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
What the painting was not about That is why for many years Irwin declined to allow his work to be photographed, because the image of the canvas was precisely what the painting was not about. Indeed, the problem is even more complicated than that. For in a very real sense the achievement of these paintings was in their making, and the finished canvas at one level is only an incidental relic, a fossil of that original process of discovery: not only do you have to be present before these paintings in order to experience them, it may be that you have to have made them as well. Lawrence Wechler & Robert Irwin, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees Only a mind opened to the quality of things photographyimages