Author: Manfredo Tafuri<br />File Type: pdf<br />This major work by Manfredo Tafuri, one of todays most important theoretical historians and critics of architecture and urbanism, presents his critique of traditional approaches to historical investigation and criticism in a penetrating analysis of the avant-gardes and discourses of architecture. Tafuri probes the lines between reality and ideology, the gap that avant-garde ideology places between its own demands and its translation into techniques, the ways in which the avant-garde reaches compromises with the world, and the 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 a linear progression or compact block. In his methodological introduction, he states that the historiographic work should set into crisis not only its subjects and their plurality but also the historical project itself and the critical operations and languages of history it employs. The Sphere and the 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 the twentieth century continue two major Piranesian themes, the limit of forms and ... the violence done to the forms themselves. Tafuri points out that what appeared to be the possibility of affecting the social and physical order through the introduction of a poetics of transgression, as in the deployment of the metropolis as a mise-en-scene infuturist and expressionist theater or in the encounters between the German and Soviet avant-gardes in Berlin in the early 1920s, emerges merely as aesthetic techniques, codified and self-referential. Dismantling and reassembling the structure of the ideology of the avant-garde, Tafuri analyzes the relationship between the avant-garde and the planning of three great world-systems the USSR on the threshold of the first 5-year plan the United States on the verge of the New Deal and Weimar Germany in the grip of Sozialpolitik. In the 1970s, he observes, the mechanisms of control and management of urban space clash with political reality. He examines the work of, among others, Stirling, Rossi, Gregotti, Venturi, Eisenman, Graves, Hejduk, Argest, and Gandelsonas, and finds a disenchanted avant-garde engaged in a private dialogue with forms, intent on playing a glass bead game. Manfredo Tafuri is Chairman of the Faculty of the History of Architecture and the Director of the Institute of History at the Architecture Institute in Venice. He is the 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). **From Publishers Weekly Instead of transforming reality, modern avant-garde artists, in Tafuris tough judgment, are merely playing with techniques, their private dialogue a glass bead game. These difficult, wordy essays throw down a gauntlet to avant-garde movements in architecture, theater, painting, film and literature. This Venetian critic mocks todays New York architects who work in self-defined limbo to entertain a select public. He examines the total theater of such architects as Moholy-Nagy and Gropius, who envisioned a counter-city as a global alternative to the real. The essays make provocative connections between the arts, showing, for example, why Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein saw Piranesis drawings as a forerunner of new film language. These wide-ranging essays, moving from the cross-pollination of German and Soviet artists in Berlin of the 1920s, to the designs of architects like Venturi, Graves and Rossi, challenge an avant-garde that has lost its moorings in contemporary life. 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal Tafuri ( Architecture and Utopia ) is one of the best-known Italian writers on modern architecture and urban design. Unfortunately, he is also one of the least intelligible to American readers. His method is heavy on poetic and philosophical interpretation. In this book he draws heavily on such intellectual giants as Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as he examines the history of avant gardes in the making of modern architecture over the past 200 years. In discussing the 20th century, he focuses on pivotal periods for the USSR, the United States, and Germany, and he assesses the significance of such contemporaries as Venturi and Graves. For specialized collections. Peter Kaufman, Suffolk Community Coll. Libs., Selden, N.Y. 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.