Ideology as Architecture. Manfredo Tafuri and Critical History

Abstract

The history of architecture is not a linear one, it is rather a fragmented track, a tangle made of different paths, studded by many “provisional buildings”. It is a historical space in which crisis becomes a project of transformation. Starting from these premises, the article analyses the foundations of Manfredo Tafuri’s thought, one of the few historians of architecture who confronts himself, without hesitation, with artistic avant-gardes and with those ideologies that underlie many utopias of the Twentieth century. What is at stake is the definition of modernity, starting with the politics of space. Tafuri articulates in advance a critique, that would have developed in the following years, both of the architect as the ideologist of the "social" and of the post-modern rhetoric of the overcoming of "great narrations". However, he did not came to a new and revisited realism. According to Tafuri, the city and the metropolis are obviously the places of political and social contradictions, but they are also the fields where critique can go beyond itself, beyond the disciplinary borders of architecture, of sociology, of semantics.