“Architecture without Architects” was the title of an influential exhibition by the architect Bernard Rudofsky at the MoMA in 1964; “Housing: An Anarchist Approach” was the name of a famous book by the English architect and anarchist Colin Ward, in which the author proclaims the rights and productivity of self-built housing and squatting in postwar Europe. Whereas the latter’s collection of essays discussed specific cases of European and Latin American squatter movements from the 1940s to the 1970s. Rudofsky’s exhibition presented photographs of local vernacular architecture from all over the world, with the claim that architects should learn from “premodern architectural forms”. Both of these perspectives identify a condition that emerged during decolonization, in which a massive crack appeared in the modernist movement and its vision of top-down planning. Whereas Rudofsky’s approach suggested an aesthetical and methodological shift, Colin Ward’s was a political reading of spatial self-expressions that might offer new methodologies and an alternative understanding of society. But they were also two very different interpretations of the simple fact that, throughout the ages and around the world, architecture has been produced without the intervention of planners or architects.



Though housing programs since the 1950ties / 1960ties did take certain specific local, regional or cultural conditions into account when they were conceived, these conditions turned out to be much more complex after decolonization than previously thought. The many ways of appropriating space and architecture by people can also lead to the assumption that both colonialism and the postcolonial government never managed to assume complete power over the population. Another way of thinking about architecture without architects might begin by reflecting on the trajectories of colonial and global modernity, and how people can make use of them today. The colonial contact zone, which, as James Clifford showed, was affected by concepts and practices of modernity, colonialism, and migration, is reformulated and adapted by minor daily practices, small in scale but globally massive in number and impact.(MvO)



Sources:

Hughes, Jonathan and Simon Sadler. Non-Plan: Essays on Freedom, Participation and Change in Modern Architecture and Urbanism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Rudofsky, Bernard. Architecture Without Architects: A Short Introduction to Non-Pedigreed Architecture. Albequerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1964.

Scott, Felicity. “Bernard Rudofsky: Allegories of Nomadism and Dwelling.” In: Anxious Modernisms Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture, edited by Sarah Williams Goldhagen and Réjean Legault, 215-238. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.

Ward, Colin. Housing: An Anarchist Approach. London: Freedom Press, 1973.