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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.

1. James Grimmelmann on September 18, 2006 2:39 PM writes...

Note also that since Wikipedia and Citizendium use the same license (GNU FDL), it will be trivial to synchronize content back and forth between the two. I wouldn't expect Wikipedia to be systematically biased against information gathered and vetted on Citizendium; that's what deference to contributions rather than people is all about. Result, any noncontroversial areas in which the Citizendium excels will quite quickly result in Wikipedia rapidly rising to the same level of excellence. Citizendium's design makes the reverse less likely to happen.

2. Eric Finchley on September 18, 2006 3:40 PM writes...

I disagree with your comments on expertise. It seems to me that you are conflating expertise and authority. A judge has a socially constructed authority to pronounce sentence, just as an opinion commentator has the authority to write for a diverse audience in a national newspaper. But we haven't said anything about their expertise here.

Clay on September 18, 2006 4:13 PM writes...

You're right; I should have been clearer that I'm talking about the distinction between having expertise and being an expert. The latter category is where issues of authority come in, and what seems to get Sanger worked up is his belief that the overlap of expertise and experts is large.

Seth Finkelstein on September 20, 2006 12:38 PM writes...

Regarding: "My belief is that Wikipedia's success dramatizes instead a change in the nature of authority, moving from trust inhering in guarantees offered by institutions to probabilities created by processes."

22. David Gerard on September 22, 2006 7:08 AM writes...

Plenty of people complain of Wikipedia's alleged "anti-expert bias". I've yet to see solid evidence of it. Unless "expert-neutral" is conflated to mean "anti-expert." Wikipedia is expert-neutral - experts don't get a free ride. Which is annoying when you know something but are required to show your working, but is giving us a much better-referenced work.

One thing the claims of "anti-expert bias" fail to explain is: there's lots of experts who do edit Wikipedia. If Wikipedia is so very hostile to experts, you need to explain their presence.

23. engineer_scotty on September 22, 2006 1:19 PM writes...

I've been studying the so-called "expert problem" on Wikipedia--and I'm becoming more and more convinced that it isn't and expert problem per se; it is a jackass problem. As in some Wikipedians are utter jackasses--in this context, "jackass" is an umbrella category for a wide variety of problem behaviors which are contrary to Wikipedia policy--POV pushing, advocacy of dubious theories, vandalism, abusive behavior, etc.

31. ProfRAP on February 9, 2007 10:22 PM writes...

An excellent article -- best I've seen about Citizendium. I worked on CZ for three months, was active in the forums, wrote many new articles, improved many others. But every time I, or other independent-minded editors, did anything that strayed from the Larry vision, we heard from him personally. Interdisciplinary Studies was rejected as a field; Larry didn't think it was legitimate.