1/5/2023 0 Comments Piranesi labyrinth![]() ![]() In his view, like other cultural domains, but even more so, due to the tension between its autonomous, artistic character and its technical and functional dimensions, architecture is a field defined and constituted by crisis.ĭuring the 1970s, Tafuri published important essays in Oppositions, the journal directed by Peter Eisenman. Since this struggle continues in the present, architectural history is not a dead academic subject, but an open arena for debate. Instead, it is a continuous struggle played out on critical, theoretical and ideological levels as well as through the multiple constraints placed on practice. He is noted for his pointed critiques of the partisan "operative criticism" of previous architectural historians and critics like Bruno Zevi and Siegfried Giedion and for challenging and overturning the idea that the Renaissance was a "golden age" as it had been characterised in the work of earlier authorities like Heinrich Wolfflin and Rudolf Wittkower.įor Tafuri, architectural history does not follow a teleological scheme in which one language succeeds another in linear sequence. Manfredo Tafuri an Italian architect, historian, theoretician, critic and academic, was arguably the world's most important architectural historian of the second half of the 20th century. His diagnosis of the dilemmas of modernity and of late capitalism extends the Frankfurt School in new ways, and is bleak, implacable, and for that very reason, therapeutic and painfully stimulating." - Frederic Jameson "Tafuri's work is probably the most innovative and exciting new form of European theory since French post-structuralism, and this book is probably the best introduction to it for the newcomer. It also forces the question of whether an ethical architecture is possible." - Christina Spellman, Telos ![]() "As it traces the derailing and mistranslations of utopian intentions, offers a powerful corrective to conventional histories emphasising the heroism of the avant-garde. These wide-ranging essays, moving from the cross-pollination of German and Soviet artists in Berlin of the 1920s, to the designs of architects like Venturi, Graves and Rossi, challenge an avant-garde that has lost its moorings in contemporary life. ![]() Interweaving intellectual models and modes of production and consumption, Tafuri constructs an elaborate network of references, comparisons, and analogies - drawing on such intellectual giants as Marx, Nietzsche and Freud - that leads to an interpretation of history as an archaeology of fragments and interpretations rather than a linear progression or compact block. Tafuri probes the lines between reality and ideology, the gap that avant-garde ideology places between its own demands and its translation into techniques, the ways in which the avant-garde reaches compromises with the world, and the conditions that permit its existence. Instead of transforming reality, modern avant-garde artists, in Tafuri's tough judgment, are merely playing with techniques, their private dialogue a "glass bead game." Tafuri's essays throw down a gauntlet to avant-garde movements in architecture, theater, painting, film and literature: he mocks today's New York architects who work in self-defined limbo to entertain a select public he examines the "total theater" of such architects as Moholy-Nagy and Gropius, who envisioned a "counter-city" as a global alternative to the real and he makes provocative connections between the arts, showing, for example, why Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein saw Piranesi's drawings as a forerunner of new film language. This major work by Manfredo Tafuri, one of today's most important theoretical historians and critics of architecture and urbanism, presents his critique of traditional approaches to historical investigation and criticism in a penetrating analysis of the avant-gardes and discourses of architecture. ![]()
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