ARTICLE ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 2017.
This title has been borrowed from Bernard Rudofsky, a Moravian-born American writer, architect, and social historian who published an influential book of the same name in 1964. It has the subtitle ‘A short introduction to non-pedigreed architecture’, suggesting that the ‘buildings’ Rudofsky describes have no lineage or provenance. The subject matter is truly vernacular in that it is architecture which is domestic and functional, but includes habitation (or at least occupation) of rocks, trees and landscapes as well as man-made structures. Essentially, each subject matter is produced not by specialists but by the endeavours of a particular community, where this resultant ‘primitive’ architecture has a beauty of its own. And we shouldn’t confuse primitive with low intelligence, as the book readily illustrates.
