Monday, May 11, 2015

RE-READING MANFREDO TAFURI: ARCHITECTURE AND UTOPIA



READING “ARCHITECTURE AND UTOPIA”
MANFREDO TAFURI

VIII: Preface
The relationship between the historical avant-garde movements and the metropolis, the relationships between intellectual work and capitalist development, research on sociology and planning practices, on social-democrat  administration of the city , on architecture of America cities and on building cycle, have been the object of collaborative program to have arrived at any firm and dogmatic conclusions.

IX: Preface
What is of interest here is the precise identification of those tasks which capitalist development has taken away for architecture.
To the deceptive attempts to give architecture an ideological dress

X: Preface
Instrument of knowledge might be immediately useful to the political struggle.
2: Reason’s Adventure
The bourgeois intellectual’s obligation to exist can be seen in the imperativeness his functions assumes as a social mission.

10: Reason’s Adventure
Not having at its disposal a mature substratum of production techniques adequate to the new conditions of bourgeois ideology and economic liberalism, architecture was obliged to restrict its self –criticism to two areas of ANTI-EUROPEAN SIGNIFICANCE & FORMAL ROLE

41: Form as Regressive Utopia
City as an autonomous field of architectural intervention.
Enlightenment architecture from the very beginning postulated one of the concepts fundamental to the development of contemporary art: the disarticulation of form and the anti-organic quality of structure. Nor is it without significance that the institutions of these new formal qualities was from the first related to the problem of city, which was about to become the institutional locus of modern bourgeois society.

The solicitations of theorists for a revision of formal principles did not however, lead to areal revolution of the meaning but, rather, to an acute crisis of value.

158: Architecture and its Double: Semiology and Formalism.
The attempt to revitalize architecture by means of an exploration of its internal structures comes about just at the moment when avant-garde studies in the linguistic field are abandoning “ambiguous” communications and taking their place in the heart of the productive universe through the creation of artificial programming of languages.

Architectural self-criticism does not go to the root of the matter and has need to hide behind new ideological schemes borrowed from the semiological approach.

An architecture that has accepted the reduction of its own elements to pure signs, and the construction of its own structure as an ensemble of tautological relationships that refer to themselves in a maximum of “negative entropy”

182: Problems in the Form of a Conclusion
Reflection on architecture, inasmuch as it is a criticism of the concrete “realized” ideology of architecture itself, cannot but go beyond this and arrive at a specifically political dimensions.

abstract from book" Architecture and Utopia", Manfredo Tafuri

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