When you study medicine to become a doctor, you start at the beginning: conception, cell division, embryo, foetus, child. You learn to understand the body by studying its origins, it’s first beginnings - where it comes from, how it forms.  Why is this not so with the education of the architect? Why start with theories, styles or trendy rendering software and not with the basic of all questions: how have humans, across time and geography, always managed to create places to live comfortably? To illustrate my point: in my second year of architecture school, we were asked to redesign Schiphol airport - while none of us had even learned how to build a proper shed.

Architecture Without Architects by Bernard Rudofsky should, in that light, be required reading for every first-year architecture student. The book - published alongside an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1964) - portrays the astonishing ingenuity of people around the world. No iconic buildings, but windcatchers from Afghanistan. No megalomaniac starchitect projects, but semi-subterranean homes on the Chinese löss plateaus, where people have found ways to live despite the constant, unrelenting winds. No factory-made prefab housing, but village structures that adapt to their environment like living organisms. No signature, no ego, no trend - only necessity, knowledge, and imagination.

Rudofsky gives voice to what French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss called the bricoleur: someone who builds with what is at hand -  both physically and metaphysically. Someone who works through experience, improvisation, and a deep relationship with place and climate. The bricoleur builds systemically, reordering the larger whole from within. In contrast stands the modern engineer, who begins with abstract models, universal rules, and works from the drafting table rather than on location. The one builds with hands in the earth; the other with the latest design software and a catalogue of prefab building components.

For me, this book was a wake-up call. It reminded me why I wanted to become an architect - or more precisely, an anti-architect. Not a master planner, but a participant in the life of a specific place. Architecture Without Architects shows how building can emerge from connection, observation, and collaboration with the elements.

At its core, building is not an academic discipline, but a response to life itself. In an age when architecture is often detached from place and context, Architecture Without Architects is more than just a book. It is a correction. A reorientation. A reminder of the simple fact that architecture had always existed before the architect. And that wisdom still lives - in the shade of palm trees, in the mud-brick domes of the granaries, in the social configuration of the Kashba, and in the quiet dance between wind, roof, and wall.

“Vernacular architecture does not go through fashion cycles. It is nearly immutable, indeed, unimprovable, since it serves its purpose to perfection.”
- Bernard Rudofsky