Manfredo Tafuri

Given his wide contributions as an historian, it seems easy to forget that Manfredo Tafuri (1935-1994) briefly worked as an architect in the first five years of the sixties. During this period Tafuri, then still a young intellectual, reconciled theory and practice, something that would later become unthinkable, until a series of political conflicts led him to renounce this project along with a whole historical framework. Far from being an auxiliary practice in his studies, the designing of projects was for the young Tafuri both a political front for transformation and a decantation chamber for his studies in history and philosophy, where many still-developing historiographical premises were put to test. We begin with his first publications as a student in Rome, 1960, and move toward Theories and History of Architecture, 1968, where the author breaks off from the idea of an architect-historian. This article intends to better understand the theoretical transformations that take place in Tafuri's works in the 1960s, trying to reveal a movement between two political poles and two interpretations regarding the uses of history in architecture, revisiting research and drawings from the young Tafuri and finding echoes of these in his later work.

Snad by na počátku bylo vhodné položit si otázku, co vlastně architektura je. O to se však již
odnepaměti snažilo mnoho teoretiků, architektů a v neposlední řadě filosofů, a tak bych se zde spíše
držel přístupu nedávné knihy Paula Sheaphearda nazvané Co je architektura či svazku Filosofie
architektury od Jiřího Hermacha, které tuto otázku, aby neupadly do bludného kruhu nekonečného
tázání se na prahu problému, do jisté míry obchází a přece jak postupujeme textem proloženým
četnými referencemi nepřímo odpovídá. Můžeme sledovat cestu od Vitruviových svazků De
Architectura, přes stavitele středověké gotiky, k renesančnímu přívalu, „zmrzlé hudbě“ baroka,
Ruskinových Sedm lamp architektury a posléze konečně dojít do blízké minulosti i současnosti.
Vzhledem k zaměření tohoto textu na dílo Manfreda Tafuriho pojmenované Architektura a utopie se
však z historie ponejvíce zaměřím na osvícenství a další etapy až k současnosti, prozkoumám
novější interpretace a řešení, kterými se na Tafuriho počin pokusili navázat pozdější autoři. Zvláštní
pozornost si pak zaslouží téma města a vůbec s Heideggerem řečeno obývání a poměr člověka a
prostoru coby myšleného bydlení a potřeby domova. Prostor je věnován i jakési typizaci utopií, Le
Corbusierovi a jeho Moduloru, nástupu kybernetického věku ve vztahu k architektuře a závěrem i
několik řádků o urbanismu a veřejném prostoru města.
Rozsáhlá část tohoto textu zabývající se samotnou Architekturou a utopií od Tafuriho se může zdát
rozvleklá. Ačkoli je spíše jakýmsi shrnutím, snažil jsem se v ní nastínit i další souvislosti a
reference a ač má vlastní interpretace nabízí jen menší autorský přínos, považuji tuto kapitolu za
esenciální k přistoupení k pozdějšímu Tafuriho vývoji, jeho pokračovatelům a z něj vycházejím
interpretacím. Méně přímo pak souvisí s několika dalšími zkoumanými díly, i zde je však možné
popatřit zajímavé souvislosti a paralely.

The article is aimed to reconstruct the intention of the historian of architecture Joseph Rykwert as the author of the monograph «The idea of a town: the anthropology of urban form in Rome, Italy, and the ancient world». The analysis relies on the methodological principles proposed by the Cambridge School (intellectual history): Quentin Skinner and John Pocock. The author's intention, contained in the text, can be identified by comparing his language and arguments with other texts of a given historical era, devoted to a similar plot. The book was conceived as a challenge to functionalism and the "picturesque style" in architecture. Published in 1963, it already resists neoavantgarde, the principles of the Ulm School of Design and the Italian rationalism of Aldo Rossi and Manfredo Tafuri.

Статья посвящена реконструкции авторской интенции историка архитектуры Джозефа Рикверта как автора монографии «Идея города. Антропология формы города в Риме, Италии и Древнем мире». Представленный анализ, прежде всего, опирается на методологические принципы, предложенные Кембриджской школой интеллектуальной истории: Кв. Скиннером и Дж. Пококом. Авторское намерение, заключенное в тексте, можно идентифицировать путем сопоставления его языка и аргументов с другими текстами данной исторической эпохи, посвященными схожему сюжету. Книга задумывалась как вызов функционализму и «живописному стилю» в архитектуре. Опубликованная в 1963 году, она противостоит неоавангарду, принципам Ульмской школы дизайна и итальянского рационализма А. Росси и М. Тафури.

The Italian architect and historian Manfredo Tafuri (b. Rome, 1935; d. Venice, 1994) made a decisive contribution to the practice of architectural history, yet the breadth of his bibliography and the depth of his perception into historical problems remains largely unexplored even today. The first English-language book to consider his contribution to architectural culture, it opens an overdue discussion on both the premises of his practice and the historical questions that consequently emerge.

Stoppani, Teresa. ‘Interpreting the Renaissance by Manfredo Tafuri’.
Extensive book review of the English language edition of Tafuri’s book. It discusses Tafuri’s work on the Renaissance in the context of his historical “project”, and the English language translations and interpretations of Tafuri’s works.

This is the text of a paper that I intended to give at a  conference in Brazil that, unfortunately, I could not attend due to reasons beyond my control. It was published, moreover, without the necessary footnotes and images, before I had a chance to add them. A final version, with footnotes and images, and no changes at all in the text, will be uploaded soon. I made the decision to include the paper  here, on academia.edu, even without the necessary apparatus criticus, due to the urging of colleagues and to widespread interest in the topic, if only as a corrective to certain misreadings of this key historian and thinker (Tafuri is usually reductively seen as a Marxist, albeit an unorthodox one, often without any acknowledgement of his Weberian side).
Abstract of Conference:
Desde seu início, a iniciativa foi concebida como uma oportunidade para refletir sobre a recepção dos alunos ao pensamento do teórico italiano Manfredo Tafuri, tema que, até então, havia sido pouco explorado. À luz do ponto de vista do que chamamos de 'leitores e leituras', propôs-se partir do testemunho de quem "leu" Tafuri diretamente, de perto, como seu aluno, mas também daqueles que com ele se informaram e se formaram após a sua chegada a Veneza. Esse duplo ponto de vista permitiu oferecer ao leitor um olhar significativo sobre a evolução do método historiográfico de Tafuri, recuperando a metodologia de construção do pensamento de alguns de seus cursos, além do conteúdo de suas aulas. A segunda parte do seminário, ao contrário, propôs destacar o diálogo de Manfredo Tafuri com arquitetos na Itália e no exterior. Duas décadas após a morte do teórico, pareceu-nos interessante dar espaço também àqueles que, ao longo desses vinte anos, tentaram, por sua vez, uma primeira "leitura"....

A finales de los años treinta un gran número de maestros modernos europeos emigraron a Estados Unidos. Este hecho incidió drásticamente en el sistema docente universitario norteamericano, que pasó del sistema Beaux Arts a una metodología derivada de la Bauhaus alemana. No obstante, este nuevo didactismo fue, a su vez, objeto
de crítica; y en algunos reductos universitarios se gestó una reacción pedagógica de signo contrario. Esta corriente, denominada Nuevo Formalismo, habría de dominar el panorama académico estadounidense durante los cincuenta y sesenta.
La crítica ha acotado esta tendencia, casi con exclusividad, a los
estudios del arquitecto e historiador inglés Colin Rowe. Sin embargo sus ideas trascendieron el mero discurso teórico y otros colegas aplicaron su particular método analítico en su actividad profesional y docente. El Nuevo Formalismo también se ha tachado de aproximación anodina a la arquitectura moderna por despojarla de su componente ideológica. No obstante, si aceptamos que la arquitectura es expresión de los deseos y preocupaciones de su época, esta reclusión consciente en el plano formal debe interpretarse –y así lo hizo Tafuri originalmente– como la ruptura del compromiso social. Los seguidores de esta doctrina la entendieron como superación de la visión utópica y mesiánica de la primera modernidad, y proclamaban la necesidad de autonomía de una disciplina encorsetada.

Criticality was an anguished debate in contemporary architecture. A classic 1974 essay on the problem, Manfredo Tafuri’s “L’Architecture dans le Boudoir,” argued that neo-avant-garde architects manipulated the empty signifiers of their art and left the world at large unchallenged. Nevertheless, my chapter argues, neo-avant-garde modernists like Alison and Peter Smithson, James Stirling, Archigram, and the Office of Metropolitan Architecture sincerely posited design as a mode of research into architecture’s relationships to an emergent modernity. Tafuri correctly warned that this postwar celebration of Futurism, Constructivism, non-Euclidean geometry, Pop art, and technology strayed, in distinction to the interwar modernism from which it grew, toward the mimesis and celebration of capitalism and its associated social relationships. But faced with the accelerating deterritorializing effects of cultural, economic, extraurban, transnational, and technological development, this "projective modernism" was nonetheless civic, reinventing the 19th-century public-sphere typologies of concert halls, libraries, museums, and transport interchanges threatened with extinction. This pragmatic, optimistic, and liberal architecture left the boudoir, then, only to be detained in the Salon.

In the mid-seventies, stimulated by a climate of ever-increasing openness to the West, the Slovenian architectural debate was enriched with new nuances through the contribution of the journal "Arhitektov bilten". Born in 1964 as the bulletin of the Architects’ Association of Ljubljana, the journal went in 1974 under the direction of Janez Koželj. As a former student of Edvard Ravnikar, Koželj was among the main exponents of a generation of architects who strove to underline the autonomy of architectural language. While "Sinteza", the magazine animated by the historian and art critic Stane Bernik had already promoted the dialogue between the arts, design and architecture since the 1960s, AB was the expression of the point of view of the architects, making a clear break with Slovenian art historical school. Strongly supported by Ravnikar, the publication soon became the organ of ideas of the KRAS group, founded in 1977 and formed by Vojteh Ravnikar, Marko Dekleva, Matjaž Garzarolli, Egon Vatovec, which was joined by Koželj, Mladen Marčina, Irena Černič, Damjan Gale. Its best works, the commercial building with post office in Vremski Britof near Sežana, or the town hall in the same Karst town, which was the epicentre of the group's production, both designed by Vojteh Ravnikar in association with the KRAS group, highlighted the affinities with the Italian debate. A continuous attention to Rossi's work and theory also emerges through Aleš Vodopivec's writings. Vodopivec, in association with Koželj, was the co-author of a fundamental theoretical text, entitled Iz arhitekture. The strong interest in the Italian debate emerges from the writings by the sociologist Pavel Gantar, who praised Progetto e Utopia as “the most relevant essay on architecture ever written”. Tafuri himself gave a speech at the Klub delegatov in Ljubljana in 1981. Translations into Slovenian of Tafuri’s works were done by the architect and critic Janko Zlodre, like Projekt in utopija (1985). We should not forget Aldo Rossi’s L’Architettura della Città, whose text was partially translated in Slovenian by Nanča Kosmač- Kogej in 1980. Very relevant was also the exchange of ideas with Luciano Semerani and the historian Marco Pozzetto from Trieste, who had a strong presence in Slovenian debate. In an intellectually lively context, we can basically understand the role of Italian theory as an instrument of criticism and resistance to an American-style Postmodernism.

This paper considers the project of constructing community in the early architecture and urbanism of Le Corbusier. Taking up Tafuri's trenchant critique of aesthetic modernism in the early twentieth century, Le Corbusier is seen as a paradigm of formal utopianism. In the face of the economic and social turbulence experienced after the 1929 crash, architectural utopias become increasingly subservient to economic imperatives and planning. I end with a brief discussion of Fredric Jameson's more recent interpretation of utopianism as a possible antidote to contemporary political managerialism.

In this thesis I revisit Manfredo Tafuri’s 1969 article “Per una critica dell’ideologia architettonica” (Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology) within the political context of Italy in the 1960s. I address the research question: what is the contemporary relevance of the essay read in this context? I suggest that testing the arguments in Tafuri’s 1969 essay against his complete oeuvre and his subsequent career as a critic or a historian obfuscates and misconstrues the context and the essay. I argue that the essay was published in a moment when operaisti protagonists were processing the implications of the operaisti discourse they constructed in relation to the intensification of the social conflict in Italy in the late 1960s and the 1970s. This provides a convincing context for Tafuri’s application of this discourse as a total rejection of the possibility of the existence of an architectural profession outside participation in capitalist development. I conclude that, located with precision within the context of the journal Contropiano, where his essay was first published, “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology” is more likely to agitate intellectuals and architects than it has previously. It is important for the generation who has not yet acquired professional autonomy, such as architectural students or interns, to be reminded of Tafuri’s critique within its context as they assume their social vocation. Thus this is my target readership for this thesis. It is particularly important to revisit Tafuri and his 1969 essay at a time when there is a growing discussion around a social vocation or discourse on sustainability, participatory design, radical architecture and such. The social agenda still makes the art and the profession of architecture resilient to transforming political, economic and social structures. In this light, it is not only necessary but also relevant to revisit the nature of the social vocation of architects as it had been criticized in Tafuri’s 1969 essay within the intellectual debates Italian operaisti project initiated.

This is the full text and map book (image document separate from and attached to the end of the text) of my undergraduate Bachelor's thesis completed and defended in May 2010. I received high honors and the Alumni Award in the History of Art for this project.

İtalyan mimarlık tarihçisi Manfredo Tafuri bu çalışma alanını 20. yüzyılın ikinci yarısında radikal biçimde dönüştüren kişiliklerin en önemlilerinden biriydi. Biçim analizi merkezli ve doğru-yanlış sistematiği arayışı içindeki bir yazma pratiğini, biçim eleştirisi olmaktan çıkarıp toplumsallık eleştirisi kılma çerçevesinde yenilemeyi denedi.

This essay focuses on the writings of the architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri, who was at the center of a group of historians and theorists at the University of Venice’s School of Architecture. It considers how his works dealing with the avant-garde, especially Architecture and Utopia and The Sphere and the Labyrinth, develop a historical-critical method to identify and explicate the gap between the evolution of ideologies of the avant-garde and their translation into a repertoire of techniques that have divergent histories and social meanings than those posited by avant-garde ideologies. In doing so, Tafuri is not just offering an “ideology-critique” of modernism, revealing the way that the avant-garde failed to fulfill its postulated social and aesthetic goals; he is also arguing metahistorically, that via a dialectic of the avant-garde, twentieth-century capitalist modernity weaves an ideological fabric of modernism and interleaves it into the effective structure of reality, for instance through the practices of architecture and urbanism. Thus, “modernism” becomes a relevant term of periodization, not because of the historical veracity of any orthodox art historical narrative of the succession or progressive evolution of modernist forms, but insofar as “modernism” designates the symptomatic tension between the progressive history of avant-garde forms and the heterogeneous technical history that represents how the avant-garde’s formal programs were actualized.

Manfredo Tafuri’s celebrated and often misinterpreted book Progetto e Utopia (1973) expands upon his 1969 essay ‘Per una critica dell’ideologia architettonica’. In the book preface Tafuri dismisses the critics that had defined the essay ‘an apocalyptic prophecy’ that pronounced the ‘death of architecture’. He explains that the book aims to identify ‘those tasks which capitalist development has taken away from architecture’, and pursue a form of engagement that can return architecture to an active role in society. Here Tafuri sets the grounds for his long-term “project” of reinventing architectural history as a necessary voice at work in architecture, tasked with exposing the intersections of architecture with power and the complexity of the strategies of domination, and arriving at their modes of production. The architectural history he advocates must look beyond architecture, to explore architecture’s relation with power institutions and with their myths and representations. The labour of this analysis has no end.
As Tafuri realises his “project” per exempla, he repeatedly returns to the urban projects that Le Corbusier had developed for Algiers between 1930 and 1942, exploring in them those “beyond architecture” and ideological constructions that the “project” of critical history had set out to dissect. In instalments, Tafuri shows how Le Corbusier’s persistent engagement with Algiers is emblematic of the modern project’s ambiguous relationship with capitalism and with power. This chapter argues that Tafuri’s work, by returning and differently focusing his attention to the project, cuts deep through the methods of historiography itself, revealing the “unsafe building” of historical analysis and the need to render its project interminable.
~ ~ ~
The volume On Power in Architecture brings together essays and interviews critically analysing the relationships between architecture and power from three philosophical perspectives: materialism, phenomenology, and post-structuralism. Perceptive philosophers, theorists of architecture, and historians reflect on the intersection of power and architecture – discussing specific architectural cases and analysing the topicality of established theoretical concepts in the time of contemporary neo-liberalism.
The featured articles were first presented between 2017 and 2019 in a series of symposia On Power in Architecture at the Museum of Architecture and Design in Ljubljana, supported by the Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory and other partners.

El Ático Beistegui (1929-1939) es un singular proyecto de reforma que Le Corbusier diseñó y ejecutó junto a Pierre Jeanneret para Charles de Beistegui y de Yturbe. Este artículo trata de construir un nuevo enfoque sobre las decisiones proyectuales, para lo que se plantean cinco disyuntivas encadenadas, relacionadas con diversas aportaciones de autores que se han aproximado al significado de la obra de Le Corbusier en su contexto socioeconómico y político-cultural. Estas disyuntivas se refieren al papel de la arquitectura ante la transformación del medio habitado bajo el avance tecnológico tras la revolución industrial y como parte de las nuevas técnicas de regulación política de la sociedad de masas enfocada al consumo, ahora basadas en la unión de la cultura y los medios. Con este trasfondo implícito, se contrastan las aportaciones de relevantes autores del s. XX con otras más recientes. La idea de que la reinvención de las técnicas de proyecto responde a una voluntad de control se abre a otra posibilidad: la búsqueda de acuerdos parciales y provisionales, en medio de las contradicciones e incertidumbres de un presente en transición.

This contribution focuses on the possibility of isolating an Italian theory of architecture in the postwar period until 1969, taking the controversy over Renaissance proportions as a case study. Rather than defining a specific approach to the subject from Italian authors compared to their international colleagues, this contribution explores the specificity of Italian humanism and the significance of that experience from the point of view of the postwar reconstruction. The study of Renaissance architecture, rather than offering a historical precedent for the construction of national identities, warded off that possibility, constituting a problematic beginning for European modernity.

This article uses an adjusted Marxist base-superstructure analysis of the late Zaha Hadid's BMW plant in Leipzig to connect neoliberal architecture with the structural transformations in logistics that have taken place over the past four decades through the introduction of the container and the implementation of just-in-time production. Hadid's BMW plant is analysed as a spectacular expression of the dream of logistics somehow surpassing the mode of production by transforming all fixed capital into circulating capital, producing "ultimate profit machines." The article thus contributes to the development of a critical cultural theory that "returns" to capital and situates cultural objects such as architecture within broader socioeconomic contexts. It does so by mapping the complex relationships between an economy "infused" with culture and an architecture that has become instrumental to the workings of the post-Fordist economy and taken the form of an architectural spectacle.

This paper is an attempt to read Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau through Walter Benjamin’s theory of the baroque in his book The Origin of German Tragic Drama (or Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, hereafter simply Ursprung).1 It then considers whether Benjamin’s idea of a relationship between the baroque and Early German Romantic art theory has any bearing on the charge of Schwitters’ contemporaries that he was merely a ‘German Romantic’ in Dada costume. In the first place, this is an exercise in matching formal attributes to concepts, and must be assessed on whether the comparisons are apposite: whether Benjamin’s distinctions allow us to see more in Schwitters; whether the works of Schwitters provide the kind of illustration to the Trauerspiel that Paul Klee’s angel does to Thesis IX of ‘On the Concept of
History’.2 In the second place, the paper concerns what it is to call a twentieth-century work ‘baroque’. Does this suggest some causal process that links the culture of seventeenth-century Europe with the twentieth? Or is baroque simply descriptive—able to be applied to antiquity or the arts of Asia? Neither is the case; the baroque remains an impure mixture of aesthetics and history. It is a description of an abstract a-historical artistic comportment, but one that makes no sense without a patrilineage of concrete forms. To describe Schwitters as baroque or Romantic, necessarily invokes not only the precedents but a kind of history. This is not the history that explains how modernism came about, but rather what the past now means and has meant. These issues of the potential of history to make and undo our ideas of architecture are not novel, but are suggested by the proximity of Schwitters and Benjamin in the work of Manfredo Tafuri.

Presentazione delle iniziative promosse dall'Università Iuav di Venezia per valorizzare il lascito scientifico e didattico di Manfredo Tafuri. Il progetto si articola in due momenti distinti e complementari: ricognizione, reperimento, conservazione e valorizzazione delle pubblicazioni di Tafuri, e la costituzione di un archivio sonoro con le registrazioni delle sue lezioni.