The Sphere and the Labyrinth, Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970's

Abstract

This major work by Manfredo Tafuri, one of today's most important theoretical historians and critics of architecture and urbanism, presents his critique of traditional approaches to historical investigation and criticism in penetrating analysis of avant-gardes and discourses of architecture. Tafuri probes lines between reality and ideology, gap that avant-garde ideology places between its own demands and its translation into techniques, ways in which avant-garde reaches compromises with world, and conditions that permit its existence. Interweaving intellectual models and modes of production and consumption, Tafuri constructs an elaborate network of references, comparisons, and analogies that leads to an interpretation of history as an archaeology of fragments and interpretations rather than linear progression or compact block. In his methodological introduction, he states that historiographic work should set into crisis not only its subjects and their plurality but also historical project itself and critical operations and languages of history it employs. Sphere and Labyrinth charts an extensive itinerary from Piranesi to postmodernism. Piranesi, the Wicked Architect, used architectural language in ways that transgressed and destroyed traditional boundaries. The avant-gardes of twentieth century continue two major Piranesian themes, the limit of forms and ... violence done to forms themselves. Tafuri points out that what appeared to be possibility of affecting social and physical order through introduction of poetics of transgression, as in deployment of metropolis as mise-en-scene infuturist and expressionist theater or in encounters between German and Soviet avant-gardes in Berlin in early 1920s, emerges merely as aesthetic techniques, codified and self-referential. Dismantling and reassembling structure of ideology of avant-garde, Tafuri analyzes relationship between avant-garde and planning of three great world-systems: USSR on threshold of first 5-year plan; United States on verge of New Deal; and Weimar Germany in grip of Sozialpolitik. In 1970s, he observes, mechanisms of control and management of urban space clash with political reality. He examines work of, among others, Stirling, Rossi, Gregotti, Venturi, Eisenman, Graves, Hejduk, Argest, and Gandelsonas, and finds disenchanted avant-garde engaged in private dialogue with forms, intent on playing a glass bead game. Manfredo Tafuri is Chairman of Faculty of History of and Director of Institute of History at Institute in Venice. He is author of Architecture and Utopia and coauthor with Giorgio Ciucci, Francesco Dal Co, and Mario Manieri-Elia of The American City (both MIT Press paperbacks).