FELICITY SCOTT Bernard Rudofsky: Allegories of Nomadism and Dwelling QL! ta September 1965 Reyner Binham published a shor review of Architecture without Architects, the catalogue of an exhibition curated by Bernard Rudofsky that had opened the previous November at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Entitled “Nobly Savage Non-Architects,” Banham’s review wrestled with a paradox, for the ‘primitive’ buildings Rudofsky presented appeared to the English critic to be irrelevant to “our present technological and social dis- pensation” and yet, as he concluded, conceding a pertinence, “an ‘ excursion like this into architectural noble-savagery is just serendipity 1 from MoMA’s perspective) unexpected appeal of Rudofsky’s photographs of “communal” settle- ment patterns, “non-pedigreed” architecture, and proto-industrial structures perhaps compelled Banham’s dismissal, but he too under: stood their peculiar allure. “For architects,” he remarked, “Bernard Rudofity's collection of photographs ... must be a real orgy of profes- ‘ sional self abasement before the ‘spontaneity’ (oh?) of the ‘inspired amateurs’ (yes?).” What worried Banham most, however, was the ' “substratum” of “radical misapprehension about the cultural implica- tions ofall this for architects today.”* ‘The seduction of contemporary architects by images of Mediter- ranean hill towns and other ‘exotic’ structures was, of course, pre- figured by that of an earlier generation of modernists: Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier, Bruno ‘laut, Mies van der Rohe, José Luis Sert, among others. And, as Banham and Rudofiky were well aware, anthropo- ' logically inspired investigations were again on the rise by the 1950s. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy published Native Genius in Anonymous Architec A The Modem Movensnt_ ture in 1957,’ and sporadic articles on vernacular architecture appeared Popular Cure in prominent journals of the time ~. The Architectural Review, Casa: Everyday tie bella continuita, Architectural Forum, Architecture d’Aujourd'hui — 4 la mode.”' The enormous and (e aie including Aldo van Eyck’s famous study on “The Architecture of the Derocate Freedom Dogon” published in 196." Despite the visibility of the work of Tear Her liens Ten, Rudofsky’s 1964 exhibition of “non-pedigreed” architecture cap- Penis tured the imagination of a new generation of architects in an unprece 5 Ahency dented manner. Banham himself acknowledged this in 1976. After Architect's Hoy Regionalism /Ploce as-___ noting that “the claims of urban ‘spontane- ity” Mad been mobilized as early as the 1951 meeting of c1am, he recalled that “a tide of interest in vernacular architectures, cul nating in Bernard Rudofsky’s exhibition Architecture without Architects (1964), had also produced interest in what Maki contem- poraneously described as ‘group form’.”* Frequently invoked as a pivotal, if prob- lematic, event in the postwar reassessment of architectural modernism, the impact of Architecture without Architects cannot be attributed to “serendipity @ la mode,” as Banham would have it. Rudofsky’s project of photographing and studying architecture ethnographically dated back to his student years at Vienna’s Technische Hochschule in the 1920s, and was the subject of his doc~ toral dissertation on the “Primitive Con- crete Construction of the Greek Cyclades” in 193. Living in Htaly from 2932 antil 1938 he also participated in the rising interest in the Mediterranean house centered around Casabella, a modemist discourse exempli- fied by Giuseppe Pagano's exhibition of r936, Architettura Rurale.* In the interim between. his formation as a modern architect and his later work in the United States, however, Rudofsky’s approach to the subject took a marked turn, distinct from, but not entirely out of step with, the widespread revival of interest in “primitive” art and ethnography in the 1960s.’ If‘vernacular” architecture as Rudofsky understood it had been central to the formulation of modernism, he also recog- nized that this aspect had been suppressed in the subsequent codification of modernism to become, in his words, “the narrow world of official and commercial architecture.”® The rising interest in “spontaneous” architecture provided a catalyst to overcome this restraint, and Rudofsky deployed the seductive appeal of his photographs to mobilize contemporary discontents, launching Architecture without Architects as a carefully crafted, polemical attack on the state of modern architecture FELICITY scott Participating in a widespread disavowal of both modem architecture and urbanism in the postwar period, Rudofsky’s project articulated a symptomatic response to the uncertainties confronting the discipline Faced with the threat of cultural homoge- nization arising from unprecedented levels of communication and commercialism, and a simultaneous sense of increasing social fragmentation, non-Western societies and pre-industrial Mediterranean towns appeared to offer an alternative to this condition.° By the 1960s, moreover, faith in technological progress had increasingly given way to its dystopic counterpart. The progressive social ‘deals informing the techno-optimism of an earlier generation, including modern archi- tects, had been contested by evidence of, modem warfare and the haunting prospect of global environmental and nuclear catas- trophes, Presented from a Western per- spective, the cultural products and technical knowledge of supposedly “organic” societies were seen as a mode of resisiance to that increasingly totalized modern condition." ‘The unapologetically ‘exotic’ images presented in Rudofsky’s exhibition appealed to this countercultural refusal of Western culture's logic of progress, a growing reaction that fully took hold only in the 1960s. If architects had become handmaidens of a technocratic modemity and its systems of administration, here it seemed was a project that countered that domination." Address- ing what some regarded as the exh: architectural modernism, Rudofsky’s images of “non-pedigreed” architecture presented an alternative to existing professional prac- tices, thereby capturing both architects imaginations and their disdain, John Jacoby later recalled the exhibition as “an antidote to the personality oriented formalism of 60s design.”"? And there was something com- pelling about Rudofsky’s title. In its rejection of architecture, the “without” produced a succinct catchphrase for the renouncement ion ofof modernist orthodoxies.'? Systematically formulated throngh key institutions such as clam and MoMA and perpetuated through architectural schools and the American Institute of Architects, an officially sanc- tioned modem architecture had, according to Rudofsky, secured a role for the profession within bureaucratic planning administra- tions and commercial imperatives at the expense of modemnism’s true vocation, Fre- quently mentioned in passing, Rudofsky's title continues to evoke a sense of that grow- ing discontent and to stand in for the search for alternatives to a modernist paradigm that was, by the 1960s, most spectacularly visible in large-scale urban-renewal projects This investigation will offer neither a comprehensive outline of these problematics as they pertain to Rudofsky’s work nor a detailed account of his exhibition, for the heterogeneous, inconsistent, and often oppor- tunistic nature of his speculations refuses han approach, Rath singular if strategic trajectory through this terrain, tracing Rudofsky's contribution to the architectural debates addressing uproot edness and’mobility. Formulating a ‘line of flight’ from regulatory dictates, Rudofsky’s somewhat perverse relation to mainstream discourse presents an interesting twist with- in the ongoing dialectic of freedom and integration. Privileged tropes in both pre- and postwar theorizations of the modern condition, uprootedness and mobility were understood as both the disastrous effects (alienation) and as the liberating potential (freedom) of industrial technologies. For instance, in 1926 Hannes Meyer claimed mobility to be central to the “New World.” With somewhat ominous reference to war- planes, he explained the liberating possi- bilities of a mobility that was “disrespectful of national borders.” As he wrote, “Our dwellings become more mobile than ever: mass apartment blocks, sleeping cats, residential yachts, and the Transatlantique , it will follow a BERNARD RUDOFSKY undermine the local concept of the home- land. The fatherland fades away. We learn Esperanto. We become citizens of the world.”"* In 1g60 Alison and Peter Smithson again announced that “Mobility has become the characteristic of our period Social and physical mobility, the feeling of a certain sort of freedom, is one ofthe things that keeps our society together... Mobility is the ey both socially and organizationally to town planning, for mobility is not only concerned with roads, but with the whole concept ofa mobile, fragmented commurity."* Shadrach Woods reiterated the position that same year, explaining that “In terms of housing, [mobility] means the easy, unques- tioning tootlessness of the urban popula- tion.” Soon after, Guy Debord offered a less optimistic reading of this condition, refer- ring to modetn urbanism in 1967 asa “tech- nology of separation.” As he recognized, the reorganization of these fragmented parts was just a further stage of the territorial logic of modernist urbanism: “The general trend toward isolation, which is the essential reality of urbanism, must also embody a controlled reintegration of the workers based on the planned needs of production and consump- tion. Such an integration into the system must recapture isolated individuals as indi- viduals isolated together.""” The nostalgia for an “integrated totality.” appearing in Georg Lukscs's theorization of the “transcendental homelessness” of the modern condition, had found, by the mid 1960s, many analogous sentiments among architects searching for a panacea to that condition of alienation.'® Disconnectedness was often set against the dialectical counter- part of an organic connection to the land which, it was assumed, could be found in ‘primitive’ cultures. This erstwhile existence agi tion of many postwar architects who searched of organic relations haunted the i 27for modes of reintegrating their fragmented society and who embraced the notion of a total architecture. A legacy of the Bauhaus’ idea of a Gesamtkunstwerk, an idealization of the architect’ role in the comprehensive design of the built environment, it also entailed organicist notions of a “total” recon- ciliation of man and his surrounds. In 1955 Walter Gropius published a collection of essays, The Scope of Total Architecture, in which he described the “sweeping transfor mation of human life” brought about by technological advancements — automobiles, airplanes, radio, film, gramophones, tele- phones, and x-ray technology — a transforma- tion of the world, in his assessment, from static and “seemingly unshakable” concep- tions to ones of incessant transmutation, Gropius explained that this condition led to incr a “perilous atomizing effect on the social coherence of the community.” The archi- tect and planner thus inherited the task of reintegrating that atomized world into a whole, a task Gropius described as creatinj and controlling a “living urban organism! “This,” he affirmed “we might call ‘total architecture.” The Dutch architect Jacob Bakema had espoused a different concept of totality in 1947, looking to “primitive” cultures for a model of an organic whole. “Architecture is simply one of the tools available for man to get familiar with total life in order to have his own art of living,” Bakema wrote, explaining that to achieve this, “Form has to be total (organic).”” In contradistine- tion to the imposed integration of Gropi Bakema understood this totality to arise “spontaneously” out of the habits and cus- toms of a culture. As Banham acknowledged in Megastructure, Rudofsky had participat- ed in this discourse of “spontaneity.” Yet, unlike Bakerna, he would never extrapolate that organicism to the practice of contem- porary architects. ing specialization, entailing Feucity scort In 1966 Rudofsky was given the opportu- nity to position himself vis-a-vis such notions when he was invited to speak at an annual conference of the American Institute of Architects (aia). On the theme “Total Archi- tecture,” Rudofsky commented that it “sounds rather ominous. To me at least,” he said, “the words have an apocalyptic ring,” In Architecture without Architects Rudofs! had himself referred to a “total picture of architecture,” describing his use of images of vernacular buildings to open up “official” architectural codifications to other “geo graphical and social dimensions.” He sur- mised, however, that the alas use of the term “total” intended no such heteroge- neous picture. Registering his distance from the institution, Rudofsky announced to his audience: “I cannot escape the suspicion that my having been invited to speak here results from a case of mistaken identity.” Indeed, Rudofsky was far from certain of the merits of any totalizing organization, which for him led not to a new organic community (he recognized that this was no longer pos- sible) but, rather, to integrating subjects into a system geared toward control and profit There was, of course, another “prin subject that emerged as a central theoretical trope in this period, and one that was at the center of Rudofsky’s project: the nomad. Neither homeless (like the uprooted subject) nor integrated into administrative struc- tures, the nomad represented an alternative strategy of occupying territory. Pivotal to conceptions of the nomad were technologies of nomadism, the environmental and inhab- itable technologies that enabled the nomad to dwell. By the early 1960s, architectural projects employing tents, trailers, and pneu- matic and other light-weight, transformable, or transportable structures were spreading through the pages of architectural maga- zines. From Frei Otto's truly bizarre tensile and pneumatic structures of the mid 1950s onwards to Constant Nieuwwenhuy’s encamp tivad ee tt Floating Village, China. From Erasmus Francisci's Lustgarten, 1668. 91 Floating viloge, Chin, in Erosmus Froncse!’slusigartan (1658. From Bernard Rudeiky, Architecture without Architects [Now York: MoMA, 1964) ment for gypsies (c. 1958), Yona Friedman's “Program of Mobile Urbanism” (1958), Ron Herron’s “Walking City” (1964), Michael Webb's “Cushicle” (1966), Peter Cook’s “Nomad” (1968), and even to the futuristic post-urban visions of Superstudio, dating from the end of the decade, architects were attempting to reformulate the discipline’s tertitorial strategies. Structures of nomadic and mobile popula- tions formed an important facet of Rudofsky’s eclectic display in Architecture without Archi tects. Although images of nomadism were overshadowed visually by the abstract modem geometry and communal organizations pre- sented in other photographs, the articulation of a nomadic mode of dwelling remained a strategic, even urgent prospect towards which his architectural polemic was directed Indeed, in the exhibition catalog, Rudofsky situated the Ark as the very ur-form of archi- tecture, the divine pinnacle before the inven: tion of either fixed dwellings or the kee A floating village depicted in 1668 was also BERNARD RUDOFSKY prominently displayed in the preface (fig. 93) serving to introduce sections dedicated to “nomadic” and “moveable” architecture. Rudofsky’s dystopian analysis ofa globalized modern condition driven by advanced indus- trial and communication technologies found its counterpart in an explication of nomadic tendencies, Rudofsky re tive potential in such “ habits, which provided a formulation of how the modemn subject might dwell within a condition of global deterritorialization. Although he did not have the conceptual tools to avoid essentializing relations, or the philosophical or rhetorical skill to avoid dog- matic assertions, this nomadic prospect offers key terms for a symptomatic historical case study of the postwar era. From today’s stand- point, Rudofsky’s approach is dismissible as an unconscionable primitivism. Its enor mous impact on the architectural community of the 1960s and its resonance with debates of that period, situate it, however, as @ significant, even pressing, object of study. ‘ognized a redemp- rimitive” dwelling 219Rudofsky’s Allegories Whether received as an ameliorating response to or as an escapist retreat from the predicament of postwar industrial civi lization, Rudofsky’s show was widely received as.a prescriptive sermon or “homily.” Despite his protestation that “nothing could be more uncongenial to him than the role of the reformer,” and his insistence that his exhibition was “supremely unfunctional,”?> his presentation of vernacular architecture was persistently understood as proposing formal and aesthetic models for designees Architecture without Architects was pitched to appeal to contemporary concerns, although ata different register than its reception por- trayed. If his project is to be likened to a rhetorical trope, however, Rudofsky provided us with other possibilities. While lecturing in the wake of his newfound popularity, it was not the sermon he drew upon; rather, he insisted that the images of vernacular archi- tecture should be understood in the manner of a “parable” or “allegory” of contemporary problems. Specifically, the images in his exhibition invoked the specter of the ruina- tion of both “primitive” and “modem” architecture ~ for Rudofsky, the effect of a reigning architectural pedagogy, of modern architecture's institutionalization and of its positioning within the “so-called progressive” system of industrial production. According to the testimony of many viewers, looking into those images produced most peculiar effects, arousing an urgent sense of even melancholy, accompanying the sense that what was depicted there had already disappeared.” By contrast with the assumed unity of “appearance and essence” that characterizes the symbol, such organic totality is absent in allegory.” Rudofsky’s images were not offered as living examples of a better way of life, but pointed beyond their manifest con- tent to the condition of modem architecture His photographs might thus be understood, FELICITY SCOTT through the words of Walter Benjamin, as harboring “the destruction of the organic interrelations in the allegorical intention.” While Rudofsky never provided a definition of allegory, his use of captioned photographs, images carefully selected for their readabil ity as modern, and his active reinterpretation of their content, suggests an affinity with Benjamin's own theorization. In this sense, Banham was correct in reading the images as empty signs. Yet in concluding that they were thereby simply the product of a radical misapprehension, Banham had nol taken into account the potential of an allegorical ing through supplementary and historically contingent meanings produced by the allegorist.® Rudofsky had indeed appropriated those images, adding a second (modemist) text and undertaking a violent decontextualization in resituating them in a Westen aesthelic paradigm. Yet itis not surprising that the allegorical status of those images went almost entirely unrecognized by his contemporaries. In the exhibition's introductory remarks and captions (texts largely reproduced in the catalogue’), little mention was made of this double charac- ter and indeed at times the commentary reads as a simple championing of the vernac- ular. In addition to rhetorical (and implied visual) comparisons between the “primitive” images and their purported modem counter- parts, Rudofsky did make a few subtle refer- ences to his strategy. He noted, for instance, that “the exhibition ... is frankly polemic comparing as it does, if only by implication, the serenity of the architecture in so-called anderdeveloped countries with the architec- tural blight in industrial countries.” While many recognized the satirical content of the images, Rudofsky's “allegorical intention” remained obscure.*" He would later reiterate that his melancholy gaze was directed upon modem architecture, When the exhibition arrived in London in 1974, Rudofsky was still impressing upon 2 refunctio| his audience that his interest in vernacular architecture had no strictly instrumental function. Speaking at a meeting of the Royal Institute of British Architects (n1Ba) he declared, “I hope I don’t have to assure you that vernacular architecture is no more for copying, adapting, and adopting than his- torical architecture. Its lesson, if any, les elsewhere.” Tired of the persistent misunder- standings, Rudofsky finally began to lay out the background of his lesson. “Fifty years ago,” he recalled, modem architecture pointed southward, like a sunflower. As a young man, the puritan Lecorbusier [sic] discovered the humanizing influence of the Mediterranean, the sea that, death, literally claimed him as its own. In the 1930s, JL architecture asa triumph of the Mediterranean. jet prematurely proclaimed modem Butafter this happy start, Rudofsky noted, events took a disturbing tum. It was our misfortune that, forthe past decades, architectural thought has been dominated by dis- ciplinarians hailing from frigid zones, and only lately have we become aware of the extent of the dehumanization they have caused.” Thus the dialectic of modern architecture, as presented by Rudofsky, was irreconcilably split between a sensuous, Mediterranean origin and a faith in progress advanced through the machine aesthetic and the Bauhaus legacy. If the former had been unduly suppressed, the latter had succeeded all too well in radically transforming the built environment, a transformation that, Rudofsky believed, had assumed the totaliz- ing character of the administrative and com- mercial system itself At the heatt of this problem was a dis- turbance in the contemporary milieu, a disturbance that for Rudofsky was not nec- essarily entailed by technology. Through BERNARD RUDOFSKY uuntempered commercialization the very pos- sibility of a milieu had been withdrawn, as the environment was transformed through an administrative framework that captured the subject into its system.” As we shall see, it was this system and not simply mobility that for Rudofsky precluded intimate relations between subjects and their environment, thus, for him, the possibility of dwelling. Indeed, he desired the utmost mobility, and did everything possible to ensure that his own ability o travel remained unfettered.”* If this mobility was itself enabled through industrialization, the problem for Rudofsky became how to forge a nomadic mode of dwelling that could hamess the potentially liberating effects of technology without being subjected to administrative control ind America Years earlier, “Bernardo” Rudofsky, who was an inveterate sun worshiper and even a selfproclaimed nudist, had himself, “like a sunflower,” turned south and left the frigid zones of his native Austria behind. Having completed his formal education, he left Vienna indefinitely in 1932 for the temperate climate of southern Italy, where he remained until suddenly compelled to leave following the Nazi Anschluss of 1938. He emigrated to South America, staying briefly in Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro before settling in Sao Paulo, Brazil. He arrived in New York in 1941, having won a Latin American prize in MoMA’s “Organic Design” competition. Soon afterwards, the chairman of MoMA’s Department of Architecture, Philip Good- win, invited him to propose an exhibition ona subject suitable to a modem audience. In response, Rudofsky submitted a portfolio of photographs of vernacular architecture that he had taken during his excursions in the 1g20s and ’30s, As he recalled Rudofiky thought “vernacular architecture would be a welcome departure from (the museum's] routine.”** ars later, amIn this, however, he was sadly mistaken. As he explained, his photographs were reject- ed as “unsuitable for a museum dedicated to modern art.” “If anything,” he recalled, his proposal “was thought to be anti-modern This came as quite a surprise to Rudofsky, as he had already exhibited the photographs in an exposition of modern architecture and design in the Austrian section of the 1931 Berliner Bauaustellung.”” For the Viennese- trained Rudofsky, who in the 1930s had resided in Weimar Germany and then Italy, such “primitive” architecture was firmly situated within the modernist discourse."* | If Goodwin turned Rudofsky’s exhibition proposal down, it was, as Rudofsky noted, “because the Museum was just then preach: ing the gospel of modem architecture.” ‘That gospel was the International Style. Codified nearly a decade earlier by Alired Barr, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, and Philip Johnson through the 1932 Modern Architec ture: Intemational Exhibition, the Interna- tional Style had, by this time, established itself as the prevailing discourse of architec- tural modernism in the United States.” Rudofsky's attempt to insert “anonymous” architecture into this context was not, in fact, “antimodern,” but sought specifically to confront the museum’s codification. As Goodwin would have known, Rudofsky was committed modem architect. Rudofsky had established himself as such despite the disruptive effects of the rise of European Fascism and his peripatetic way of life." While undertaking research on the exhibi- tion Brazil Builds, which opened in 1943, Goodwin had come across Rudofsky's stun- ning courtyard houses in Sao Paulo, and included Casa Arnstein and Casa Frontini (fig. 9.2) in his exhibition. Perhaps because | of this not entirely mistaken identity, he did not reject Rudofsky's interest in vernac- ular architecture outright. As Rudofsky recalled, “a portfolio of my photographs was graciously accepted and buried in the FELICITY ScoTT museum files where it remained undisturbed for the next twenty-three years.”"! In that 23-year period before these photo- graphs returned to haunt MoMA as Architec- ture without Architects, Rudofsky pursued a critique of the state of modem architecture in the United States. Beginning with the 1944 MoMA exhibition Are Clothes Modem?. he invoked “primitive” practices asa chal- lenge to the museum's implicit assumption that modern culture represented a higher level of civilization. Directing his study of “non-pedigreed” products to this end, Rudofiky set out to show in turn that modern design had been depleted of its sensuous dimensions in the United States, and ren- dered into simply another exchangeable commodity within a “sinister system of con- trol” ~ the fashion industry." Coupled with : the “leveling influence of modern communi- cation,” Rudofsky found that this situation led to an ever-increasing cultural homoge- nization, for him an “international style.” After Are Clothes Modem? appeared as a book in 1947, Rudofsky set about resituating his polemic within a more evidently archi- tectural discourse. In that year, he produce a manuscript sketch entitled “Tentative out. . line of a book or. human shelter in general and on the contemporary house in particular but chiefly about Man in his role as inhabi- tant” Variously retitled “Are Houses Mod- em?,” “Studies in Domestic Architecture,” and “The Inmate,” this project continued his critique of International Style modernism, and of the mass-consumer subject it antici- pated. Developed until 1953, Rudofsky’s , “House Project” — as he titled his files — was then divided. One half led to his 1955 book on the American “hore” entitled Behind the Picture Window.” The other half would lead to Architecture without Architects, and subsequently to its book-length expansion into The Prodigious Builders The genealogical connection between “Are Houses Modern?” and Architecture4 92 Virgilio Frontni Howse, So Paulo, 1940, Bernard Rudotsk,orchitect. From Domus 234 (1946), page 9 without Architects provides evidence of the continuity of Rudofsky’s modernist concerns . and the importance of questions of uprooted- ness and mobility. Topics appearing in the 1947 proposal included: The ark; Shelter, not industry, the main target in modern war; Ancestral home and Heimatsliebe; Blood and Soil; The Trailer house; The shop-built house; Is nomadism a way of life?; The com- muter; Migratory trends in recent times; Return to primitive dwelling types ~ Fuller house, Nissen and Quonset hut; Hiroshima, Immigrants in the new environment; and ‘The packaged citizen, ‘The house, in Rudof- sky’s outline, was figured as man’s primary territory as well as being the site in which dwelling became conventionalized. Since traditional notions of territory — articulated through clinvate, geography, city walls, and ethnicity — had been disrupted by the advent > of a more dispersed urban organization, the BERNARD RUDOFSKY product in part of advanced communication and transportation technologies, the ques- tion had arisen: how was the subject to dwell within this reorganized sphere? Fascinated by cultures that built upon extreme topographical conditions, Archi- tecture without Architects articulated ~ “fonly by implication” ~a critique of the unchecked and homogenous growth of modern cities. “Instead of trying to ‘conquer’ nature, as we do, [the untutored builders] welcome the vagaries of climate and the challenge of topography,” Rudofsky argued. Yet he recognized that if initially built for security, the physical borders and arrange- ments of many hill towns and fortified vil lages had subsequently lost their defensive quality and now simply “help to thwart undesirable expansion.” The ultimate impli- cation of Rudofiky’s remarks was the impos- sibility of such distinct urbs. Even if he 23lamented their loss, he recognized that notions of territory had to be rethought. His own domestic work illustrates the change in his thinking. Rudofsky’s Casa Oro of 1936, designed in association with Luigi Cosenza, seems almost to grow out of its rugged site ‘on the top of Posillipo overlooking the Bay of Naples (fig. 9.3). In this it recalls his fascination with cliff dwellers. His later courtyard houses, however, were not deter: mined through a specific topographic, cli ‘matic, ot historic relation, as demonstrated , through his repeated displacement of the court and solarium from Italy to Brazil to Long Island, and even to Michigan (figs. 92 and 9.4). Tuned inward, the court sustained ils own mode of dwelling, registering the contingencies of context in a minor, inciden- tal manner. Like the domestic space of the nomad, it was the domestic organization that was displaced Nomads If, as Rudofiky argued, Architecture without Axchitects was to be read not as prescrib ing a retum to the vernacular but, rather, allegorically, then the question of nomadism or of the subject’ dislocation from “native” soil was one of his most persistent allegories, providing an important conceptual frame. work for aspects of his presentation of vernacular structures. IF uprootedness was thought to be a quintessentially modern condition arising from industrialization, Rudofsky put that thought into question Reversing the common teleology and dis- orienting this narrative of progress, Rudofsky insistently traced the presence of mobility (and even mass production) within “pri live” architecture, Presented in his images of tents, floating villages, and movable BENSESKANPAL Eg a