The Voyage and the House. The search of Place by Bernard Rudofsky

This text focuses on the work of the modern Austrian architect Bernard Rudofsky, exploring his reflections and investigation on domestic space, showing how his ideas about modern housing were inspired by and evolving from his travels, and therefore considering questions of location and time as strongly connected to the design process. The voyage was for Rudofsky a way of thinking, an intellectual and physical experience. From his travels all over the world, looking at spaces and buildings of all the times, he brings back images, ways of living, which constitutes a fragmented collage of architectural experience from various countries and cultures. From this collage he develops new design ideas, exploring the possibility of reviewing the modern way of habitation. Rudofsky explored different ways of occupying and using the spaces. His designs - the villa Oro, the house in Procida, the house in Positano, the hotel in Capri, (Italy), the Frontini and Arnstein houses (Brasil), his own house in Spain, and the Nivola house in New York - represent radical investigation in the domestic space, radicalizing the relationship with nature (in particular with the ground), and conceiving the spaces as strongly related to the actual physical and sensorial experience. The research is based on material from the Getty Center Archive, Los Angeles, where most of Rudofsky’s work material is kept