#manfredo tafuri

[a-r-g-u-s-a-p-o-c-r-a-p-h-e-x]

...una pianta procede da dentro a fuori, poiché la casa o il palazzo sono un organismo simile a ogni essere vivente. LC.

L’architetto sta lì, invece, per costruire altre metafore. MT.

[naihhhhishere]

Fase II - Parcial II

Aquí les comparto la cuartilla que mi grupo y yo redactamos con respecto al último parcial realizado de historia II.

[cinemajolia]

Manfredo Tafuri’s daily reviewing papers routine, 30x40 cm, acrylic paint on paper, Brussels, 2018.

[spatialnotebook]

“It is true that Hilberseimer’s “city-machine,” the image of Simmel’s metropolis, seized upon only certain aspect of the new function assigned to large cities by capitalist reorganization. But the fact remains that, in fact of the new techniques of production and the expansion and rationalization of the market, the architect as a producer of object had indeed become an inadequate figure. It was now no longer a question of giving form to single element of the city, nor even to simple prototypes. The real unity of the production cycle having been identified in the city, the only suitable role for the architect was as organizer of the cycle.”

— Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia (1976), p. 107.

[spatialnotebook]

“… If bourgeois power in the city was shaped by exceptions and singularities rather than systems and programs, these same exceptions and singularities could potentially become forms representing the autonomous power of the workers. But such an approach required an entirely different reading of the city. It required an understanding if the city as a place of political formation─of contingencies, actions, and exceptions─rather than as a place based on abstract mechanisms of planning and development. It is within this perspective that Aldo Rossi’s conception of an autonomous architecture firmly based on the idea of the singularity of the locus rather than on the science of planning came close to the Operaist’ conclusion─paradoxically enough, much closer than did Tafuri’s critique of ideology.”

— Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Project of Automomy (2008), p.53

[anatrichila-blog]

Manfredo Tafuri (1935-1994)

Arguably the world's most important architectural historian of the second half of the 20th century, Manfredo Tafuri stirred up controversy by criticising modern architecture’s alliance with capitalism.

Manfredo Tafuri is a prolific author on a wide variety of subjects ranging from 16th-century Venice (L’armonia e I conflitti, coauthored with Antonio Foscari) to more alien topics such as The American City (coauthored with Giorgio Ciucci and Francesco Dal Co). Each of his works serves as a platform for questioning the methods of architectural history, which, as he so emphatically states below, is not to be distinguished from criticism. In Theories and History of Architecture, he identified a major problem of “operative criticism,” endemic to architects who write about architecture. His suggestion to counteract this tendency to impose contemporary standards on the past was to shift the discourse away from the protagonists and individual monuments and consider architecture as an institution. His most widely read book in America, Architecture and Utopia, advanced this position, proposing an ideological analysis of architecture. His disconcerting message for those who had hopes of a “progressive” architecture was that there can be no class architecture which can revolutionize society, but only a class analysis of architecture. In his most recent theoretical work, La sfera e il labirinto, he has outlined a method of history called the progetto storico. This historical project, which is deeply indebted to Michel Foucault’s “archeologies of knowledge” and Carlo Ginzburg’s “micro-histories,” seeks to study the “totality” of a work, disassembling it in terms of iconology, political economy, philosophy, science, and folklore. His goal is to penetrate the language of architecture through non-linguistic means. At the core he still finds the problem of “the historic role of ideology.” The job of the Tafurian critic-historian is to “reconstruct lucidly the course followed by intellectual labor through modern history and in so doing to recognize the contingent tasks that call for a new organization of labor.” In November, 1985, we interviewed Professor Tafuri on the subject of criticism. 

One of the greatest problems of our day is dealing with the uncontrollable acceleration of time, a process that began with 19th-century industrializations; it keeps continually disposing of things in expectation of the future, of the next thing. All avant-garde movements were in fact based on the continual destruction of preceding works in order to go on to something new. Implicit in this is the murder of the future. The program of the “modern” artist was always to anticipate the next thing. It’s just like when you see a “coming attraction” ad for a film, essentially you have already consumed the film and the event of going to see the film is predictably disappointing and makes you anxious for something new.

sources: 

https://thecharnelhouse.org/tag/manfredo-tafuri/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manfredo_Tafuri

[italianartsociety]

By Alexis Culotta 

Famed architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri died on 23 February 1994 in Venice. A prolific scholar and author of the topic of Italian architecture and its multiple valences, Tafuri was born in Rome in 1935. As a young man he initially pursued training as an architect, studying at the Scuola Superiore di Architettura in Rome. Shortly after graduation in 1959, though, Tafuri turned his attentions to the theories and interpretations of architecture. 

His first book publication, Teorie e storia dell’architettura (Theories and History of Architecture), released in 1968, received widespread acclaim and set Tafuri on course to become on the most influential architectural historians of the age. His specialization in the field Renaissance architecture combined with the infusion of his Marxist ideology yielded some of the most pivotal texts on the topic, including his discussions of Renaissance masters such as Raphael and Francesco di Giorgio Martini. Though his subsequent publications at times attracted criticism, Tafuri today is nevertheless still recognized as contributing significantly to the field of Italian architectural history. 

Photo of Manfredo Tafuri. Undated. 

Cover, Interpreting the Renaissance: Princes, Cities, Architects (Yale University Press, 2006). 

Cover, Theories and History of Architecture (Icon, 1981). 

Cover, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development (MIT Press, 1979). 

[archilannka]

“Architecture’s historical incapacity to operate critically can then be read as a problem inherent within the notion of critical architecture - as opposed to the critique of architecture - as such:  »To search for an alternative within the structures that condition the very character of architectural design is indeed an obvious contradiction in terms.« The problems within which architecture finds itself enmeshed are not themselves architectural, but the problems of an unfree society.”