Cooper Hewitt says...
Bernard Rudofsky was a writer, architect, curator and critic best known for his provocative exhibitions and books, including Are Clothes Modern? (MoMA NY 1944), a critique of the western fashion system; Architecture Without Architects (MoMA 1964), a celebration of vernacular architecture; and Now I Lay Me Down to Eat (Cooper Hewitt Museum, 1980), which presented multi-cultural alternatives to the basic design problems of living-- dining, sleeping, sitting, cleaning, and bathing.
Born in Moravia, Rudofsky earned a doctorate in architecture, then went on to work in Germany, Italy and Brazil before settling in New York in 1941. He continued to travel extensively throughout his life. He taught at Yale, MIT, Waseda University in Tokyo, and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, and was a Guggenheim, Ford, and Fulbright Fellow.
Rudofsky's travels were a type of field research in his ongoing critique of the limited scope of Western architecture and design. His body of work, while humorous and subversive, presents a sustained argument for a human-centered design.
