![]() Yet Tafuri’s pessimism or melancholy reading of the neo-Avant-garde of 60s and 70s becomes an end of architecture narrative. It is not a piece of history complete in itself, but rather an intermittent journey through a maze of tangled paths, one of the many possible provisional constructions obtainable by starting with these chosen materials. Between utopian ideas and forms of architecture and the concrete reality which they always come into collision. The Sphere and the Labyrinth can be seen as a unique Avant-garde historiography, characterized by the dialectics in the text itself, between the ideology of an architect and the structural forces driving capitalist society. Thus, the theme of imagination enters into the history of modern architecture with all its ideological significance, as a source of hypotheses that cannot be formulated by science. Piranesi is a wicked architect – the architect as a transgressor. Art can only destroy itself in order to constantly renew itself. And this leads straight to the emergence of the Avant-garde idea of art as dialectical becoming. Piranesi, in Tafuri’s portrayal, is a disenchanted critic of enlightenment values and forms one who leaps over them with his secret aspiration to find new syntheses. The themes that weave in and out of this design are, we believe, evident: at the beginning, the discovery of “transgression” and of formal writing as a perverse excess, as the subject’s voyage beyond the columns of Hercules, beyond the codified limits then, the slow taking over of a “language of transgression,” the realization that the subject’s freedom was merely “freedom for techniques,” rather that freedom for writing. In reality, however, in writing the single chapters – published in provisional form in various Italian and foreign journals between 1972 and today, and subsequently completely revised – we have adhered to a design that we invite the present reader to contrast with the theses expounded in this introduction. (eds.), Architecture Criticism Ideology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 1985)Īs Tafuri writes in the introduction of the book: Fredric Jameson, “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology”, in Joan Ockman, et. Their double subjects Theories and History, Architecture and Utopia, Sphere and Labyrinth, give a first clue to Tafuri’s privileged historical method, one that Fredric Jameson had identified in his 1985 essay Architecture and the critique of ideology, as dialectical historiography.ġ. There is a certain similarity in the titles some of his books. The 1980 book La Sfera e il Labirinto, translated into English in 1987 as The Sphere and the Labyrinth, is subtitled as Avant-garde and architecture from Piranesi to 1970’s. This methodological reading illuminates not just Tafuri’s historiographic technique but also offers a key to his own ideological presuppositions and in this sense it is all together becomes a Tafurian “project”. The seminar by Joan Ockman has been articulated around the “close reading” of the book, literally chapter by chapter, by looking especially at its narratives and rhetorical design and structure the method, which has been elaborated by the Anglo-American new critics from 1930’s into the post-war period the new critics who sometimes are known as the “formalist school” or “practical criticism”. In the panorama of the rhetorical production of the architectural culture of 60’s and 70’s, Tafuri’s contribution must be accounted not just as an intellectual and scholarly exegesis, but an intervention in that culture, with rather profound evaporations throughout the international scene. Despite Tafuri’s denunciation of what he called “operative criticism” – the tendency of a part of historians and critics to program architecture’s future direction – his own historical writing was unquestionably engaged political project in his own way. In fact no other scholars have ever attempted to write this kind of architectural history before. A PhD seminar held in Rotterdam, April 8th 2010įrom the standpoint of writing the history of the avant-garde in architecture, there is no book more rigorous, challenging, and poetic than Manfredo Tafuri’s The Sphere and the Labyrinth, where the fragments of the history of neo-Avant-garde, like the pieces of a jig-saw puzzle, have been re-assembled in a poetic and Utopian construction.Ĭertainly no historian of architecture has ever produced such a challenging theorization of the relationship between architectural ideology and capitalist modernity.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |