Architecture Without Architects A Gallery by Bernard Rudofsky en.wikipedia.org Both a book and a MoMA exhibition of the same name by Bernard Rudofsky originally published in 1964. It provides a demonstration of the artistic, functional, and cultural richness of vernacular architecture. In 200 enlarged black-and-white-photographs, he showed various kinds of architectures, landscapes, and people living with or within architectures. Shown without texts or explanations, the visitors were just confronted with imagery that showed indigenous building traditions, which were very much at odds with the ideas of architectural modernism which had been promoted through NYC MoMA's Philip Johnson in his famous 1932 exhibition "Modern Architecture. International Exhibition". Non-architectsThe tacit wisdom of the body architecture
The Finish Fetish Artists An Essay www.getty.edu For others, perhaps especially those artists who worked with light and transparency and were involved in the birth of the Light and Space Movement, an immaculate surface is a prerequisite. Helen Pashgian explained this very clearly: “On any of these works, if there is a scratch... that’s all you see. The point of it is not the finish at all – the point is being able to interact with the piece, whether it is inside or outside, to see into it, to see through it, to relate to it in those ways. But that’s why we need to deal with the finish, so we can deal with the piece on a much deeper level”. The importance of a pristine surface calls for a very low tolerance to damage by the artists. The feeling is shared by Larry Bell: “I don’t want you to see stains on the glass. I don’t want you to see fingerprints on the glass... I don’t want you to see anything except the light that’s reflected, absorbed, or transmitted” Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One SeesThe light that hits the glassPhenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface lightartinterfacesmaterial