants to put the visitor in the condition to draw autonomously his or her own personal conclusions and not to be induced to do so by reactions planned from the outside.

His setting of questions as primary objectives rather than teaching is probably the most relevant aspect and finds a corresponding concept in the one which tells us that an exhibition’s staging is merely an unconcluded research that, on the contrary, draws attention to topics open to the individual’s opinion and knowledge. Most probably it is in such a way that, at best, a layman can be turned into an expert researcher. This swapping of roles is necessary in Ruofsky’s shows an stagings, which are informed by a very personal technical and theoretical basis, and which will lead him to accomplish sensational an provocative exhibitions and stagings and even subversive ones like Architecture Without Architects17. It was suggested at MoMA in 1941, although the opening was in 1964, and he aimed to demonstrate with it how the architecture investigated in his travels, described by him as no-pedigree, unknown, vernacular, Mediterranean, was more humane and less influenced by fashion than the modern one, and most of all that some of the best architectures of our time, and also of the past, were produced by ignorant people, without any education or theoretical foundations18. Besides this show represented for Rudofsky the way to redeem all those kind of architectures which at that time had not yet been considered, which had been completely ignored.

If as Goethe says, we see only what we already know19, Rudofsky, on the other hand says that in order to see further beyond we need to know other, something that usually is ignored.

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