Problems Unsolved

In a setting of garish sports shirts, pastel shorts, and knobby knees pinkening in the summer sun, 500 designers, teachers and admen gathered in Colorado last week for the eleventh annual Aspen International Design Conference. The theme of the conference was "Man--The Problem Solver." But if the delegates expected comforting words on man's deductive powers, they were brought up short by Designer Bernard Rudofsky, chief architect of U.S. exhibits at the Brussels Fair and guest director of exhibitions at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art.

On the efforts of man to solve the basic problems of food, clothing and shelter, Architect Rudofsky heaped scorn. The obsessive concern for time-and labor-saving devices in the kitchen, he said, has turned the U.S. from a "food culture to a dishwasher culture." As for clothes, "we are victims of the brassiere erotic." said Rudofsky. "We have lost a religious respect for the dignity of the human body. We squeeze and distort the body, and our clothes are only shaping it." Man is no better prepared to solve the problems of shelter, said Rudofsky. "About a generation ago, great exertions were made to lift architecture above the level of pastiche." Yet, with "fashionable change slowly getting the better of invention, a kind of bargain Taj Mahal is already infiltrating contemporary architecture as portents of failure." Chief practitioner of this kind of architecture, says Rudofsky, is Edward D. Stone, famed for the neo-Moorish latticework walls he wraps around his buildings: "He throws in a veil of mechanical ornament, a smokescreen of stone, so that you can't see the structure behind."

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