'This book made me reconsider how I view architecture'

摘要

A s The Museum of Modern Art preface puts it: 'Architecture Without Architects introduces the reader to communal architecture - that is architecture produced not by specialists but by the spontaneous and continuing activity of a whole people with a common heritage, acting within a community of experience.' Vitruvius, Le Corbusier and Mies Van der Rone - we all know these names. Architectural history has engraved their work into our brains. However, while I learned about the Modernist buildings of Charles-Edouard Jeanneret and unornamented geometric forms of Mies in the lecture hall, I often found myself searching for non-Eurocentric architecture when I arrived home. Architecture Without Architects was the first book that exposed me to non-Western vernacular design. It showcases architecture that is situated outside the main canon, such as the sprawling underground villages in China's Loess Belt or the rectangular dwellings that hug the cliffs of Southern Mali. In Rudofsky's book, there are no elegant unadorned pavilions or monolithic glass skyscrapers but instead buildings that humbly react to human necessity.