Disorientation - Bernard Rudofsky in the Empire of Signs

Felicity D. Scott

ISBN 10: 3956791878 / ISBN 13: 9783956791871

Published by Sternberg Press, DE, 2020

About this Item

Seller Inventory # LU-9783956791871

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Disorientation - Bernard Rudofsky in the Empire of Signs
• Publisher: Sternberg Press, DE
• Publication Date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 3956791878
• ISBN 13: 9783956791871
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: New
• Weight: 666 grams

About this title

Synopsis

Viennese émigré architect Bernard Rudofsky (1905–1988) is most frequently recalled for curating “Architecture without Architects,” the famous 1964 photography exhibition of vernacular, preindustrial structures at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Far from simply a romantic or nostalgic invocation of cultures lost to industrial modernity, Rudofsky's exhibition drew on decades of speculations about modern architecture and urbanism, particularly their semantic, technological, institutional, commercial, and geopolitical influences.

Focusing on Rudofsky's encounters with Japan in the 1950s—he described postwar Japan as a “rear-view mirror” of the American way of life—architectural historian Felicity D. Scott revisits the architect's readings of the vernacular both in the United States and Japan, which resonate with his attempts to imagine architecture and cities that refused to communicate in a normative sense. In a contemporary world saturated with visual information, Rudofsky's unconventional musings take on a heightened resonance.

Critical Spatial Practice 7
Edited by Nikolaus Hirsch, Markus Miessen
Featuring artwork by Martin Beck

About the Author

Felicity D. Scott is Associate Professor of Architecture at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, where she directs the PhD program in architecture and codirects the program in Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture. She is the author of Architecture or Techno-utopia: Politics after Modernism (MIT Press).