Andrew Leach
Manfredo Tafuri’s 1968 book Teorie e storia dell’architettura (Theories and History of Architecture) offers a wide-ranging analysis of the historian’s method and responsibilities in architectural culture. Teorie e storia contains a profound examination of the status and actuality of historical knowledge in the modern era, from the ‘rise’ of humanism to the ‘fall’ of the modern movement.1 The language and style of this analysis in Teorie e storia quickly yields – within months of its first publication – to another vocabulary and a new set of named objectives following Tafuri’s move north from Rome and Palermo to Venice and his exchange of one political and cultural context for another. As a work preceding his full integration with the Veneto political discussion conducted by the group that Tafuri entered upon his assumption of duties in 1968 at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia, in the Istituto di Storia dell’Architettura, it operates as an intellectual bridge: a reflection on his intellectual life to date, and a programmatic document against which we can read the initial trajectory of the research and teaching of Tafuri and his colleagues in Venice from the end of that decade. Indeed, understanding the bearing of Teorie e storia upon the Istituto and its activities from 1968 is essential to an appreciation of his conduct as a historian, not simply at this moment at the end of the 1960s, but in his adherence to an enduring principle.
The very broad points of Tafuri’s argument in this book are indebted to both Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. Tafuri wholeheartedly imports Benjamin’s and Adorno’s diagnoses of a cultural crisis stemming from the nineteenth century and culminating in the inter-bellum artistic avant-garde, along with their individual ongoing searches for a ‘style’ of analysis that deliberately avoids assuaging that same crisis from the most theoretical of both their studies on modernity available to Tafuri (in Italian) by the late 1960s, including books on contemporary thought, art, symbolism, music, aesthetics and phenomenology that were in print ahead of his work on Teorie e storia. Tafuri’s reading and adaptation of Benjamin’s essay Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936) to the larger disciplinary questions he faced in his theorization of historiography and its practice translates Benjamin’s position into a setting altogether different from that in which Benjamin first formulated his ideas.2 In Teorie e storia, Tafuri extends Benjamin’s theory of modern art and architecture’s place therein well beyond the limits explicitly asserted by Benjamin himself, recasting the Benjaminian ‘crisis of the object’ as a problem integral to a cultural development that Tafuri later describes as an ‘era of representation’.3
Benjamin’s Das Kunstwerk is much less a referent or methodological source – as we might understand Adorno’s function for Tafuri – than an analogy by which Tafuri parallels Benjamin’s history of the relationship between art and technology in the modern age with the history of architecture qua architecture. In other words, where Benjamin pinpoints the mechanisms through which the loss of art’s aura leads to the reclassification of the traditional high arts as acquisitions and (subsequently) extensions of technological and institutional evolution, Tafuri restates the terms of Benjamin’s essay in order to explain the problem of history in contemporary architecture as something systemic to the epistemological and cultural structures of architecture as an art form, but specifically as an art form that has origins bound tightly to the practice of historical representation. In turn, the first instances of history’s appearance in architecture, paralleling the terms of its crisis, occur in the Renaissance. And the Renaissance, by definition, is – in a temporal sense, at least – an era in which aura, originality and creative authority are at stake; so, too, is its cultural authority as (simultaneously) the reincarnation and inheritance of an ancient golden age.
Benjamin’s writing became well known in Italy following the publication in 1962 of a collection of essays entitled Angelus Novus. Although Tafuri had limited access to Benjamin’s work in its Italian translation from that time, his analysis of Das Kunstwerk (Ital. ed. 1966) in Teorie e storia (written 1966–7) is the first instance where he cites the Berliner.4 On the basis of the evidence that follows, we might deduce a close affinity with this essay that Tafuri did not share with Benjamin’s writing as it appeared in the earlier volume, or with other work that appeared in the later L’Opera d’arte. Given that Teorie e storia is principally concerned with the tools and tasks of historiographical practice – the practice of writing history – Benjamin’s entry into the Tafurian bibliography is extremely specific. Tafuri dedicates the first two chapters of Teorie e storia to the historical preconditions of architecture’s crisis, which he associates (following the title of his first chapter) with an eclipse of history. Central to his account is the architectural object and its historical relation to material and metaphysical precedent since the fifteenth century; both themes pay tribute to Benjamin’s terms, if not his theses.
Teorie e storia advances the argument, largely implicit, that the changes in artistic and intellectual culture marking the beginning of the Tuscan Renaissance result in a set of concepts informing architecture’s temporality and intellectual structure from that moment forwards: distinctions between past, present and future; the ideological tools that separate utopia from reality; and the mechanisms that bridge an idealized past and a real present, a real past and an idealized present, an idealized present and idealized future (crossing a corrupt present), and so on. As we shall soon see, these concepts are inextricable from the way that Tafuri appears to understand the implications of Das Kunstwerk, and underpin many of his claims pertaining to the historian’s tools and tasks.
Reading the relevant passages in the most straightforward manner: when Tafuri invokes Benjamin from time to time over the two decades following his first citation, the basic terms of his reference rarely stray far from his initial reading of this essay – with the important exception (which we will leave for another occasion) of his analysis of Borromini through Benjamin’s book on German baroque drama, which is doubtless influenced by Cacciari. Consequently, when Tafuri makes fleeting reference to Benjamin in Architettura contemporanea, La sfera e il labirinto and Storia dell’architettura italiana, 1944–85, and in his essay ‘The Main Lines of the Great Theoretical Debate over Architecture and Urban Planning, 1960–77’, he stays close to such issues as the commodification of the object and the status of the ‘author’ and ‘aura’, all relative to ‘the historical problem’.5
Yet while Benjamin offers much to Tafuri’s historical understanding of architectural phenomena in the age of mechanical reproducibility, his immediate importance to the architectural historian lies in his contribution to a definition of the long modern era, the aforementioned age of historical representation. Tafuri treats this general classification consistently from Teorie e storia to Ricerca del rinascimento, and this in its most abstract form remains a constant in his theorization of history and historiography.
If the objective of Teorie e storia, then, is a critico-historical analysis of the place of history in architectural culture, its time frame is, in the sense outlined above, Benjaminian: modernity as the era of historical representation.
Tafuri writes his account of architecture’s crisis – a concept that he later concedes verges on overuse – in a deliberately inflammatory style that exaggerates (or provokes, depending on one’s perspective) the perceived crisis rather than calming its recognizable symptoms. The book formalizes Tafuri’s position that the role of historical analysis is the identification of historical problems and their origins, not the more prophetic function of imagining their solution or the instrumental task of understanding the nature of their fulfilment. He bluntly holds his disciplinary fathers responsible for the current state of affairs, blaming it upon their lack of attention to the conditions that he, via Benjamin, diagnoses. Their fault, he suggests, is ignorance, a failure to properly understand the nature of the historian’s standing in relation to architectural production. Their chief mistake is to interpret these two practices as coincident, supplementary, an error that simply exacerbates the crisis of both history and the object, as Tafuri defines it therein. The widespread tendency to encourage the availability of historical knowledge to architectural practice is a fundamental target of Tafuri’s book: from the adoption of abstract values to the quotation of and deference to concrete exemplars to the enactment of a blatant formal historicism.
Whatever motivations we might assign Tafuri in singling out the faults of individual historians, and however keenly we sense the deformations that he makes between reading Benjamin and deploying his terms, it is important that we keep in mind that Benjamin remains at the centre of this discussion. Whether he is a hostage or a willing aid is a judgement better, for the moment, suspended.
Chapter One of Teorie e storia, ‘L’architettura moderna e l’eclissi della storia’ (‘Modern Architecture and the Eclipse of History’), follows the history of historical representation through an account of the development of architectural theory spanning from the fifteenth to the twentieth century. The principal theme of this analysis is the availability of historical knowledge to the intellectualization of architecture as an art. Tafuri draws extensively on the modest but diverse body of his own publications to date, a ‘library’ that bridges his career as an architect and his fledging, deeply polemical, first attempts at historical writing on modern architecture and on works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. If in places Tafuri appears too aggressive, too explicit in targeting colleagues and academic friends, it may be a result of his easy insertion of these earlier pieces (or their attitude) into Teorie e storia, these essays and books conveying Tafuri’s often heavy-handed claim for a seat at the academic table. Setting this observation aside, while his architectural histories inform the generous scope of Teorie e storia, they are clearly made to reflect upon the standing of the architectural work in his definition of an artistic and cultural crisis. At the same time, he exposes the nature of the analysis of these crises conducted thus far as constituting part of the problem.
Teorie e storia therefore concerns not only the contemporary limitations of architecture and its understanding of its own past; by implication, the book returns Tafuri’s historian’s scepticism to his own earlier practice and judgements. This dialectical understanding of the past – operating between empathy and antipathy with respect of the architect – is essential to the problem of architectural history as conducted by historians trained first as architects.
As a starting point, then, it is useful to accept that Teorie e storia concerns the relationship between two practices and two figures between which Tafuri artificially distinguishes: between architectural production (however defined) and the critico-historical analysis of that production, intellectual and material; and thus between the architecttheoretician and the critic-historian.
In conceiving of architecture as a production, and considering that the conditions of that production implicate both the history and historiography of architecture, Tafuri’s ‘eclipse of history’ corresponds to Benjamin’s ‘crisis of the object’. Benjamin observes that the mechanization of artistic production generates an irrecoverable distance between the artwork’s essence and its representation, enacting, from the end of the nineteenth century, a destruction of that essence by new technologies of production. Tafuri mirrors this position by suggesting that the devices by which historical knowledge is incorporated into the intellectualization of architectural production make it increasingly difficult to distinguish historical knowledge from contemporary critical knowledge (which includes knowledge of history) and ideas pertaining to the future (loosely understood as utopian) that are built into projective architectural practice. Consequently, history, like the aura, is neutralized in the modern age, eclipsed by the mechanisms and imperatives of production.
Tafuri disagrees with Benjamin on the origins of these critical catalysts. For Benjamin, they spring from industrialization and the new way of seeing ushered in with the modern world and the nineteenth century growth of consumer culture. Benjamin’s modern world begins with the machine and the birth of mass labour. ‘Mechanical reproduction’ is not only a new governing model for the manufacture of objects and culture, but also an analogy for an emerging (and for Benjamin, disturbing) mode of life. Through it, human society experiences the subjugation and then loss of the unicum to the factory.
In Tafuri’s analogy, mechanical reproduction translates to ‘historical representation’, whereby the ‘death of the aura’ relates to the loss of a past reality concurrent with its persistence in architectural culture as a form of mediated knowledge – indeed, as knowledge that is necessarily mediated, and never direct. History’s crisis lies in the complete loss of a direct apprehension of the past, in the total subjugation of historical knowledge to the mechanisms of that mediation and thus in its synthetic reinvention within that same process of intellectual intercession. To the extent that Tafuri observes the phenomena that he associates with Benjamin’s argument occurring over a substantially longer duration than that attended to by Das Kunstwerk – notwithstanding Benjamin’s identification of the origins of the aura with religious rites in ancient Athens – his reception emulates the spirit of Benjamin’s point.
However, Tafuri’s crisis of history precedes the twentieth century by several hundred years; for him, it occurs in the fifteenth century, with Brunelleschi’s citation of the Pantheon in his design for the dome of the Florentine cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore. By quoting the past, Brunelleschi’s building became Architecture through an act of historiography, a contrast to the surrounding accumulation of urban fabric in which he rendered the cupola an object instrumentally distinct from its field. Alberti’s reworking and programmatic interpretation of Vitruvius’ first-century documentation of Roman building practices and architectural thought – De architectura (late first century, BC) – as De re aedificatoria (1452) formalized this link between history and the present, between citations of the past and the urban settings in which they occur. It is impossible, Tafuri argues, not to import, with these quotations, an ideologically dependent narrative-representation of the artistic or cultural settings of the original work: a form of deference to the irrecoverable unicum of Antiquity. To describe the invocation of Rome in 1440s Florence as meaningful is a massive understatement.
In intellectual terms, architecture emerges from this moment as a practice subject to its own theoretical programme: it is different from building for being what we would now call one of the arts – an eighteenth century distinction; it shares, from this moment, a cultural pedestal with poetry, painting and sculpture. From the same time, architectural history undertook to represent the past through the same intellectual agenda as that governing architectural production. Yet by so doing, it became increasingly removed from the facts of history, from the recovery and representation of the past’s reality, and ever more solely aligned with the imperatives of that production to the detriment of a direct experience of evidence of the past in the present. What commenced as an intellectual enquiry into the practices of the Ancients became (and perhaps always was) a search for the true principles of architectural composition, form, beauty and disposition.
Architects concerned with history, or historians concerned with architecture, thus, over the course of the centuries marking Tafuri’s eclipse, traded a fragmentary yet immediate knowledge of the past for complete, discrete, communicable (and inevitably loaded) images, exchanging a confrontation with reality for an encounter with its representation. History (in architecture) and historians (of architecture) alike hence experience the crisis that Tafuri pinpoints.
Tafuri begins arguing that Brunelleschi, by introducing a classical architectural language into medieval Florence through ‘a superhistorical comparison with the great example of antiquity’, and Alberti, formalizing a structure for that reborn language, fixed history – the narrative representation of past in the present – as a new architectural value. 6 Their intellectual endeavours of this moment – between the fifteenth century’s third and sixth decades – formed ‘the first great attempt of modern history to actualize historical values as a transformation of mythical time into present time, of archaic meanings into revolutionary messages, of ancient “words” into civil actions’.7 That time and place, mid-quattrocento Florence, thus encapsulated a new way of conceptualizing, composing and positioning architectural works in the city, signalling the ready availability of historical knowledge as material that architects, then a fledgling category of the artistic professional, could reconfigure to future ends through the practice of architectural design, or – literally – architectural drawing (disegno). This evolution heralded a new status for historical judgements as determinist assessments partially to be absorbed and elsewhere overcome: ‘History, according to this conception, cannot be represented by a continuous line, but, rather, by a broken line defined by an arbitrary yardstick that decides, each time, its values and goals.’8
Reading between Tafuri’s lines, history comprises a series of images, the standards governing the production of which are the same as those overseeing the contemporaneous production of architecture. This, in short, is architectural theory as defined along tightly circumscribed scientific lines. (When Tafuri refers to architectural theory here, he speaks of a prescriptive code and not of its more recent manifestation, since the 1970s, as a critico-literary genre.)
If history, following this case, is subject to the theory of architecture (thus defined), then the recollection of Antiquity’s classical culture describes an artificial distance between the past and its traces in the present and therefore
between those who make use of the evocative power of quotations and allusions to substantiate an independent discourse in order to build a new reality, and those who try to recover the exact meaning of those quotations in order to cover up the disappointments of reality, to re-evoke the substantial structures of an heroic past in order to contrast them, polemically, with contemporary hypocrisies, to defend an artistic revolution that is in danger of locking it up in the ivory tower of an historicism become an end in itself.9
In Tafuri’s view, the Renaissance is wrapped up in an advanced form of historicism that effects both a new field of artistic endeavour and identifies a historical marker for that undertaking, the norm from which the trajectory of modern architecture proceeds. Rejecting the romantic notion of an unmediated exchange with the past, the accumulation of disagreeing pasts – conflicts and agglomerations spanning centuries – perceived by Tafuri in the medieval city, the historical abstractions invoked in the new architecture of the mid-fifteenth century and its concurrent intellectualization all exchange experience, with all its contradictions, for value and moral. Elsewhere, in L‘Architettura dell’Umanesimo (1969) and Progetto e utopia (1973), he equates this with ideology, and since his basic critical strategy does not change across the years commencing with his writing of Teorie e storia (begun in 1966), we wisely acknowledge the broadly post-humanist Marxist epistemology that underpins Tafuri’s approach.10
He implies two dichotomies that brand artistic discourse and production of this moment. The first is that by or in distinguishing architecture from its context, replacing the notion of building as indistinguishable from its urban background – even accounting for historical hierarchies driven by power and trade – with that of a building-art, the values defining which are understood to originate not from context, but from forces applying ideology upon the city, extending out from architecture and the arts, which are considered exemplary. In the sense inferred from Teorie e storia, there was no architecture before the Renaissance because there was no building that assumed autonomy in counterpoint to or conversation with urban fabric.
Reading across the grain, we can restate this observation: there was no architecture before the Renaissance because building, before this time, did not activate values extracted from the past as measures of a surpassable present. Before the Renaissance, that is, there was no project, and without a project, there is no architecture.
With Santa Maria del Fiore, Brunelleschi’s representation in Florence of the enduring values of Antiquity conveys abstract knowledge of the past that is not simply implicit to the work, but drawn from the work and projected upon the city in which those selfsame values originate. It formalizes historiography as a judgement conducted in the present, of the present. In differentiating an object from its field, the architectural work stands as a critique of a contemporaneous reality in which it exists but does not belong. Tafuri identifies the origins of the work – in this modern, Benjaminian sense – as concurrent with the birth of the capacity for historical abstractions to inform the theoretical agendas underpinning the production of those same works.
If the reinvented classical tradition of the Renaissance relies, then, upon the artificial recovery of classical codes, articulated through the architectural treatise, this theoretical production as much as the production of buildings defines architecture in the conceptual apparatuses that are important for Tafuri’s account: temporality, ideology, judgement, abstraction. In the quattrocento, architecture begins with history; history informs theory and the values that will help artists overcome the present; theory dictates the future, which becomes (in time) a reality: this is a basic account of the project. Codifying historical knowledge as a representation of the past, De re aedificatoria drew an intellectual distinction between the architectural object and its broader urban, political, religious, economic and military environments. The work’s ‘author’ is likewise emancipated: the architect as artist. This move imbues the work, for the first time (continuing through Tafuri’s argument) with an ‘aura’, with the singularity and cult value of the unicum. However, the authority of the aura in the Renaissance work, a model for the following centuries of architectural design and theory, rests with history. The very notion of aura – distinguishing architecture intellectually from the Renaissance onwards – is haunted by the artistic tendency towards mimesis and by an unrecoverable originality that lies somewhere in the deep past.
Taking stock of their knowledge of the past, Tafuri explains, architects of the sixteenth century began rediscovering historical contexts apart from the dominant tradition of the classical. While he later rejects the concept of mannerism as it appears in Teorie e storia and the earlier L‘Architettura del manierismo – coming back to it decades later with his writing on Sanmicheli – here it comprises a ‘disturbance’.11 Following his case, we find Tafuri identifying a number of ‘anxious’ attempts in the sixteenth century either to reconcile the ‘anti-historical code’ of the classical tradition with the compromised fragmentation of the Middle Ages – a ‘ghost’ that ‘continues to reappear, making the nightmares of Mannerism even more tormented’ – or to declare their ultimate incongruity.
On one hand, Raffaello Sanzio follows a ‘taste for license connected to the discovery of the ancient grotesques, which develops into an intentionally theatrical architecture’. On the other, Andrea Palladio, Giulio Romano, Baldassarre Peruzzi and others perpetuate ‘a more destructive tendency towards contamination, towards a polemical deformation of the Classicist lexicon, towards its sadistic perversion by grafting it onto Gothic or Gothic-like systems’. The Mannerists stretch and burst the later fifteenth century’s intellectual bubble. Their ‘polemical deformation’ of the classical codes extends beyond the rule, corrupting them with history’s counter-lessons.12
If these developments begin with the Sack, they assume added significance with the Counter-Reformation. Tafuri suggests that ‘an art that does not want to create new meanings’ will shy away ‘from any temptation to compromise itself with historical verification’.13 In contrast, the architects of the Roman seicento continue to question rather than exalt a classical ‘truth’.
Francesco Borromini, especially, ‘gives first place to the problem of history’. Understanding the relationship between theory and history, the architectural project and its ideological foundations (Tafuri projectively asserts), he searches out a theoretical programme within architecture, which ‘must fold on itself in order to show its structure as a renewed instrument of communication, has to stratify itself in a complex system of images and geometric-symbolic matrixes’. Borromini’s attempts to ‘unify such a tangle of problems’ result in a bricolage ‘of modulations, of memories, of objects derived from Classical Antiquity, from Late Antiquity, from the Paleo-Christian, from Gothic, from Albertian and utopist-romantic Humanism, from the most varied models of sixteenth-century architecture’.14 His work documents ‘a genuine experience of history’ in which broken fragments recalling the entire span of the past filter into the present, not as a single, linear inheritance, but with all the ‘complexity and variety’ demanded by a challenge to the dominance of the Classical.
In order to carry on using them (as Borromini meant to do, in spite of all his destructive fury) it is not enough, as in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, to ignore the issue through an act of faith: now one needs to check, by plunging into history, by getting involved and soiled by it.15
Re-couching the status of historical knowledge in architecture as a ‘collage of memories’ rather than as a narrative laden with values, Borromini explicitly problematizes historical representation as a conduit separating past from present. This provokes, according to Tafuri, three distinct responses in Borromini’s ‘children’, Borromini’s heirs. The first is to ignore his lesson in favour of a mythical classical tradition, untested against historical evidence: a practice of classicist composition and the internal extension of its traditions, such as in ‘the critical eclecticism of Carlo Fontana and Fischer von Erlach’. The second builds upon his ‘historical synthesis of the opposites’ by developing ‘antithetical linguistic matrixes’ and ‘bricolage’: the ‘European Borrominism’ of Guarino Guarini, Vittone and Johann Santini. Finally, architects like Wren, John Soane, Nicholas Hawksmoor, Thomas Archer and John Vanburgh persist in experimenting with linguistic codes – such as those Borromini unveiled – although they do so without ‘the least polemical trace’.16
Of all these inheritances, the European Borrominists at least extend Borromini’s preoccupation with the historicity of architectural production. While his own meditations ultimately acquired form in building, the increasing importance of a visual architectural culture, coupled with the early eighteenth century rise of archaeology and its ‘recovery of history’ facilitated the growing importance of communicating the architectural past in a manner exceeding both building and treatise.
In this sense, Borromini’s historiographical legacy rests properly upon Piranesi. Both Borromini and Piranesi challenge, in their own respective fashions, the language of a classical history with a contrapuntal vocabulary drawn from same past as that claimed by architecture’s ideologues as the basis for the classical tradition. These conflicting pasts appear not simply as spectres haunting the present, but arrive with the full signifying power of the mainstream classical. Yet in presenting those counter-pasts as fragments, Piranesi exposes a paradox: the fragment signifies nothing beyond itself; it demands a whole that is past, passed: gone. Nevertheless, any extrapolation of their meaning upholds the pretence of their capacity to signify within a coherent linguistic system. The fragment does not, consequently, mean anything. Invoked by Piranesi (and Borromini before him), it rather threatens classical meaning with a shadow of the world of its production. Each Piranesian composition, therefore, challenges history with the infinite worlds indicated by each fragment therein, but without claiming the recovery of those pasts and places, or the necessity of such a recovery. His Parere su l’architettura (1765) thus portrays an ‘agonizing dialectic’, mirrored in his design for the altar at Santa Maria del Priorato (completed 1766):
narrative, didactic and caustically late-Baroque – facing the public; abstract, anti-descriptive, and of haunting Illuminist symbolism – at the back, where a naked sphere is embraced by a geometrical solid figure, in a sort of allegory of the already achieved eclipse of the sacred.17
The allegory prefigures the Enlightenment, continues Tafuri, and its ‘cult of reason’ – and its dialectics, although reference to Horkheimer and Adorno’s book (Ital. ed. 1966), awaits later writing – itself compromised by an ideology of intellectual emancipation and other freedoms.18 The classical tradition confronts knowledge garnered from the archaeological recovery of Pagan Rome, reconciling that knowledge with a scientific model that collapses reason into positivism and a claim for the destruction of ideological mediation through knowledge. The trajectory of Tafuri’s ‘eclipse of history’ thus takes a new turn. From the programmatic recovery of classical forms in the quattrocento, to the deep suspicion of the Mannerists and the dialectical interplay of history and the past in baroque Rome, he returns to another claim of direct, scientific apprehension of the past. Yet, here too, that knowledge is tempered by the new value of Reason.
In accord with Hegel’s Aesthetik, Tafuri proposes that the age of reason and its normalizing capacity connects the ‘death of art’ to Benjamin’s crisis of the object. 19 For Hegel, the rise of the natural sciences and a discourse on liberty supplant ‘art as a super-individual institution and as immediate communion with the universe’. The new capacity in Enlightenment architectural theory to make reasoned judgements of a now encyclopaedic appreciation of history does less to break through the membrane of architectural culture than to shore up the defence of that culture as a legitimate arbiter of historical value. Brunelleschi’s historiographical isolation of the cupola of Santa Maria del Fiore – a triumph of the classical over the medieval – is universally extrapolated into the positivistic model subjugating archaeological discoveries in Italy, Greece, the Levant and North Africa as artefacts of these regions are unearthed, documented, published and appropriated by archaeologists and architectural writers from the seventeenth century onwards. The Battle of the Styles between idealized medieval and classical codes – extending from the mid-eighteenth century to the start of the twentieth in France, England, the New Worlds of North America, the Antipodes and elsewhere – thus remains intellectual in character, fundamentally utopian.
In looking backwards while looking forwards, one denies both the past and the present as they might actually be.
The irredeemable digression of the represented past from a past reality therefore lies at the centre of Tafuri’s crisis of history. Why, though, is Tafuri compelled to express this historical development as a crisis? To an increasing degree through the centuries that Tafuri speedily recounts, historical representation follows an agenda set by the imperatives of architectural production; it is no longer shaped by those value-setting forces beyond architecture that once informed that same production. In deviating from the values of the world at large, the abstract norms informing architectural production result in artistic works that have (in turn) no bearing on that same world. In other words, through its increased ideological insularity, architecture ceases to matter beyond architecture itself, which upholds the rhetorical position that architecture remains a bastion of relevancy to society, commerce, power and so forth. Tafuri’s crisis of history is thus, in its implications, quite different to Benjamin’s crisis of the object, exacerbated by the industrial-age destruction of the artistic aura. It is precisely in conceiving of the architectural work as autonomous or by allowing architectural theory alone to circumscribe the intellectual content of architecture that history is eclipsed, that only now is the past asked to inform the production of architecture as an abstraction, as an intellectual construct.
In an explicit recognition of his debt to Benjamin’s theory, Tafuri makes a lengthy citation from Das Kunstwerk in which he translates Benjamin’s painter and operator, magician and surgeon into figures of contemporary architecture. He pursues two lines of thought. The first reading identifies Benjamin’s characters among camps of the architectural modern movement. The painters, for example, face off a ‘new nature of artificial “things”’, but default to mimesis. Tafuri views the Italian Futurists and German Expressionists in this light. They seem to ‘get close to the new world of industrial production but then withdraw from it immediately because of the use they make of it’. On the other hand, the operators ‘identify the new laws of the equipment, and solve, by entering into it, its irrationalities and contradictions’.20 Exemplified by Le Corbusier, Gropius and Mies van der Rohe, they do not accept this new nature of the modern world as an external condition that demands a response in art. Rather, it is embedded, inextricable from processes of both production and apprehension.
A second application of Benjamin’s analogy introduces more clearly the broader problem of historical memory in architecture. Tafuri observes that the ‘new laws of the equipment’ undermine the historical abstractions that, in the nineteenth century, informed stylistic historicism. The mechanization of building processes and materials – or more properly the ideology of mechanization – draws architecture out of its auto-circumscribed territory and into direct encounters with engineering (production) and cinematography (representation). The capacity to situate architecture in a dialectical exchange with the new conditions of production and consumption tracks architecture’s concurrent capacity to ‘enter’ modernity as equipment, to step beyond theory as prescription and beyond a classical model of the architectural object.
In making this point, Tafuri renders equivalent two terms: equipment and past. He thus isolates two choices that are, in his eyes, open to architects. One may either conduct a mimetic practice based on historical abstractions; or an operative practice, entering the past through direct confrontation of its traces that extend into the present.
It is one thing to make this identification, quite another to ask the architect to consistently privilege entry over mimesis. Even the most penetrative architects of the modern movement enlist both history and historians in reconciling the uses they make of history with architectural ideology, a tendency that Tafuri identifies in the reconstructed traditions of Sigfried Giedion and the historicism of Nikolaus Pevsner. In translating an operative relationship with history into a mimetic one, the reaction of the (true) avant-garde is (according to Tafuri) to deny history itself. Tafuri erroneously links this intellectual development with the (only) apparent rejection of history by the Bauhaus. The later recovery of history in the post-war years is not, in this sense, a recovery of the past. Rather, it formalizes a cult of the architectural object sustained by the intellectual functions of architectural theory.
If these observations inform Tafuri’s judgement of history’s utilization, then what are the implications for architectural history as a critical practice capable of defining itself in autonomous terms? One of the clearest dimensions of his argument is the programmatic separation of architectural and historiographical imperatives. History, he continues, cannot justify design. Nor can the insulation of architectural thinking by means of historically derived institutional positions legitimate architecture’s divorce from its intellectual, technological, economic, political and artistic contexts. At the base of his critique is an understandable intolerance for the flattening out of history in its contemporary analysis. That this tendency informs each of the others is integral to Tafuri’s reading of history’s eclipse. The importance of history to architectural culture thus informs a series of broader artistic crises, notably those relating to autonomy and the nature of the architectural object.
Historically, the most operative of these practices lie at the intersection of Dada and De Stijl: ‘They fully coincide in their negation of any validity of the object and in their prophecy of the coming of collective reaction that will make up the new city.’21 Deeply suspicious of history as ‘a danger to the present’, something to be ‘suppressed’, this avant-garde proposes a new set of architectural values, largely derived from elsewhere: psychology, mathematics, etc. Beyond the Continent, Frank Lloyd Wright demonstrates the free use of his equipment, interrupting the continuity of history by absorbing into it ‘fragments of anti-European historical memories’. However, while Dada and De Stijl occupy the city sans objet, Wright, Le Corbusier and others demonstrably recognize the ‘historicity of their antihistoricism’ by considering the new problem of preserving and adapting historical town centres.22
To recap: Tafuri’s account commences with Brunelleschi opposing an idealized patrimony against the accumulated fabric of medieval Florence; it concludes with the problematic assignation of historical centres as heritage, ambiguously inert as elements of the contemporary city. Le Corbusier’s Plan voisin (1925) strips away all non-historic context from around the monuments of the Parisian centre to create a historical park, protected from but available to the city. If Dada and De Stijl join together in celebrating the end of history, then these centres are beyond their conception of the city as the site of artistic life. Le Corbusier and Wright both subject these objects to a new order of urban relevance, accommodating their inertia as a condition of the past they choose to engage as equipment. The perception of history in the present is inevitable, as is its translation into the cultural values of heritage. But their heritage is monumentalized, divorced from the past and its representation, and thus removed from life.
In contrast, for Vittorio Gregotti ‘history … presents itself as a curious instrument whose knowledge seems indispensable, but that, once acquired, can’t be used’.23 Through a partial rejection of the modern movement he stands up to defend the historical centres, appearing to invoke the romanticism that informed the nineteenth century reception of historical codes as revivals. Ye t this defence of history is bound into the same search for use-value that characterized the reinvigoration of historically derived design methodologies instituted by Bruno Zevi in Rome from 1964. The problem, as Tafuri suspects that Gregotti understands it, lies in the reconciliation of objects with planning and the exigencies of the profession. For Kahn, he suggests, and others explicitly concerned with the autonomy of architectural design, the problem lies with history’s availability to a ‘new objectivity’.
Tafuri’s crisis of historiographical practice is thus intimately connected to the crisis of the object, the terms of which he shares with Benjamin. If the productive imperative corrodes the autonomy of the architectural work and undermines its capacity both to index and to signify with any critical integrity, then Tafuri concludes that historians need to rethink two relationships: that of architects to their works; that of history to their making. The problem of historical practice identified by Tafuri involves a widespread resistance to cultivating a critical historical consciousness. Historians, in his view, chose the easier path of substantiating myths endorsed by architectural culture itself, conceived of and defended within an architectural ideological framework. Tafuri asserts that the historian’s role is ‘dialectical … in respect of the architect’. Does it remain so? What, we can ask of him today, is architecture relative to – its criticism or history? And to whom does the historian take ‘constant opposition’ in an era wherein neither author nor object remain conceptually uncompromised?24
If the object’s crisis is bound into a crisis of historical representation, one question remains: what, if not historical representation at the end of this trajectory, is the historian’s principal concern? The title of the second chapter of Teorie e storia signals the general direction of Tafuri’s answer: ‘L’architettura come “oggetto trascurabilev e la crisi dell’attenzione critica’ (‘Architecture as “Ambiguous Object” and the Crisis of Critical Attention’). Critical attention offers a new premise for historical practice, one that redefines the historian’s relation to the architect, and that reclassifies the status of theoretical agendas in architecture. To this extent, Tafuri identifies the need for a new dialectical exchange between an objective knowledge that accepts the preconditions of a production determined by architectural theory and a subjective knowledge capable of isolating that same theory in favour of reading architecture in all its contexts. It must be dialectical because the former pole rejects ‘even the relative possibility of objectivity’; the latter, the ‘specific qualities’ of architectural design.25 Where the incongruity between an object’s meaning as a product of authorship and that determined by its reception ought to spawn conflict, historians hitherto have failed to rise above an indifferent response due to the haphazardness of this conflict. Tafuri’s claim is that historians should force this dialectic, to bring these two opposing poles into open confrontation.
With the Enlightenment, architecture sustained a number of fundamental epistemological changes. Most significantly, its deference (from the fifteenth century) to a super-historical code makes way (in the eighteenth) for a series of new values: reason, science, freedom. Inevitably bound up in the rise of an aesthetical discourse, architectural theory of the eighteenth century ‘realizes the impossibility of finding its own reasons exclusively in itself’.26 The new rapport, at this moment, between landscape and architectural object neatly prefaces Tafuri’s theory of a crisis of critical attention, a phenomenon related to but distinguishable from a crisis of history.
Architectural fragments embedded in the acculturated natural setting at once draw their meaning from those settings, adding up to a view in their accumulation, despite their ruthless self-defined autonomy; thus, their ambiguity. If the ‘age of enlightenment’ accords value only to the rational and the secular, recognizing neither inherent value nor tradition, then ‘the things, the objects must completely lose their symbolic charge in order to be perceived in their pure relational values’. 27 The appearance of architecture in the field of everyday life, or in contexts not properly its own, ‘excludes the possibility of speaking of … architecture as objects: they are, rather, happenings, and in this sense the historicity of art is linked to the crisis of the object’.28
The architectural object acquires its semantic values neither from the object itself nor from the intentions of its authors. The architectural landscape is turned into the ‘field of a symbolic system’.29 Applied to the history of the architectural object from the eighteenth century to the twentieth, this intellectual field shifts from that of a rationalist, enlightened project to one of that project’s application to capitalist development: from Monticello to Manhattan, as Tafuri later demonstrates in Progetto e utopia. Just as the object abdicates those architectural values it might once have projected beyond itself to external economic conditions – an end Tafuri and others explain in La città americana – so too analysis can no longer privilege an architectural ideology over those principles shaping both its production and its perception: politics, economics, social structure, and so forth.30 His point is simple, but astute. If architectural values no longer govern the architectural object in any real sense – in any sense that carries water beyond architectural discourse – then the consequences to historiographical practice of his proposed dialectical confrontation of historian and architect must expose the historical origins of the object’s ambiguity.
Benjamin, on this note, explicitly reappears. Tafuri again cites at length, recalling the German thinker’s observation that the experience of architecture in the modern age is chiefly habitual, distracted. One might apprehend architecture tectonically, through kinaesthetic experience, optically, through visual perception, but not architecturally, on its own theoretical terms. The indifference of the architectural object is part of its new status as media, a role that conflicts with its enduring aspiration for autonomy but that complies with its subjugation to the capitalist exigencies of the modern world. Architects might persistently produce the fields in which architectural values inform modes of inhabitation – Le Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation or the Siedlungen testify, in different ways, to this possibility – yet the architectural object remains just that: indeed, the object. Le Corbusier’s Algiers project, Tafuri later explains in Progetto e utopia, describes the dogged insistence upon reconciling city and teaspoon, making with megalomaniacal insistence an extended claim upon the landscape at a hitherto untested geographical scale. Rather than accept the new modes of perception identified by Benjamin as the limits of their art, these moderns counteract the gaze of the flaneur by offering up an architecture subject to the highest degrees of mediation, insisting upon the durability of architectural ideas.
Such architects as Tange, Rossi, Kahn and Stirling programmatically resist, following their high-modernist predecessors, the absent-minded perception of architecture as akin to the cinematographic apprehension of an architectural field. However, the artificial attribution of ‘aura’ to the architectural – its new cult value – occurs on the terms of a theoretical discourse in architecture and fails to extend beyond the reach of those ideological confines. Determined by architecture and applied by architects to their works (and those of others), their values no longer describe architecture’s deference to either the sacred or to the ancient past.
Involved and rejected at the same time, [the observer] takes part in a drama performed by architecture: but he is simultaneously launched outside architecture, into a dimension that doesn’t even touch the limbo of utopia. And as the critic, in the tradition of contemporary art, is nothing but a privileged observer, his position enjoys an even more accentuated ambiguity: from the position of committed collaborator he is pushed into the front row to witness, as a silent accomplice, the show offered by an architecture continuously splitting itself in an exhausting mirror game.31
The recovery of the object on purely theoretical terms would chart architecture’s own indifference towards modernity and its own traditions of historical representation, retreating into a circle of perpetual self-referentiality.
Crucially, Tafuri observes the delineation here of a series of perceptual positions: that of modern man, whose apprehension of architecture (following Benjamin, following Baudelaire) is habitual and cinematic in character; that of the architect, whose rejection of this wandering eye constitutes a denial of the modern conditions of architectural perception; and that (implicitly) of the critic, who in order to reconcile the architect’s place in the modern world must turn the intensity of the architect’s self-contemplative gaze back upon the architect from the modern’s new outlook, inverting indifference to advance a form of un-invested close scrutiny, a studied indifference: sprezzatura.
By tracking these first two chapters of Teorie e storia, we can appreciate Tafuri’s selective debt to Benjamin in the development of a theory of the historian’s intellectual and cultural setting. While the subsequent discussion in this book turns more specifically to the historian’s tools and tasks, Tafuri clearly links these contextual preconditions and problems to the task of developing a proper mode of historical analysis in his own time. Tafuri’s reading of Benjamin, while well informed, is not entirely sympathetic; neither is it accurate or generous. The Benjamin that emerges from this reading is unequivocally a constructivist, and Tafuri’s identification of a representational impasse bound up in the crisis of the object and of art is not incongruous with that figure. Yet we would be mistaken to regard this as a representation of Benjamin himself, any more than considering Tafuri’s extrapolation of the principles underpinning historiographical practice as a fundamentally Benjaminian proposition.
Read by Tafuri, Benjamin’s Das Kunstwerk constitutes at best a sustained analogy, informing the basic model of his argument as one pertaining to the relation of historical representation to architectural production and, by extension, to prescriptive architectural theory. Tafuri is not Benjamin’s modern, but a figure closer to Benjamin himself and, it naturally follows, to the critic figure that emerges from this analysis: intently concerned on the relationship between analysis and production, between vision and criticism. In this, Tafuri exceeds Benjamin relative to the particular problems he raises here, building upon the latter’s observations in order to articulate his own version of the way beyond history’s crisis and the ‘crisis of critical attention’. These are surely distinct in Tafuri’s mind, both concerned with the representation of the past in the present. However, one is unarguably the purview of the architect, the other that of the historian. The task of the latter, Tafuri appears to appreciate, is to reconnect the architect critically to the world of which that figure is a part.
This essay, with some modifications, appeared as a chapter in my book Manfredo Tafuri: choosing history (Ghent: A&S/books, 2007), which in turn refines the argument first published in Architectural Theory Review in 2005. I wish to thank Bart Verschaffel for his comments on the argument; Ruth Stewart-Leach for her editorial advice; and Teresa Stoppani for her invitation to give a lecture on this topic at the University of Greenwich, London, on which the AT R ’s essay was based.
1 Manfredo Tafuri (1968), Teorie e storia dell’architettura, 4th ed., Bari and Rome: Laterza, 1976; English ed. Theories and History of Architecture, trans. Giorgio Verrecchia, London: Granada, 1980. All quotations from the English edition.
2 Walter Benjamin (1936), ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, V(1).
3 Manfredo Tafuri (2006), Interpreting the Renaissance: princes, cities, architects (Italian ed. 1992), trans. Daniel Sherer, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, p. xxix.
4 Walter Benjamin (1962), Angelus Novus. Saggi e frammenti, intro. & trans. Renato Solmi, Turin: Einaudi. The Italian edition Angelus Novus precedes the German volume of the same name (1966), which corresponds to (1955) Illuminationen, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. In Teorie e storia, Tafuri cites the later edition (1966), L’opera d’arte nell’epoca della sua reproducibilità, trans. Enrico Fillipini, Turin: Einaudi.
5 Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co (1976), Architettura contemporanea, Milan: Electa; Tafuri (1980), La sfera e il labirinto. Avanguardie e architettura da Piranesi agli anni ’70, Turin: Einaudi; (1986) Storia dell’architettura italiana, 1944–85, Turin: Einaudi; and (1979) ‘The main lines of the great theoretical debate over architecture and urban planning, 1960–77’, A+U, 100: 133–54.
6 Tafuri (1980), Theories and History, p. 14.
7 Ibid., pp. 14–15.
8 Ibid., p. 16.
9 Ibid., p. 15.
10 Manfredo Tafuri (1969), L’Architettura dell’Umanesimo, Bari and Rome: Laterza; and (1973) Progetto e utopia. Architettura e sviluppo capitalistico, Bari and Rome: Laterza.
11 Manfredo Tafuri (1966), L’Architettura del manierismo nel cinquecento europeo, Rome: Officina. Compare Tafuri’s essay ‘Sanmicheli. Problemi aperti’ (1992) in Howard Burns, Christoph L. Frommel and Lionello Puppi, eds, Michele Sanmicheli. Architettura, linguaggio e cultura artistica nel cinquecento, Milan: Electca; (1996), ‘Andrea Palladio’, Vicenza: CISA, pp. 228–34.
12 Tafuri (1980), Theories and History, pp. 17–18.
13 Ibid., p. 18.
14 Ibid., p. 19.
15 Ibid., p. 20.
16 Ibid., pp. 22–4.
17 Ibid., pp. 26–8.
18 Ibid., p. 26; Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (1947), ‘Dialektic der Auflkärung’, Philosophische Fragmente, New York: Institute of Social Research; Ital. ed. (1966) Dialettica dell’Illuminismo, Turin: Einaudi.
19 Tafuri (1980), Theories and History, p. 29.
20 Ibid., pp. 31–2.
21 Ibid., p. 36.
22 Ibid., pp. 41–2.
23 Ibid., p. 55.
24 Ibid., p. 64.
25 Ibid., p. 79.
26 Ibid., p. 82.
27 Ibid., p. 84.
28 Ibid., p. 85.
29 Ibid.
30 Giorgio Ciucci, Francesco Dal Co, Mario Manieri-Elia and Manfredo Tafuri (1973), La città americana dalla Guerra civile al New Deal, Bari and Rome: Laterza.
31 Tafuri (1980), Theories and History, p. 97.