Tafuri, Manfredo

Bio Sketch

Manfredo Tafuri (1935–1994) was an Italian architectural historian and theorist, central figure of the Venice School. His "critique of architectural ideology" argued that modern architecture could not escape its absorption by capitalist development, and he insisted on a rigorous, non-operative history over the legitimating "operative criticism" of modernist historiography. His work is the touchstone for Geoffrey's interest in Tafuri's structural incapacity thesis and the possibility of critical architecture.

Key Works

• Progetto e utopia (1973; Architecture and Utopia, 1976) — architecture and capitalist development; the end of utopia.
• Teorie e storia dell'architettura (1968) — the critique of operative criticism.
• The Sphere and the Labyrinth (1980) — avant-gardes from Piranesi to the 1970s.

Key Concepts

Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:

• Ideology
• Critical Architecture
• Heterotopia
• Flat Ontology

Relevance to Geoffrey's Research

Tafuri is central to Geoffrey's postmodernism & critique and neoliberalism & architecture areas: his operative-criticism critique, his "structural incapacity" thesis (Wallenstein's "Tafuri and the End of Utopia"), and his claim that architecture "no longer constitutes the place where the true stakes are located" feed directly into Geoffrey's research on the impossibility of class architecture under capitalism and the critical/projective debate. The Sphere and the Labyrinth supplies the fullest statement of his master claim that the avant-garde's freedom was "freedom for techniques" rather than freedom for writing — the key diagnostic behind the critical/projective debate the wiki tracks.

Source Support

Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:

• Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development (Tafuri 1976)
• The Sphere and the Labyrinth (Tafuri 1987)
• Architecture, Critique, Ideology
• Architecture and the Critique of Ideology (Jameson 1985)
• Changes are Coming: Interview with Peter Eisenman on the City of Culture of Galicia
• The Architecture of the City (in the Age of its Financial Reproducibility)
• Architecture and Modernity: A Critique
• Architecture or Techno-Utopia
• Fifty Years of "Learning from Las Vegas"