Mediterranean Manifesto

Bernard Rudofsky’s Longing for a New Way

‘No new way of building, a new way of living is needed’’ stated Bernard Rudofsky, the Viennese architect. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he saw great potential in adapting life to architecture and not the other way round. How we inhabit spaces is primarily the result of cultural and historical context. Rudofsky was intensively exploring the everyday to derive a new way of living. He worked both abstractly and concretely on his vision of living. He drew on distant cultures in terms of space and time, where he especially found an inexhaustible source of inspiration in the rural architecture of the Mediterranean. With his manifesto for a new way of living, the Casa di Procida in the Gulf of Naples, he condensed his findings into a design that would accompany him throughout his life. The present work attempts to reconstruct and interpret the central idea of the design. Through research in various archives in both Italy and Austria, previously unpublished material has been collected and reunited. Rudofsky’s approach of rethinking housing shows an alternative way of architecture.
supervisor
lorenzo de chiffre