Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development

Author: Manfredo Tafuri
Year: 1976 (English trans. by Barbara Luigia La Penta of Progetto e Utopia, 1973)
Source type: book
Raw file: raw/books/tafuri-1976-architecture-and-utopia.md

Summary

Tafuri uses Marxist ideological criticism — in the strictest sense, in the tradition of Fortini, Tronti, Asor Rosa, and Cacciari — to reread the entire cycle of modern architecture from the Enlightenment to the present as an ideological instrument of capitalist development. He argues that capitalist development has progressively taken away from architecture the ideological tasks of prefiguration, so that "the drama" of contemporary architecture is to be "obliged to return to pure architecture, to form without utopia; in the best cases, to sublime uselessness." The end of utopia is not a lamentable loss but a historical necessity: once capital no longer needs ideology, architecture's ideological function becomes superfluous, and the "crisis of modern architecture" is revealed as "a crisis of the ideological function of architecture." Tafuri insists this is neither regret nor prophecy, but only the identification of "those tasks which capitalist development has taken away from architecture," and a call for a class criticism of architecture rather than any alternative architecture: "there cannot be founded a class aesthetic, art, or architecture, but only a class criticism."

Key Claims

• The declared purpose — what capital took from architecture: "the precise identification of those tasks which capitalist development has taken away from architecture. That is to say, what it has taken away in general from ideological prefiguration" (Preface).
• Pure architecture / form without utopia: "to see architecture obliged to return to pure architecture, to form without utopia; in the best cases, to sublime uselessness" (Preface).
• Neither regret nor prophecy: "when the role of a discipline ceases to exist, to try to stop the course of things is only regressive utopia, and of the worst kind" (Preface).
• Ideology is useless to capital and damaging to the working class: "Ideology is useless to capitalist development, just as it is damaging from the working-class point of view" (Preface).
• The metropolis as the center of the avant-garde's concern: "It is not just by chance that the metropolis, the place of absolute alienation, is at the very center of concern of the avant-garde" (Ch. 1).
• Enlightenment utopianism is unreal: "the architectural proposals of eighteenth-century Europe have nothing unrealizable about them... all the vast theorization of the philosophies of architecture contains no social utopia to support the urban reformism proclaimed at a purely formal level" (Ch. 1).
• Piranesi — rationalism reveals its own irrationality: "In the attempt to absorb all its own contradictions, architectural 'reasoning' applies the technique of shock to its very foundations" (Ch. 1); "it is not only the 'sleep of reason' that conjures up monsters, but that even the 'wakefulness of reason' can lead to deformation" (Ch. 1).
• Utopia condemns itself to checkmate: "it made evident the checkmate to which utopia condemned itself, revealing the secret will to arrive at the brink of destruction implicit in the utopian hypothesis" (Ch. 2).
• No longer Hegel but Keynes — ideology becomes concrete and is suppressed: "No longer Hegel but Keynes... Ideology, become concrete and stripped of any trace of utopianism, now descends directly into individual fields of endeavor; which is the same as saying that it is suppressed" (Ch. 3).
• Le Corbusier's Algiers as the highest hypothesis of modern urbanism — and its failure: "With the plans for Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Rio, and finally with the Obus plan for Algiers, Le Corbusier formulated the most elevated theoretical hypothesis of modern urbanism" (Ch. 6); "Architecture as ideology of the plan is swept away by the reality of the plan when, the level of utopia having been superseded, the plan becomes an operative mechanism" (Ch. 6).
• The crisis begins when capital no longer needs the ideology: "The crisis of modern architecture begins in the very moment in which its natural consignee — large industrial capital — goes beyond the fundamental ideology, putting aside the suprastructures. From that moment on architectural ideology no longer has any purpose" (Ch. 6).
• Architecture as a spectre of itself: "In order to 'sustain' the metropolitan space, architecture seems obliged to become a spectre of itself" (Ch. 6).
• Semiology seeks a lost meaning: "Through semiology architecture seeks its own meaning, while tormented by the sense of having lost its meaning altogether" (Ch. 7).
• The fate of formalism is advertising: "it is not by pure chance that historically the fate of formalism is always to end by the work on form being used for advertising" (Ch. 7).
• The crisis of the ideological function: "the crisis of modern architecture is not the result of 'tiredness' or 'dissipation.' It is rather a crisis of the ideological function of architecture" (Ch. 8).
• No class architecture — only class criticism: "just as there cannot exist a class political economy, but only a class criticism of political economy, so too there cannot be founded a class aesthetic, art, or architecture, but only a class criticism of the aesthetic, of art, of architecture, of the city itself" (Ch. 8).
• Modern architecture as the last attempt of bourgeois artistic culture: "the entire cycle of modern architecture and of the new systems of visual communication came into being, developed, and entered into crisis as an enormous attempt — the last to be made by the great bourgeois artistic culture — to resolve, on the always more outdated level of ideology, the imbalances, contradictions, and retardations characteristic of the capitalist reorganization of the world market" (Ch. 8).

Connections

Concepts: Ideology · Critical Architecture · Spectacle · Iconic Architecture
Authors: Manfredo Tafuri · Sven-Olov Wallenstein · Fredric Jameson · Walter Benjamin · Theodor Adorno
Debates: Critical vs. Projective · Spectacle vs. Function
Related source notes: Architecture, Critique, Ideology (Wallenstein 2016) · Architecture and the Critique of Ideology (Jameson 1985) · The Architecture of the City (Bismarck 2024)

Direct Quotes

"It is not just by chance that the metropolis, the place of absolute alienation, is at the very center of concern of the avant-garde." (Ch. 1)

"No longer Hegel but Keynes... Ideology, become concrete and stripped of any trace of utopianism, now descends directly into individual fields of endeavor; which is the same as saying that it is suppressed." (Ch. 3)

"Through semiology architecture seeks its own meaning, while tormented by the sense of having lost its meaning altogether." (Ch. 7)

"there cannot be founded a class aesthetic, art, or architecture, but only a class criticism of the aesthetic, of art, of architecture, of the city itself." (Ch. 8)

Open Questions

• If the end of utopia is a historical necessity and "there cannot be founded... a class architecture," what positive political or professional task remains for the architect beyond the "analysis of the techniques of programming" that Tafuri gestures toward — and how does this bear on the post-critical/projective turn in later debates?