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Though a trained architect himself, he designed little beyond a series of houses, including his best known, for himself. But by the time he died in 1988, Rudofsky had gained an international following as a critic, curator, author, photographer, painter and polemicist.

Looking at the world around him, there wasn't much he liked. From the houses we live in to the clothes we wear, the peripatetic Rudofsky argued, we have been sold a bill of goods.

Now, a major exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Lessons From Bernard Rudofsky, examines in depth the career of a man who hoped to change the world.

To makes sense of Rudofsky's arguments, it is important to keep in mind that he came of age at a time when modernism was sweeping the world. This was the movement that repudiated the past and insisted that human need could be met through the application of science and technology, through rationality.

We know better now, but for the young Czech-born intellectual, modernism was both curiously appealing and deeply abhorrent. Like Rudofsky, the modernists professed great admiration for vernacular or indigenous architecture; they respected its lack of style, its simplicity. But there was a messianic streak in the modernist credo that left him skeptical. "The house has to become again what it was in the past," he wrote, "an instrument for living, instead of a machine for living. This would make all the difference in how we conduct our lives – like the difference between playing a violin and playing a jukebox."

The reference, of course, was to Le Corbusier's famous axiom that a "house is a machine for living in."

The implication of Le Corbusier's words, that human existence can be reduced to a series of mechanical functions, flew in the face of everything Rudofsky believed.

In an exhibition organized for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Architecture Without Architects, Rudofsky explored "non-pedigreed" building in places around the world.

"There is much to learn from architecture before it became an expert's art," he wrote in the catalogue. "The untutored builders in space and time ... demonstrate an admirable talent for fitting their buildings into the natural surroundings. Instead of trying to `conquer' nature, as we do, they welcome the vagaries of climate and the challenge of topography.