ABSTRACT
Rudofsky was an incessant traveller and a lifelong champion of the Mediterranean lifestyle, which he saw as both a healthy and honest version of the modernist aesthetic and an earthy alternative to northern abstraction. The sensuality of Kalypso's cave would not be out of place in his influential book Architecture Without Architects, a protest against functionalist hegemony. Gio Ponti, who provided Rudofsky with his Domus platform, once stated, 'The Mediterranean taught Rudofsky and Rudofsky taught me'. Rudofsky fled Fascist Italy for South America, Japan and New York, his own lifelong Odyssey, which left a trail of exhibitions and open houses, disseminations of the Capri code, unfolding into luxurious green terraces. Bocklin presents a psycho-gram of strained relations. His setting of Odysseus and Kalypso is more like 'a sea cave where nymphs had chairs of rock and sanded floors' than Kalypso's actual domestic arrangements.
