Manfredo Tafuri's theory of the architectural avant-garde

Abstract

Despite its frequent use, the meaning of the term architectural avant-garde is ambiguous and an explicit theory delineating its parameters has not been written. What would be the theoretical glue that binds various architectural movements of the early twentieth century, which are commonly referred to as historical avant-gardes? What might be a specific theory of architectural avant-garde, one that is not necessarily synonymous with the theories of avant-garde in visual arts or literature? In this paper, I suggest that a theory of architectural avant-garde is inscribed in Manfredo Tafuri's writings, and I excavate this theory in relation to three related themes: End (death) of history, metropolitan condition and end of architecture as auratic object. Tafuri considers 'death of history', in the sense of the rejection of the past or aspiration for newness, as one of the leading principles of avant-garde movements. The metropolitan condition that requires a brave confrontation with the 'intensification of nervous stimulation', 'rapid crowding of changing images' or 'blasé attitude' that Tafuri observes via Simmel is the second theme I underline. According to the historian, far from feeling anguished for the lost past, the avant-gardes confront the new chaos of metropolis as a fruitful condition of existence. Yet these two themes alone have the risk of culminating in the cult of novelty as the sole ground of avant-gardism, and of dissolving the distinction between avant-garde and fashion. Though Tafuri accepts the description of avant-garde in terms of the shock of the new, contingency and ephemerality, I suggest that it is the third theme that differentiates his theory from a definition based solely on novelty. Following Hegel's theory on the 'end of art' and Benjamin's theory on the 'destruction of aura', Tafuri formulates avant-gardism in terms of the end of architecture as auratic object. Just as mechanical reproduction and mass production gave an end to the status of art as cult objects, 'the dialectic between architectonic object and urban organisation' enters into a radically new phase with the avant-garde. If one translates (Tafuri's reading of) Benjamin's and Hegel's theories into architecture, it follows that the ultimate architectural avant-garde would mean the end of architecture in the sense of its total dissolution into the urban structure of the modern metropolis. The fulfillment of the architectural avant-garde would be the total dissolution of Architecture into something outside itself, of aura into mass, of form into process, of author into producer, of architect into organiser. According to this interpretation, the architectural avant-garde thus demands a radical challenge to the institution of architecture itself, to the ways architecture is produced and consumed within the modern metropolis. I discuss Tafuri's theory of architectural avant-garde in relation to his own architectural examples especially in Weimar Germany, suggest that the Siedlung projects hold one of the most crucial places in this theory, and explain why the historian considered the avant-garde as an historically conditioned, critical but failed attempt.