MAnfredo Tafuri's Theory of the Architectural Avant-garde

135 The Journal of Architecture Volume 7 Summer 2002

Manfredo Tafuri’s theory of the architectural avant-garde1

Esra Akcan

GSAPP, Columbia University, New York, USA

Despite its frequent use, the meaning of the term architectural avant-garde is ambiguous and an explicit theory delineating its parameters has not been written. What would be the theoretical glue that binds various architectural movements of the early twentieth century, which are commonly referred to as historical avant-gardes? What might be a speci c theory of architectural avant-garde, one that is not necessarily synonymous with the theories of avant-garde in visual arts or literature? In this paper, I suggest that a theory of architectural avant-garde is inscribed in Manfredo Tafuri’s writings, and I excavate this theory in relation to three related themes: End (death) of history, metropolitan condition and end of architecture as auratic object. Tafuri considers ‘death of history’, in the sense of the rejection of the past or aspiration for newness, as one of the leading principles of avant-garde movements. The metropolitan condition that requires a brave confrontation with the ‘intensi cation of nervous stimulation’, ‘rapid crowding of changing images’ or ‘blasé attitude’ that Tafuri observes via Simmel is the second theme I underline. According to the historian, far from feeling anguished for the lost past, the avant-gardes confront the new chaos of metropolis as a fruitful condition of existence. Yet these two themes alone have the risk of culminating in the cult of novelty as the sole ground of avant-gardism, and of dissolving the distinction between avant-garde and fashion. Though Tafuri accepts the description of avant-garde in terms of the shock of the new, contingency and ephemerality, I suggest that it is the third theme that differentiates his theory from a de nition based solely on novelty. Following Hegel’s theory on the ‘end of art’ and Benjamin’s theory on the ‘destruction of aura’, Tafuri formulates avant-gardism in terms of the end of architecture as auratic object. Just as mechanical reproduction and mass production gave an end to the status of art as cult objects, ‘the dialectic between architectonic object and urban organisation’ enters into a radically new phase with the avant-garde. If one translates (Tafuri’s reading of) Benjamin’s and Hegel’s theories into architecture, it follows that the ultimate architectural avant-garde would mean the end of architecture in the sense of its total dissolution into the urban structure of the modern metropolis. The ful llment of the architectural avant-garde would be the total dissolution of Architecture into something outside itself, of aura into mass, of form into process, of author into producer, of architect into organiser. According to this interpretation, the architectural avant-garde thus demands a radical challenge to the institution of archi© 2002 The Journal of Architecture

1360–2365 DOI: 10.1080/13602360210145088

136 Manfredo Tafuri’s theory of the architectural avant-garde Esra Akcan

tecture itself, to the ways architecture is produced and consumed within the modern metropolis. I discuss Tafuri’s theory of architectural avant-garde in relation to his own architectural examples especially in Weimar Germany, suggest that the Siedlung projects hold one of the most crucial places in this theory, and explain why the historian considered the avant-garde as an historically conditioned, critical but failed attempt.

Framing the question Despite its frequent use in professional discourse, the meaning of the term ‘avant-garde’ in architecture is ambiguous and an explicit theory delineating its parameters has not been written. Giorgio Grassi even claimed that an architectural avantgarde is a contradiction in terms, not only because the avant-garde movements have had a minor inuence on the major shifts in architecture; but also because architectural avant-gardes have desperately tried to accommodate themselves to the avantgarde ‘isms’ that were born and developed within the sphere of plastic arts (such as Cubism, Suprematism, or Neoplasticism).2 Grassi challenged the task of theorising an architectural avant-garde, since for him this would by denition be an avant-garde of the second degree, which attempts to chase and catch up with movements that are external to itself, rather than confronting the internal concerns of architecture. As opposed to this assertion, a recent symposium on the American architectural avant-garde attempted to show the importance of the term for understanding architectural practices in this country, yet little consensus on the term itself or its theory emerged.3 To give another example, a recent issue of The Journal of Architecture mapped postwar architectural movements as motivations toward

a ‘renewed putting in question of the avant-garde’ and as ‘self-conscious and critical engagement with (and interrogation of) the very concept of an avantgarde’.4 Both of these publications critically yet briey mentioned Manfredo Tafuri and confronted his judgement about the impossibility of a new or ‘neo-avant-garde’ to emerge. It seems that a discussion on both Tafuri’s use of the term and clarications toward a working theory of architectural avant-garde is timely. The term avant-garde in literature and ne arts is equally problematic. The two books written on the theory of avant-garde by Renato Poggioli and Peter Bürger proposed competing theses. It is useful to clarify the theses in brief, since one of the aims of this paper is to question their explanatory power in reference to an avant-garde in architecture, by comparing and contrasting their propositions with Manfredo Tafuri’s ideas. In 1962, Poggioli5 outlined four types of avantgarde attitude: activism, in the sense of ‘sheer joy of dynamism’,6 mobility, speed or sportive enthusiasm; antagonism, in the sense of opposition to academic or established schools, as well as negative reaction to the public; nihilism, in the sense of beating down anything on the way to a level of attaining non-action; and nally agonism, in the sense of antagonism that reaches the level of


self-destruction and welcomes this self-ruin as a sacrice for future movements. For Bürger7 writing in 1974, on the other hand, it was more important to acknowledge the historicity of the avant-garde (situate the avant-garde in its historical context) than to propose some ahistorical moods. Taking the criteria of purpose, production and reception of art works, Bürger reconstructed three phases in art history: the sacred, courtly and bourgeois. For Bürger, as art progressed through these three phases, it gradually moved from being a collective form of production and reception to an individual affair; art works gradually lost their meaning as cult objects and became portrayals of ‘bourgeois self-understanding’.8 This line of development enabled the artists to attain their ‘freedom’ from religiosity and royalty, at the expense of cutting the very veins that connected them to life praxis. In other words, with the bourgeois world, art moved towards its own autonomy, gaining its own place as an institution separated from religion and court, but also from collective ideals. According to Bürger, avant-garde art was an attack on this institutionalisation and autonomy of art in bourgeois society. Avant-garde art tied art back to the praxis of life – not to religion or court, but to contemporary problems of the society; it aimed at a radical transformation of the way art functioned, was produced and consumed in the bourgeois society. This contradicts Poggioli’s interpretation that followed the élitist tradition of Greenberg’s9 essay ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ (1939), and dened avant-garde as a ‘minority culture’ 10 with an ‘aristocratic taste,’ in essential ‘opposition to mass culture and proletarian art’.11

Furthermore, Poggioli claimed that any presumed afnity between artistic radicalism and political radicalism was a misunderstanding,12 and that the only relation between the avant-garde and politics was the necessity of a liberal regime for an avant-garde to emerge. 13 Thus, Poggioli’s position opposes Bürger’s, where favourite avant-garde movements were Russian Constructivism and Dada, and where the term included movements with socially oriented political agendas. Some of the contributions and limits of Poggioli’s and Bürger’s theories in explaining the architectural avant-garde have been pointed out by several architectural critics.14 For Bürger, I would add questions such as: Can we talk about an autonomous architecture in any period in the rst place? Would the attack on institutionalisation of art hold true for architectural avant-gardes who unavoidably situated themselves in a profession that is necessarily tied to institutionalisation of pedagogic and production processes? Nevertheless, this does not mean that Bürger’s theory is useless to understanding the architectural avant-garde, as I shall argue in the following pages. Poggioli’s opposition between the avant-garde and the masses, as well as between the avant-garde and political commitment seems to fall short in explaining the architectural avantgardes of the early twentieth century. As Hilde Heynen has stressed following Bürger and Andreas Huyssen, one of the keys to understanding the historical avant-garde in architecture is to treat it as a moment of conscious disruption in the rupture between high art and mass culture.15 The question remains: What would be the theoretical glue that binds various architectural movements of the early


twentieth century, which are commonly referred to as historical avant-gardes? What might be a specic theory of architectural avant-garde, one that is not necessarily synonymous with the theories of avantgarde in visual arts or literature? In this paper, I shall suggest that a theory of architectural avant-garde is inscribed in Manfredo Tafuri’s writings. The aim of this paper is to excavate this theory in his texts between 1968 and 1980, namely between Teorie e storia dell’architettura (Theories and History of Architecture) and La sfera e il labirinto (The Sphere and the Labyrinth). Throughout his writings, I suggest that Tafuri uses three related themes to refer to the architectural avant-garde. I would like to name and discuss them as follows: death of history, confrontation with the metropolitan condition and death of architecture as auratic object.

1. Death of history As becomes clear in Theories and History of Architecture,16 the concept of history is key to understanding Tafuri’s theory of architectural avant-garde. The term history as well as its derivatives such as historicism, historicity or historicisation can have multiple meanings. Therefore, Tafuri’s use of these terms needs to be claried. The concept of history can be used to denote either the past, or writing about the past, or change (as an unavoidable result of the movement of time). Though Tafuri uses the word in all of these senses, he uses what he calls the ‘death of history’ or ‘anti-historicism’ as an indication of architects’ rejection of the past. On the other hand, he uses ‘historicity’ as the consciousness of change due to the course of time.

Tafuri considers ‘death of history’ – in the sense of rejection of the past – and aspiration for newness as one of the leading principles of the avantgarde movements. Yet, this desire to break with history should be conceived as an historically legitimate point of arrival within the course of a process that had its beginnings as early as the Renaissance. ‘We must test the “historicity” of the anti-historicism of the avant-garde,’17 Tafuri says, and explains that the avant-garde’s conception of history had parallels with that of some Tuscan humanists of the Quattrocento. It was architects such as Brunelleschi or Borromini who revolutionised the conception of history in architecture so that ‘from then on absolute values no longer rule the symbolic structures of artistic activity; it is the adventure of man that takes on the leading role, and claims the discovery of a new constructive nature of form’.18 The differentiation between the classical and modern conception of time is crucial to understand Tafuri at this point. For him, the revolution of Brunelleschi and Borromini was the moment when the modern consciousness of historicity replaced the classical conception of timelessness. After that moment, quotations, bricolages or pastiches of historical elements ‘destroy rather than reinforce the historical value of the ancient “things” inserted in the new contexts’.19 After that moment, ‘history may contradict the present, may put it in doubt, may impose, with its complexity and its variety, a choice to be motivated each successive time’.20 History now ‘challenge[s] the validity of classical codes’,21 rather than conrms their timeless truth value. The modern conception of history accepts the pastness of the past.


In the rst chapter of Theories and History, Tafuri gives a quick history of the ‘eclipse of history,’ from the Renaissance’s radical break to the resurrectio n of historicism in the 1960s. In this history, avantgarde refers to a particular moment whose rejection of history is an historically conditioned point of arrival. [T]he artistic avant-gardes of the twentieth century have pushed aside history in order to build a new history. . . . In this way, the neat cut with preceding traditions becomes, paradoxically, the symbol of an authentic historical continuity. In founding anti-history and presenting their work not so much as anti-historical, but rather as above the very concept of historicity, the avant-gardes perform the only historically legitimate act of the time . . . The antihistoricism of modern avant-gardes is not, therefore, the result of an arbitrary choice, but, rather, the logical end of a change that has its epicentre in the Brunelleschian revolution, and its basis in the debate carried on for more than ve centuries by European culture (Original emphasis.) 22 Thus, what Tafuri calls the ‘death of history’ is nothing but the avant-garde moment in the eclipse of history, which began in the Renaissance. Rejection of the past, and self-conscious or selective use of historical forms on the grounds of their perceived validity for the present – anti-historicism and historicism – shared the same consciousness of time. The formation of avant-gardes was intrinsically connected to this modern consciousness and to the historicity of their moment.23 For each of the three themes I shall elaborate

through the paper, it is useful to go beyond the abstract denition and give some examples. For instance, in a chapter entitled ‘Modern Classicism : Architecture Without Avant-Garde’24 in Architettura contemporanea (Modern Architecture), Tafuri and Francesco dal Co differentiate between the avantgarde and another trajectory of the modern movement. They say ‘it is important to realise that not all modern architecture has had its roots in the avantgarde movements. . . . [I]n opposition to the Dionysiac vitalism of Futurism and Dada there is also the classical style or the unloquacious reserve of those who, speaking the language of renunciation, reject the notion of death postulated by the avantgarde’ (my emphasis).25 Tafuri and dal Co consider Behrens, Loos, Tessenow, Garnier and Perret to be among the classicist trajectory of the modern movement, as these architects sought ‘a new dignity’ and for forms with ‘petried words’26 (Figs 1–3). For those architects who ‘shunned avant-garde experimentalism but without falling into the populist or nationalist nostalgias’,27 architecture can still speak with classical signs. In these explanations by Tafuri and dal Co, it seems that the distinction between the desire for timeless values as opposed to ephemeral ones (‘death’) is one of the main generators of the conict between architectural avant-garde and its opposite – the classicist trajectory. But what would it mean for architecture to be based on transient and ephemeral values? Tafuri confronts this question in one paragraph of Theories and History, but seems reluctant to pursue it to its logical conclusion. What is the signicance, for the artistic object, of the loss of its traditional value as a thing


Figure 1. Peter Behrens, AEG Turbine Factory, 1909. Included in Tafuri, Dal Co, Modern Architecture, Fig. 130, p. 82.

Figure 2. Heinrich Tessenow, SingleFamily house for the Garden city of Hohensalza, 1920. Included in Tafuri, Dal Co, Modern Architecture, Fig. 148, p. 91.

Figure 3. Auguste Perret, Apartment house at Rue Raynouard, 1930. Included in Tafuri, Dal Co, Modern Architecture, Fig. 165, p. 99.


subject to ageing, and of its renunciation to a life in time analogous to that of man, to an intrinsic, meaningful historicity? Obviously, an object without historic value lives only in the present. And the present, with its contingent and transient laws, completely dominates its life-cycle: the rapid consumability of the object is built-in from the very rst stage of planning. (My emphasis.)28 ‘Contingent’, ‘transient’, ‘rapidly consumed’,. . . . Fashion seems to be the appropriate and missing word here. If these were Tafuri’s last words to explain the avant-garde, he would have ended at a similar point as Poggioli. For Poggioli the ‘destiny’ of avant-garde is fashion, in the sense of ‘impos[ing] and suddenly accept[ting] as a new rule or norm what was, until a minute before, an exception or whim, then abandon[ing] it again after it has become a commonplace, everybody’s “thing” ’.29 After recalling Charles Baudelaire’s denition of the genius as the person who continuously creates stereotypes, Poggioli claims that avant-gardism means entering into a fashion system in which the artist continuously cycles on a spiral. Being radical, then fashionable and then stereotypical is the repeating pattern. For Poggioli, it should follow that avant-gardes are the makers of fashionable objects, though not the buyers; they are the élite who produce new things and throw them out after their assimilation by the masses. If we considered this as the only criterion, the avant-gardes would be perfectly attuned to the market system. Their relation to the masses would be only of a patronising sort, and they would be motivated only by a desire for newness and a fear

of boredom. If this were true, being fashionable and being avant-garde would be the same thing – a statement whose limits in explaining the historical avant-garde was acknowledged even by Philip Johnson, when he said: But you see, the true avant-garde is never very good at selling things . . . I never was a member of the avant-garde . . . No, I am just addicted to the new . . . the avant-garde gave way to the shock of the new, to the tradition of the new. Some critics call my fascination with the new ippant, lightweight. I get the point. But it just expresses my desire to be different, to see different things and yet to stay perfectly centered within the system. I am not out to change anything. I am just ghting off boredom. . . . A desire to be famous and a hatred of boredom. Period.30 Though Tafuri would accept the description of the avant-garde as the shock of the new, I shall suggest that he further renes this denition with the help of Walter Benjamin and his own reading of Hegel. It is Hegel’s theory of ‘death of art’ and Benjamin’s theory of ‘death of aura’ – which surprisingly mean similar things for him – that release Tafuri’s theory of the avant-garde from a denition based solely on novelty. Yet, to explain the theory of ‘end of art or architecture’ as the ground of avant-gardism, we rst need to examine the role of the metropolitan condition.

2. Confrontation with the metropolitan condition From his article ‘Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology’ in Contropiano (1969) onwards, Tafuri


puts metropolis at the centre of his explanations of the avant-garde. Unlike the Brunelleschian break with history he stressed in Theories and History, Tafuri now traces the beginnings of avant-garde to Enlightenment. In the article in Contropiano, Tafuri explains this condition in reference to Benjamin and Baudelaire; he adds Georg Simmel’s early but groundbreaking observations about the metropolitan life to the expanded and reworked version of his article, which appeared as Progetto e utopia. Architettura e svillupo capitalistic o (Architecture and Utopia) in 1973.31 In Architettura contemporanea (Modern Architecture), published in 1976, Tafuri further elaborated this theme by contrasting Simmel and Tönnies’ theories as a framework to differentiate the avant-garde from others. Following Baudelaire, Simmel and Benjamin, Tafuri analyses the metropolitan condition and the new behaviour of the individual in the metropolis in terms of ‘intensication of nervous stimulation’, ‘rapid crowding of changing images’, ‘blasé attitude’, ‘regulation of money economy and commodication of objects’. Although the differentiation of these three writers and their inuence on Tafuri would have been useful for the sake of adequate detail, for our purposes I shall shift my emphasis to the avant-garde responses to this metropolitan condition. In the article in Contropiano, Tafuri explains the specic characters of avant-gardism as follows: To remove the experience of shock from all automatism, to use that experience as the foundation for visual codes and codes of action borrowed from already established characteristics of the capitalist metropolis, . . . to reduce

the structure of artistic experience to the status of pure object, to involve the public, as a unied whole, in a declaredly interclass and therefore antibourgeois ideology: such are the tasks taken on, as a whole, by the avant-gardes of the twentieth century. . . . [A]s a whole – that is beyond any distinction between constructivism and protest art. Cubism, Futurism, Dada, De Stijl, all the historic avant-gardes arose and followed one another. . . . [T]he problem now became that of teaching not how one should ‘suffer’ that shock, but how one should absorb it and internalise it as an inevitable condition of existence.32 In the 1973 version of the article Tafuri adds: Simmel’s considerations on the great metropolis . . . contained in nuce the problems that were to be at the centre of the historical avantgarde movements . . . The problem was, in fact, how to render active the intensication of nervous stimulation; how to absorb the shock provoked by the metropolis by transforming it into a new principle of dynamic development; how to ‘utilise’ to the limit the anguish which ‘indifference to value’ continually provokes and nourishes in the metropolitan experience.33 As these quotations suggest, even though Tafuri adds the parts on Simmel afterwards, his denition of the avant-garde in terms of the accommodation of shock experience in the metropolis does not change. Almost all of Tafuri’s avant-gardes at the dawn of the twentieth century confronted the speedy, stimulated and nervous life of the metropolis with a sharp, brave and cool performance


(Fig. 4). In that sense, they bet the military connotations of the term ‘avant-garde’. If metropolitan life were the battleeld to ght for the ideology of progress and modernity, the self-image of the avant-gardes would be the armed soldiers battling for the whole society. In Modern Architecture (1976), Tafuri further works on this interpretation by contrasting Simmel and Tönnies. In Tafuri’s framework Tönnies, unlike Simmel, could not deal with several layers of loss imposed on the individual by metropolitan life. By constructing the opposition between civilisatio n and culture or between society and community (Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft) and by not hiding his sympathy for the latter, Tönnies nostalgically longed for the ‘organic’ community, the peasant life

and the spirit of neighbourliness, which was put into crisis by the metropolitan condition. For Tafuri, this is the complete opposite of the avant-gardist position that bravely confronted the new society in which inward experience, personal history, psychological introspection, everything subjective, no longer mattered . . . the metropolis became the very sickness to which the intellectual felt himself condemned: exile in his homeland: . . . Baudelaire deliberately and in full awareness laid the bases for a personal attitude that was to remain constant in all the European avant-gardes: the redemption of the intellectual can come about if he will accept his own condition as a sickness that can be sublimated only through the eccentricity of the clown. (My emphases.)34 If homelessness is the ‘disease’ of the metropolis, Baudelaire’s aneur that laid the ground for the avant-garde attitude, is homeless everywhere because he can feel at home anywhere. While Tönnies still longed for an essential home in the era of homelessness with an anguish typical to nostalgic people, the avant-gardes – according to Tafuri – confronted and accepted the ‘disease’ of the metropolis as a normal and actually a fruitful condition of existence. In relation to this denition who would be the avant-gardes? In the article in Contropiano of 1969, Tafuri differentiates two trajectories of the avantgarde, that are nevertheless dependent on each other just as the mirror-image relies on the existence of its referent. Representing the two trajectories in terms of order vs. chaos, Tafuri asserts that avantgardes such as De Stijl and Bauhaus represented

Figure 4. Georg Grosz, Friedrichstrasse, 1918. Included in Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, Fig. 15, p. 97.


Figure 5. Herbert Bayer, cover of the Bauhaus journal, 1928. Included in Tafuri, Dal Co, Modern Architecture, Fig. 223, p. 131. Figure 6. George Grosz and John Hearteld, Dadamerika, 1919. Included in Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, Fig. 96.

order, while Dada and Surrealism represented and conrmed the reality of chaos (Figs 5–8). I believe the sphere and the labyrinth are allegories of these two trajectories, chosen to imply Tafuri’s distinction in the title of his book on avant-gardes.35 Chaos and Order were thus sanctioned by the historic avant-gardes as the ‘values’ in the proper sense of the term, of the new city of capital. Chaos, of course, is a given, while Order is a goal. Yet Form henceforth should not be sought beyond Chaos, but within it: it

is Order that confers meaning on Chaos and translates it into value, into ‘freedom’. To redeem the formlessness of the city of protruled consumption, one must draw upon all its progressive valences.36 As this quotation suggests, Tafuri interprets these two avant-gardes as two necessarily related positions. Representations of chaos gained their value as ‘freedom’ because there was a will-to-order, there was a will-to-order because there was no apparent order, but seeming chaos in the capitalist metropo-


Figure 7. Theo van Doesburg, colour study for architecture, c. 1923. Included in Tafuri, Dal Co, Modern Architecture, Fig. 185, p. 109.

Figure 8. Nikolai Ladovsky, project for a communal house, 1920. Included in Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, Fig. 130.


lis. Tafuri is indebted to Franco Fortini in differentiating these two trajectories of avant-gardism, as he also acknowledged with some reservations in a footnote to The Sphere and the Labyrinth.37 Here, Tafuri refers to Fortini’s article ‘Due avanguardie’ in which the latter juxtaposes ‘absolute subjectivity and absolute objectivity’. Fortini differentiate s between ‘abstract irrationality – that is, rejection of the discursive, dialogical moment in favour of free association, involuntary memory, and dream – and abstract rationality, that is, intelligibility achieved by discursive and rational means’. Although Tafuri and Fortini do not refer to Simmel at this point, the opposition between a ‘subjective’, ‘irrational’ response and ‘objective’, ‘rational’ culture is noticeably similar to the dialectic Simmel formulated in terms of the clash of ‘individual’ and ‘objective culture’ in the metropolis. Tafuri via Fortini has translated this observation about metropolitan life to the realm of architecture by dening two avant-garde responses. For Simmel, the ‘over-individuation’, ‘strangest eccentricities ’ and obsession with ‘being different’ that can be observed in some individuals of the metropolis arise as a result of the reaction against the domination of ‘objective culture’, money order and ‘over-intellectualisation ’ of life in the metropolis. 38 These two types of metropolitan life resonate in the distinction between avant-gardes representing Chaos and those representing Order. The atrophy of individual culture through the hypertrophy of objective culture lies at the root of the bitter hatred which the preachers of the most extreme individualism, in the footsteps of Nietzsche, directed against the metropolis. But it is also the explanation of why indeed

they are so passionately loved in the metropolis and indeed appear to its residents as the saviours of their unsatised yearnings.39 Chaos and Order, eccentricity and organisation are two forces pulling the tensioned rope of metropolis from two sides. Their presence depends not only on the rope but also on their dialectical relation with each other. To repeat this in Hilde Heynen’s words: ‘According to Tafuri, then, the whole concern of the avant-garde movements was to recognise and assimilate the dialectic of chaos and order that is fundamental to modern mechanised civilisation: the dialectic between the apparent chaos of the constantly changing dynamic image of the city on the one hand and the underlying order of the de facto rationality of the system of production on the other.’40 On the other hand, Tafuri interprets German Expressionism as an example for the counter-image of the avant-garde (Fig. 9). He is far from hiding his hostility to the German Expressionists (to be more specic, Glass Chain and the Arbeitsrat für Kunst) or any movement that he considers akin to Tönnies.41 He uses explicitly pejorative terms for this position such as ‘regressive’, ‘nostalgic’, ‘mystical’, – not to mention ‘Orientalist’ that needs another discussion. Unlike Simmel, but like Tönnies, Expressionist architects could not confront the loss of organic unity or the loss of centre resulting from the metropolitan condition – Tafuri claims. Instead, they searched for ways to ‘dominate the metropolitan phenomenon, to overcome the inertia of the pure anguish’.42 They did not try to reconcile the individual with the metropolis. Rather than ‘sublimating’ or ‘dispelling’ the experience of shock,


they ‘turned it inward’ and ‘interiorised’ it.43 Their glass utopias were ‘mystical’ aspirations that longed for ‘a recovery of prebourgeois values’.44 Their skyscrapers were ‘magic mountains’ and spiritual cathedrals of the modern metropolis as opposed to American skyscrapers that bravely confronted the chaos of the metropolis.45 Even in his last words on the avant-garde, Tafuri continues to contrast ‘a “progressive” ideology – typical of the historical avant-gardes’ to a ‘regressive ideology’ that promoted ‘utopia of nostalgia’, ‘antiurban thought’, or ‘the sociology of Tönnies’.46 On the chapters reserved for Nazism in Modern Architecture, Tafuri goes as far as implicitly treating Expressionism as a proto-fascist movement. Tafuri uses the fact that some late romantic and Expressionist architects took sides with Nazism as the means to prove that ‘the ambiguity of certain basic theses in the debate over the modern architecture became dramatically obvious’. Tafuri draws a similarity between Speer’s monumental plans for Berlin, striving to unify the whole city as if they would erase time, ‘transcend history’ and ‘annul

dialectic’, on the one hand, and the (Expressionistic) ‘attempt to give the world a centre again, a return to Great Synthesis, to bring to life a universe without contradictions’,47 on the other. Such analogies make Tafuri’s interpretation of Expressionism one of his weakest. In an attempt to justify his pejorative comments on anguish, Tafuri is bound to overlook some of the historical complexities that separated Expressionist utopias from Nazi programmes. Tafuri’s discrediting of any ‘nostalgic’ movement may be understandable, given his warnings against the instrumentalisation of history for design practices in Theories and History. In a later interview in 1986, Tafuri repeated this criticism proposing that if one ‘really resolved to eliminate anxiety’ one ‘would realise that history serves to dispel nostalgia, not inspire it’.48 Despite the validity of this observation, the strict opposition Tafuri formulates between those who mourned for the lost past and those who confronted it with brave and celebrating strength needs critical discussion. I shall pursue part of this criticism in the last section of this paper. Before concluding this section, I would like to draw attention to the relation between the rst and second themes I have outlined. Tafuri’s intolerance for any nostalgic ‘anguish’ is directly related to acknowledging the ‘death of history’ as the only historically legitimate step of the moment to which avant-garde architecture belonged. However, both the ‘legitimate confrontation with the metropolis’ and ‘death of history’ risk culminating in the cult of novelty as the sole ground of avant-gardism. Yet, as I have suggested earlier, ‘newness’ is not the only motivation of the avant-garde movements in Tafuri’s theory. The analysis of the metropolitan

Figure 9. Bruno Taut, ‘fantasy landscape with glass architecture on mountainscapes around Lake Lugano’, from Alpine Architecture, 1917–19, included in Tafuri, Dal Co, Modern Architecture, Fig. 189, p. 111.


condition also gave rise to another criterion I shall analyse in the next section.

3. Death of architecture as auratic object In a noticeably similar manner, in Theories and History, the article in Contropiano (that had not been changed in Architecture and Utopia) and in Modern Architecture, Tafuri interprets many avantgardist movements such as Italian Futurism, Dada or De Stijl as efforts to achieve the end of art, in the sense of art’s total dissolution into life. Quoting several lines from Futurist, Dadaist, Neoplasticist or Russian Constructivist manifestoes about the death of art, Tafuri theorises avant-gardism as the justication of Hegel’s judgement about art’s end. A few quotations might exemplify the point: Life and art having proved antithetical, one had to seek either instruments of mediation . . . or ways by which art might pass into life, even at the cost of realizing Hegel’s prophecy of the death of art.49 The task of artist is . . . to render art superuous . . . Then we will no longer need pictures and statues because we will be living in a fully realised art. Art will disappear from life in the measure in which life itself gains in equilibrium.50 It appears that Tafuri links Hegel’s theory of the ‘death of art’ to the avant-gardist motto ‘Art into Life’. However, this theory is hardly Hegelian and actually – speaking within the discourse of aesthetics as an area of philosophical investigation rather than art history – it may at best be a Heideggerian response to the Hegelian question.51 Nevertheless, this still seems to be a basic mental tool for

Tafuri himself, and I will therefore continue to disclose its crucial place in the historian’s theory of avant-garde. ‘Art dies to make room for a higher form of knowledge’,52 Tafuri suggests, following his Hegel. Tafuri also asserts that architecture, or rather the metropolitan physical structure, plays a pivotal role in the death of art. The metropolis is actually the only medium that can provide a locus for the avantgardist attempt to dissolve art in life.53 Thus, unlike Grassi for whom architectural avant-garde always follows behind the artistic avant-garde, for Tafuri architecture and city are necessary for the accomplishment of the artistic avant-garde itself. The city itself is the object to which neither the Cubist paintings, nor the Futurist ‘slaps’, nor the nihilism of Dada referred specically, but which remained . . . the reference value to which the avant-gardes tried to measure up. Mondrian would later have the courage to ‘name’ the city as the nal object at which Neoplasticist composition aimed; yet he would be forced to acknowledge that once it was translated into the urban structure, painting would have to die.54 The ‘Art into Life’ motto would not have a vital explanatory power to differentiate the architectural avant-gardes from their precedents, since architecture has always been more closely tied to life. Yet, viewed from another angle, this observation also suggests the specic locus of architecture and the city in the avant-gardist project itself. What would be more suitable for the avant-garde artists who try to inject art into life than to blend their artworks in the life of the metropolis?


Despite his continuous reference to Hegel, what Tafuri really has in mind seems to be the Benjaminian concept of the ‘destruction of aura’. In Theories and History, Tafuri links Benjamin’s theory of reproduction with Hegel’s assertion of the end of art. In the article in Contropiano and Architecture and Utopia Tafuri uses the ‘death of art’ and ‘death of aura’ in an interchangeable way55 and never elaborates any distinction between the two concepts. 56 In the late 1960s, the texts Tafuri examines of Benjamin are ‘Das Kunstwerk in Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’ (‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’)57 and ‘Der Autor als Produzent’ (‘The Author as Producer’).58 Both are the most Marxist essays of Benjamin and they provide a useful background especially for the historical avant-garde movements that were politically on the left. In the ‘Work of Art’ essay of 1936, Benjamin celebrates the mechanical reproduction technologies, since mechanical reproduction would make it possible for art to reach the masses. In ‘The Author as Producer’ on the other hand, Benjamin attacks the bourgeois notion of the artist as the sole creator of art works. Instead, he celebrates new modes of information and avantgarde techniques in art, such as wall newspapers and mobile movie houses, for their potential to blur the distinction between author and reader or between artist and audience. The two essays can be read together as advocating a radical change in the way art works are produced and received. Benjamin celebrates the new reproduction techniques for their potential to give an end to the notion of art as a luxury of the bourgeois

individual and carry it to the masses where it would be produced and consumed collectively. I will suggest that when Tafuri formulates avantgardism as the death of art, what he means is the end of art as an auratic object whose aura is dependent on its authenticity, uniqueness and production by a single author. What then would be a theory of the architectural avant-garde? For Tafuri, just as mechanical reproduction and mass production gave an end to the status of art works as cult objects, ‘the dialectic between the architectonic object and urban organisation’59 enters into a radically new phase with the avant-garde. If one translates Benjamin’s concept of the ‘destruction of aura’ and Hegel’s theory of the ‘death of art’ into the context of architecture, it follows that the ultimate architectural avant-garde would mean the death or end of architecture in the sense of its total dissolution into the urban structure of the metropolis. It should follow that the realisation of the death of aura in architecture would be the end of architecture as an object standing independently in the city structure. Subsequently, the end of architecture would also require the death of the architect as the individual creator. The fulllment of the architectural avant-garde seen in this light, would be the total dissolution of Architecture into something other than itself, of aura into mass, of form into process, of author into producer, of architect into organiser. Thus, the argument about the ‘death of architecture’ becomes the last piece that completes the jigsaw puzzle, which gives at least one picture of the architectural avant-garde. According to Tafuri’s theory, the architectural avant-garde demands a


Figure 10. Hugo Häring, elevation and ground plans, single-family houses, 1922. Included in Tafuri, Dal Co, Modern Architecture, Fig. 272, p. 149.

radical challenge to the institution of architecture itself, to the ways architecture is produced and consumed within the modern metropolis. In that sense, we can assert that Tafuri’s denition of the avant-garde is far more in line with Bürger’s theory,60 rather than Poggioli’s.61 Again, the next step should be to elaborate this argument in relation to specic examples. For the sake of appropriate concentration, I have decided to test this argument with Tafuri’s ideas on Weimar Germany. Close reading of these texts veries that Tafuri’s ideas on the denition of the avant-garde do not undergo radical changes. As a matter of fact, the chapters dealing with the German context in The Sphere and the Labyrinth were originally written before the publication of Architecture and Utopia in 1973.62 Therefore, it is quite legitimate to treat Tafuri’s different texts on Germany together. The choice of Germany is not completely arbitrary since it stays as a main context in all of Tafuri’s books on this period, while Le Corbusier63 disappears in The Sphere and the Labyrinth, and the American and Soviet contexts are introduced in later texts. Additionally, Weimar Germany that is ‘seemingly the most resistant nucleus of the concept of the avant-garde’64 in Tafuri’s own words, seems to be the main context in the historian’s mind for the themes I have elaborated. It would be the task of later analyses to test this theory in relation to the American, Soviet or other contexts. Tafuri is critical of German Expressionists also because they hardly understood the demand for the ‘end of architecture’. He treats German Expressionism on the one hand and the ‘rigourism’ of Meyer,

Lurçat or the Neue Sachlichkeit on the other as two opposing positions.65 Neither Poelzig, nor Höger, or Mendelsohn were ‘willing to accept the loss of form that is necessitated by the contemporary urban world. Their problem was still the problem that had tormented German thinking at the start of the century. Are there still possibilities for Form in the world today?’66 (Fig. 10). To give another exemplary quotation, as early as 1969 Tafuri wrote: The two poles of Expressionism and the Neue Sachlichkeit once again symbolised the inherent rift of European culture. Between the destruction of the object, its replacement by a process intended to be experienced as such (a transformation effected by the artistic revo-


lution brought about by the Bauhaus and the Constructivist currents) and the exasperation of the object (typical of the laceratin g but ambiguous eclecticism of the Expressionists), there could be no real dialogue. (My emphasis.) 67 On the other hand, Tafuri treats the Bauhaus as the locus where the spiritual-mystical tones of Expressionism as well as the resistance of Form nally came to an end, leaving its place to ‘true’ avant-gardism. In a chapter entitled ‘USSR-Berlin’ in The Sphere and the Labyrinth,68 Tafuri analyses the gradual development of this shift, starting in 1921 with the clash of Dadaist ethic as well as the arrival of Russian Constructivists in Berlin. After these encounters, the inuence of ‘the East’ would no longer be the ‘messianic expectations’ from the Orient, but the socialist ethic of the Bolshevik Revolution, Tafuri says. The artists of the Bauhaus would then realise the revolutionary potential of technology for the liberation of the working class.69 Tafuri phrases this transformation with one of his smart and equally poetic metaphors: ‘Light coming from the East’ is no longer ‘spiritual’ but ‘electric’.70 Thus, artists of the Bauhaus would no longer design objects with an aura, but organise mass production for society as a whole. The German adventure from craft-oriented design to industrial production is a perfect example that veries Tafuri’s thesis of architectural avant-garde as the destruction of aura, as well as the death of the designer as author.71 Apart from the Bauhaus – which actually produced more projects for industrial design than architecture – I would like to suggest that Tafuri

gives central importance to the urban reform and Siedlung projects of Weimar Germany as a sequel of avant-gardism. Already in 1969, he says: Accepting with lucid objectivity all the avantgarde’s apocalyptic conclusions as to the ‘death of art’ [‘death of aura’ in Architecture and Utopia] and purely ‘technical’ role of the intellectual, the Central European Neue Sachlichkeit adapted the very method of design to the idealised structure of the assembly line . . . From the standardised part and the cell to the single block, the Siedlung, and nally to the city: such is the assembly line that the architectural culture devised between the wars with exceptional clarity and consistency . . . The result of all this was the revolutionisation of the aesthetic experience itself. No longer is it objects that presented themselves for appraisal, but an entire process, to be experienced and used as such. Architecture, in calling upon the public to participate in the design . . . forced the ideology of the public to make a leap forward. (My emphasis.)72 Hilberseimer who conceived the entire city as a single unity, as a ‘social machine’ with elementary cells building up the urban organism as a whole, holds a specic place for Tafuri (Fig. 11). In Hilberseimer’s Grossstadtarchitektu r, the single building was no longer an ‘object’, because the ‘architectural object has been completely dissolved.’73 By not offering ‘models’ for design, but rather presenting the coordinates and dimensions of the design at the most abstract (because the most general) level possible, Hilberseimer


Figure 11. Ludwig Hilberseimer, illustrations from Grossstadtarchitektur, 1927, included in Tafuri, Dal Co, Modern Architecture, Figs 307–308, p. 165, and Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, Fig. 18, p. 108.

reveals – more than do Gropius, Mies or Bruno Taut around the same time – to what new tasks the capitalist reorganisation of Europe was summoning its architects . . . [T]he architect, as producer of ‘objects’ became an incongruous gure. It was no longer a question of giving form to single elements of urban fabric, nor even to simple prototypes. Once the true unity of the production cycle has been identied in the city, the only task the architect can have is to organise that cycle.74 These words suggest that for Tafuri, Hilberseimer is the ‘ultimate expression of German theoretical tradition of the subject of Grossstadt’,75 as well as

the ‘true’ avant-garde of his moment. Hilberseimer does not even have to deal with the ‘crisis of the object’ because the object has already disappeared from his considerations. Hilberseimer was a perfect example for Tafuri in his article in Contropiano and Architecture and Utopia. However, in his later books, the historian will give equal attention to other Siedlung projects by Martin Wagner and Bruno Taut – who by then had abandoned his spiritualism (Figs 12–16) – Ernst May (Figs 17–19), and Schumacher, as the ‘masterpieces of German avant-garde’.76 For its part, the architectural object as such proved in Frankfurt as in the Berlin of Martin


Wagner and Bruno Taut to be truly a thing of the past: the Siedlung was a clearly dened ensemble, but we must recognize, along with Benjamin, that it was a victory of the perception of the type over the perception of the unicum.77 This quotation suggests that Tafuri explains the Siedlung projects in terms of a dichotomy between auratic object and reproduction. For him the singlefamily house standing as an architectural object out of the urban fabric as a ‘unicum’ refers to aura; whereas typological study that makes mass-housing possible refers to reproducibility. In several texts, the Benjaminian opposition between aura and mass stands as the main criterion through which Tafuri interprets several housing projects of the period. For instance, he treats Taut’s early Magdeburg housing as well as the Weissenhof and Siemensstadt Siedlung as unsuccessful projects that hardly fullled the aspiration for urban reform. Tafuri interprets Taut’s early Magdeburg project (Fig. 20) that still had ‘anarchic-libertarian ’ and ‘messianic’ expectations from a revitalisation of agricultural life as a residue of his ‘romanticism’.78 Yet, after such last sighs, Taut joined Wagner (and May) in their housing projects that were leading towards not only an urban but also an industrial and social reform.79 The Weissenhof project in Stuttgart on the other hand (Fig. 21), which was and still remains for many historians the main masterpiece of housing of the Weimar years, was not revolutionary at all for Tafuri, because it was just a collage of single-family dwellings designed by famous architects. It was a propaganda display of the new architecture but lacked the new conception about the specic

Figure 12. Bruno Taut, Martin Wagner, Siedlung Britz, site plan and aerial view, 1925–31. Included in Tafuri, Dal Co, Modern Architecture, Figs 292–293, p. 159.

dialectic between the house and the metropolis that was, by that time, already realised by May, Taut and Wagner.80 An equally ‘less signicant’ and ‘exceptional’ housing was the Siemensstadt in Berlin (Fig. 22). In this project, while the blocks by Gropius


Figure 13. Georg Fritz. Perspective drawing of Taut and Wagner’s Siedlung Britz, c. 1925, included in Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, Fig. 240.

and Bartning accomplished the requirements of the new housing reform, those by Scharoun and Häring appealed to the ‘organic myth’ and the desire to recover the aura.81 In an exemplary passage Tafuri says: ‘If the ideology of the Siedlung consummated, to use Benjamin’s phrase, the destruction of the “aura” traditionally connected with the “piece” of architecture, Scharoun and Häring’s “objects” tended instead to recover an “aura”, even if it was one conditioned by new production methods and new formal structure’.82 What is equally important in the social housing projects of May, Taut and Wagner for Tafuri was their production process. These projects moved towards a ‘radical reform of the organisation of the building industry and of the administrative control of urban development’.83 In terms of the building industry, the Siedlung projects – of May in par-

ticular – were based on studies of modules, prefabricated concrete panels, standardised minimum cells and the idea of Existenzminimum (Fig. 23). Such production techniques became available only through the latest developments in building industry, and thus made the social housing projects realistic. Therefore, these projects were one of the rare architectural achievements in history where the avant-gardist enthusiasm for new techniques on the one hand, and the political orientation to build for the workers’ class on the other, intersected. Though Tafuri started to avoid ‘avant-garde’ as a label, he treated social housing projects as the perfect sequel of the avant-gardist project. Historically they represented one of the few moments where the political potential that Benjamin celebrated in the era of mechanical reproduction was translated into architecture. Mass production


Figure 14. Bruno Taut, Siedlung OnkelToms-Hütte, Berlin, general ground plan, 1926–31, included in Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, Fig. 243.


Figure 15. Bruno Taut, Siedlung OnkelToms-Hütte, Berlin, 1926–31, included in Tafuri, Dal Co, Modern Architecture, Fig. 294, p. 160.

Figure 16. Bruno Taut, Siedlung Schillerpark, Berlin 1924–25, included in Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, Fig. 220. Figure 17. Ernst May and collaborators, Siedlung Praunheim, Frankfurt, 1926–30, included in Tafuri, Dal Co, Modern Architecture, Fig. 288, p. 158.


Figure 18. Ernst May, H. Boehm, et al., Siedlung Bornheimer Hang, Frankfurt (plan of the rst version), 1926, included in Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, Fig. 230.

Figure 19. Ernst May, H. Boehm, W, Bangert, Siedlung Römerstadt, Frankfurt, 1926–28, included in Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, Fig. 229.


Figure 20. Bruno Taut, project for an agricultural and livestock pavillion, Magdeburg, 1921–22, included in Tafuri, Dal Co, Modern Architecture, Fig. 281, p. 154.

to Tafuri for their administrative process. From 1919 on, ‘a new conception of the technician’s role in dealing with the urban problem’84 began to take shape. Architects such as Wagner, Taut and May had political and administrative roles in the control of urban environments especially where social housing was concerned. What Tafuri appreciates highly in this process is its potential to turn the author into producer (in Benjaminian terms) and the architect into organiser.

techniques would make it possible for the architects to build for society as a whole rather than for a privileged élite, just as mechanical reproduction would carry art to the masses. Apart from the technology of reproduction, the German experiments were also of particular interest

This theory may create less astonishment in the reader when it is understood within the Italian context of the 1960s, as well as within Tafuri’s own formative years. Giorgio Ciucci and David Dunster have emphasised the importance of debates on total planning, administrative centres, and the relation between architecture and city territory as key issues in Tafuri’s intellectual concerns in the 1960s. After commenting on Tafuri’s contributions to Casabella throughout the 1960s, which was then a journal committed to presenting large urban projects and the importance of planning, Ciucci has suggested that these formative years signicantly shaped Tafuri’s self-declared task as an intellectual in the years to come.85 Dunster, on the other hand, has argued that Architecture and Utopia was born out of the context of the 1960s when questioning the relation between politics and architecture had convinced many young students and architects that the answer lay in moving architecture into planning.86 However, Tafuri’s whole historical narrative in this book is constructed to prove the impossibility of any critical action towards political change through architecture. The book is written as a


Figure 21. Weissenhof Siedlung, aerial view, Stuttgart, 1927, included in Tafuri, Dal Co, Modern Architecture, Fig. 305, p. 163.

warning to those whose beliefs in the possibility of a new avant-garde ‘often serve as illusions that permit the survival of anachronistic “hopes in design”.’87 Tafuri regards avant-garde as an historically conditioned and failed attempt – a statement that has disturbed many architects and critics who took up the challenge to prove him wrong. According to Tafuri, there can be no new avant-garde or critical architecture, whose attempts he labels as ‘neoavant-garde’ with a humorous sense of irony, since a nostalgia for avant-garde is a contradiction in

terms. To put this in David Cunningham’s words: ‘In Tafuri’s essentially Hegelian schema, all possibility of an avant-garde was completely sublated within the modernist “ideology of the plan” and any attempt to re-activate it is at best a kind of futile nostalgia which fails to understand “historically the road traveled ”’.88 It is now necessary to disclose why Tafuri gives no chance to the future of the avant-garde and why he thinks the historical avant-garde was a failed attempt. As Tafuri admits both in Modern Architecture and The Sphere and the Labyrinth, the urban reform


Figure 22. Hans Scharoun, Walter Gropius, Hugo Häring et al., Siemensstadt Siedlung, project model, Berlin, 1929–31. (Scharoun’s blocks are the ones on the bottom-left, E.A.) Included in Tafuri, Dal Co, Modern Architecture, Fig. 299, p. 160.

projects of the Weimar period came to an end by 1933, and with them died all the hopes to achieve the sequel phase of the avant-gardist project. It is necessary to list Tafuri’s explanations for the failure of the Siedlung projects to understand the perceived historicity, failure and anachronicity of the avant-garde. According to Tafuri in Modern Architecture, when May was given the chance to realise a new urban model for Frankfurt, the project failed because May’s power was restrained to an area that hardly had any effect on the overall organisation of land use. The whole ideology of ‘rationalisation of building

production’ or studies of Existenzminimum collapsed because the rents of the houses ended up being too high for the working class, due to the rise in the cost of building materials or uncontrolled credits. ‘Here was the proof that a reform in one sector, isolated from a complex of institutional reforms coordinated in a coherent political strategy is doomed to failureeven in that particular sector’,89 Tafuri concludes. In some parts of Modern Architecture, Tafuri mentions the Nazi intervention as one of the causes of the failure of the Siedlung projects, 90 whereas in The Sphere and the Labyrinth, the historian nds even this explanation naive. After


‘there can be no class architecture, only class criticism of architecture’.92 Any socially oriented hope to build for the sake of the working class is only a naive idealism, unless the political system as a whole prepares the ground for it. In Fredric Jameson’s summarising words, ‘an architecture of the future will be concretely and practically possible only when the future has arrived, that is to say, after a total social revolution’.93 I would like to conclude this section with Tafuri’s own last words on the avant-garde, dedicated to the ‘melancholy man’ of Weimar who desperately tried but lost every possible ght: The fragments rising to the surface, in fact, form a question mark, which installs itself forcefully in the narrow passage that was painfully opened up between disciplinary reorganisation and politics. The encounter was transformed into a clash: only one who refuses to cross the mined terrain of this new battleeld will be able to see the funeral drapes uttering over it.94 narrating in detail all the alternatives Martin Wagner tried one by one, and all the failures each alternative had to go through,91 Tafuri ends by concluding that the failure of the Siedlung experiment was hardly due to Nazi intervention. Almost all of the options were tested and consumed anyway. It was rather the inability to cope with the real problems arising as an intrinsic result of capitalism that put the architects on a dead-end road. The only critical moment in modern architecture when architects had the role of building for the working class was also doomed to fail. These two explanations would support Tafuri’s well-known conclusion in Architecture and Utopia:

The ignored dilemma of modernity – a critique of Tafuri’s theory of architectural avant-garde Tafuri explains architectural avant-gardism (especially of Weimar Germany) as an historically conditioned, critical but failed attempt. Neither the destruction of aura – the dissolution of architecture into metropolis – as a result of modern reproduction techniques was achieved; nor could its political potentials for the working class be fullled.95 Tafuri’s tripartite argument that I excavated in his texts in terms of the death of history, confrontation with the metropolitan condition and death of architecture as

Figure 23. Ernst May, H. Boehm, W. Bangert, Siedlung Römerstadt, Frankfurt, 1926–28, included in Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, Fig. 21, p. 118. And in The Sphere and the Labyrinth, Fig. 227.


auratic object, constructs a convincing theory of architectural avant-garde. Although this theory does not explain every movement that is commonly referred to as avant-garde, such as Expressionism or Futurism, it is still strong in developing a necessary clarity for the use of the term. As a conclusion, I would like to question Tafuri’s judgements about the critical power of this avantgardist project. Was the death of history, celebration of the confrontation with the metropolitan condition and destruction of aura, the only critical strategy of its present, as Tafuri seems to argue as much as he denies any possibility for the avantgarde to change society? In doing this, I would like start by criticising Tafuri’s one-sided reading of Simmel and Benjamin, whose ideas on metropolis and aura hold the pivotal place in the historian’s theory of the architectural avant-garde. In his opinions about the metropolitan condition, Simmel is not as decided as Tafuri is. In Simmel’s texts, one can come across expressions that Tafuri himself might criticise as ‘anguished’. For instance, Simmel’s groundbreaking essay ‘Die Grossstadt und das Geistesleben’ (‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’) of 1903, analyses the adjustment of the individual to the speedy, money-oriented and ‘objective culture’ of the metropolis, at an early moment when the transformation from a non-metropolitan to a metropolitan life was taking place. However, unlike Tafuri’s, Simmel’s value judgements about this transformation are far from ambiguous or hesitant. For example, the two contrasting quotations below that are separated by nothing but three pages depict town life both as a peaceful and as a restricted milieu respectively :

This incapacity to react to new situations with the required amount of energy constitutes in fact that blasé attitude which every child of a large city evinces when compared with the products of the more peaceful and more stable milieu. (My emphases.)96 Small town life in antiquity as well as in the Middle Ages imposed such limits upon the movements of the individual in his relationships with the outside world and on his inner independence and differentiation that the modern person who is placed in a small town feels a type of narrowness which is very similar. (My emphasis.) 97 Simmel’s text uctuates between similar hesitations about the loss and gain introduced by metropolitan life. Portrayals of the metropolitan individual swing from his/her inability to judge any quality requiring a rened sensitivity, to the pleasure of freedom no non-metropolitan enjoys. On the one hand, Simmel is critical of the metropolitan individual’s reserved relationship with others as a result of the protective organ s/he develops against the rhythm of metropolitan life. On the other hand, he appreciates this ultimate loneliness as the price of metropolitan emancipation. While Tafuri regards the uncomplaining confrontation with loss as the only historically legitimate step, Simmel would have much more understanding for the ‘anguished’ responses to this loss. Simmel neither seizes the metropolitan condition with ultimate enthusiasm, nor criticises it with a nostalgic fear of novelty. A similar case is true for Tafuri’s interpretation of Benjamin as well. First, as it became perfectly clear in his ‘Thesis on the Philosophy of History,’98


Benjamin was far from celebrating ‘the storm we call progress’ as the fruitful condition of existence in modern times – unlike Tafuri’s avant-gardes. Second, it is now a well-known fact that Benjamin’s value judgements on the decline of aura with modernity were ambiguous. The different treatments of aura in ‘The Work of Art’99 essay of 1936 and ‘Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire’ (‘Some Motifs in Baudelaire’)100 of 1939 have been studied in detail.101 In the essay of 1936, Benjamin dened the aura of an artwork in terms of its authenticity, uniqueness and cult value, and celebrated the decline of aura with the advent of mechanical reproduction for the sake of its political potential. The essay of 1939, on the other hand, favoured the experience of aura as the condition where the person (or object) we look at is invested with the ability to return the look. Thus Benjamin pictured the metropolitan life (of the poet and aneur in particular) as an auratic experience. From his earliest essays, Benjamin had deep respect for the auratic experience of ‘looking back’ and he often used this metaphor to describe his sympathy for children and collectors,102 as well as German Romanticism. Similarly, in the ‘Der Erzähler’ (‘Storyteller ’)103 written in the same year as the ‘Work of Art’ essay, Benjamin favoured auratic experience in the traditional art of storytelling and referred to the contemporary decline of aura as a tragic loss. The fact that a set of essays that celebrate the decline of aura against another set that bemoans its loss are written during similar years, makes it harder to explain Benjamin’s treatment of aura in terms of chronologically oriented categories. In other words, Benjamin seems less to

change his mind essay after essay, than to be at the centre of a dilemma whose forces are equally compelling. Benjamin gives up neither the auratic experience nor the political potential of mass production.104 As Hilde Heynen and Thomas Llorens105 pointed out, Tafuri’s interpretation of Simmel and Benjamin is highly indebted to his colleague Massimo Cacciari from the Venice School. Cacciari criticises both Simmel and Benjamin for ‘refusing to accept the full consequences of [their] own analysis’.106 For Cacciari, Heynen suggests, the attempt to rescue values such as individuality and personal freedom, as did Simmel, is nothing but retreating into nostalgic and bourgeois values. In that way, Cacciari criticises even what he considers to be the most progressive writers that have helped him develop his own radical critique of modernisation. For Cacciari, in the last analysis the modern life of the metropolis is false consciousness based on the assertion that it is essentially tied to capitalism. In Heynen’s words: ‘Apparently he excludes the possibility that any form of critical thought could emerge that would do anything other than conrm the system it claims to condemn.’107 Tafuri seems to follow Cacciari’s approach in not highlighting the ambiguities and uncertainties of Simmel’s and Benjamin’s ideas on the metropolitan condition. Both in Simmel and Benjamin’s texts, we can observe a confrontation with what I would like to call the dilemma of modernity. Unlike Tafuri’s avant-gardes of the early twentieth century whose heads are stubbornly turned forward, Simmel and Benjamin stand at an in-between space. Of course, every critic is free to use and interpret any text


s/he desires from another writer. However, I would like to suggest that incorporating Benjamin’s and Simmel’s complex treatments of the decline of aura and metropolitan condition might have given another level of sophistication to Tafuri’s histories. Confronting the dilemma of modernity may not have explained the architectural avant-gardes, but it might have developed a better understanding of the potentials and limits of their approach. It might have opened a door for appreciating works that hold some of the avant-gardist aspirations, but that nevertheless do not promote the ‘end of architecture’ in the sense of its dissolution into the metropolis or the ‘death of history’ in the sense of total novelty. This might have brought a more subtle interpretation for other receptions of the experiences of modernity. For instance, Tafuri’s intolerance for anxiety over loss prevented him from cultivating any historical sympathy for many important gures of the period and caused him relative weakness or silence in interpreting architects such as Loos, Tessenow and Expressionists.108 Unfortunately, this also caused Tafuri to ignore any possible dialectical relation between his avantgardes and non-avant-gardes. Despite his commitment to dialectical analysis, it is surprising to realise that Tafuri’s interpretations of this period do not allow much dialectic between anguish and celebration of loss. Tafuri does not come to terms with the dilemma of modernity that many of his intellectual sources confronted. One may also challenge the historian’s account of the German avant-garde and Siedlungen of the Weimar period. Although this is not a topic I can elaborate here, one can nd enough historical justication to argue that

there was more continuity than break between the ‘anguished’ garden-city debate and the Siedlungen experience. To put it in other words, the history of Weimar Siedlungen as a transformed legacy of the pre-war garden-city debate was much more complicated than a shift or break from the anguish of loss to the brave confrontation with the metropolis achieved as a result of the avant-garde. Rereading this period by tracing the post-Weimar days of architects such as Taut, Wagner and Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky in Turkey (and Japan for Taut) or May in Africa would also conrm that the architects of the Siedlung experience internalised the dilemmas of modernity much more intensely than Tafuri liked to see.109 Finally, let me conclude with a few words on the possibility of criticism and critical practice today, whether we call it the new avant-garde or not. Tafuri’s interpretation of Benjamin may also be questioned for not admitting the critical power that Benjamin himself saw in the avant-garde. Critics such as David Cunningham and Hilde Heynen110 have pointed out that Benjamin’s own version of the avant-garde, which was developed in a series of essays including ‘Surrealism’, ‘Destructive Character’ and the Arcades, allows much more critical power to the artist than Tafuri is willing to admit. Unlike Tafuri, Benjamin imagined that art could have much more non-utopian yet transformative power. After all, it is this ‘daydreaming’ that motivates the artist for the demand toward change. I would like to suggest a second point of hesitation against Tafuri’s denial of the possibility of any critical architecture based on his analysis of the modern ‘crisis’. In the last analysis, capitalism and the


oppression of the working classes seem to lie at the root of this crisis according Tafuri. Yet with a predictable North American twist, one may be justied in asking whether the working class is the only group excluded from Architecture. As long as class remains as Tafuri’s privileged category of historical analysis, oppressions based on other categories such as gender, race and geography seem to be considered less relevant. However, looking back at the evolution of architectural criticism after Tafuri, perhaps with a level of far-fetched optimism, one may suggest that the critique of ideology as a methodological tool, and critical analysis of the oppressions and exclusions of Architecture have nevertheless shaken some status quo. Whether these criticisms have made any valuable change possible or whether they have actually retarded and concealed the confrontation with the ‘real question’ is something that is up to each individual’s own judgement.

Notes and references 1. This paper was rst written in 1999 and revised in 2002 for this publication. I would like to thank Mary

also see: Joan Ockman, ‘Venice and New York’, Casabella, 619–20 (January-February 1995), pp. 57–71. 4. Cunningham, Goodbun, Jaschke, ‘Introduction’, The

5.

6. 7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

McLeod for conducting a PhD seminar on Tafuri at Columbia University that inspired the rst draft of this paper. I would also like to thank the editors and referees of The Journal of Architecture for their valuable comments. 2. Giorgio Grassi, ‘Avant-Garde and Continuity’, S. Sarterelli (trans.), in Oppositions Reader, M. Hays (ed.) (Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1998) pp.

15.

391–401. Original publication: 1980. 3. R.E .Somol (ed.), Autonomy and Ideology. Positioning an Avant-Garde in America (Monacelli Press, New York, 1997). For the reception of Tafuri in the United States,

16.

Journal of Architecture, Vol. 6 (Summer 2001), p. 107. Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, G. Fitzgerald (trans.) (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, London, 1968). Translated from Teoria dell’arte d’avanguardia (Il Mulino, Bologna, 1962). Ibid., p. 25. Peter Bürger , Theory of the Avant-Garde, M. Shaw (trans.) (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1984). Translated from Theorie der Avant-Garde (Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1974). Ibid., p. 48. Clement Greenberg, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, in Art and Culture Critical Essays (Beacon Press, Boston, 1961). Original publication: 1939. P. Poggioli, op. cit., p. 108. Ibid., p. 123. Ibid., p. 89. Ibid., pp. 96–101. See essays by Michael Hays, Alan Colquhoun, Beatriz Colomina and Christian Hubert in Joan Ockman (ed.), Architecture production (Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1988). – Joan Ockman, ‘The Road Not Taken. Alexander Dorner’s Way Beyond Art’, in Autonomy and Ideology op. cit., pp. 82–120. Hilde Heynen, ‘What belongs to architecture?’ Avantgarde ideas in the modern movement,’ The Journal of Architecture, Vol. 4 (Summer 1999), pp. 129–147. Manfredo Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture, G. Verrecchia (trans) (Harper and Row, New York, 1980). Translated from: Teorie e storia dell’architettura (Laterza, Bari, 1968).


Ibid., p. 14. Ibid., p. 26. Ibid., p. 20. Ibid., p. 20. Ibid., p. 20. Ibid., pp. 30–1. On a different topic, Carla Keyvanian has also pointed out that there is a continuity between Tafuri’s interpretation of the Renaissance and of the modern period. While many regarded Tafuri’s return to the study of the Renaissance as a ‘retreat’ after disclosing the impossibility of any critical practice in the contemporary world, Keyvanian suggests connections between Tafuri’s reading of the Renaissance and the modern world, in the sense that the historian saw the beginnings of the modern ‘crisis’ in the Renaissance world. Carla Keyvanian, ‘Manfredo Tafuri: From the Critique of Ideology to Microhistories,’ Design Issues, Vol. 16, No.1 (Spring 2000), pp. 3–15. For another important article on the relation between Tafuri’s history of the Renaissance and the ‘crisis’ of the modern world, see: Daniel Sherer, ‘Progetto and Ricerca: Manfredo Tafuri as Critic and Historian’, Zodiac, 15 (March/August, 1996), pp. 33–51. 24. ’Though this chapter was written by Francesco dal Co, it can be argued that Tafuri would at least agree with the title and the main principles of the chapter. Throughout this paper – except the ‘Architecture Without Avant-Garde’ chapter mentioned at this moment – all of the references to Modern Architecture will be to the chapters written by Tafuri. This is necessary in order to be able to analyse Tafuri’s viewpoint, rather than confusing it with Dal Co’s. 25. Manfredo Tafuri, Francesco dal Co, Modern Architecture, R.E. Wolf (trans.) (Electa/Rizzoli, New York, 1986), v.1, p. 91. Translated from: Architettura contemporanea (Electa, Milan, 1976). 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

Ibid., p. 91. Ibid., p. 96. M. Tafuri, Theories and History, op.cit., p. 40. R. Poggioli, Theory of the Avant-Garde, op. cit., p. 79. Philip Johnson, Jeffrey Kipnis, ‘A Conversation Around the Avant-Garde’, in Autonomy and Ideology, R.E. Somol (ed.), op cit., p. 46. Tafuri revised and extended his article in Contropiano (1969) in 1973, published as Progetto e utopia (Architecture and Utopia). Almost one third of the book was added to the later version, yet the additions do not challenge the main argument. Apart from the third (‘Ideology and Utopia’) and the seventh (‘Architecture and Its Double: Semiology and Formalism’) chapters that were totally written anew for the book, Tafuri also added discussions on L’enfant, Jefferson, Piranesi’s Carceri etchings, MA, Vesc, and most notably Simmel’s ideas to the 1973 version. The concluding parts have also been revised extensively. – Manfredo Tafuri, ‘Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology’, (trans.) S Sartarelli, in Architecture Theory since 1968, M. Hays (ed.) (Columbia University Press, New York, 1999). Translated from ‘Per una critica dell’ideologia architettonica’ Contropiano, 1, (January–April 1969). – Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia. Design and Capitalist Development, B.L. La Penta (trans.) (The MIT Press, Cambridge, London, 1976). Translated from Progetto e utopia. Architettura e sviluppo capitalistico (Laterza, Bari, 1973). M. Tafuri, ‘Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology’, op. cit., pp. 17–18. M. Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, op. cit., pp. 88–9. M. Tafuri, dal Co, Modern Architecture, op. cit., p. 87. Manfredo Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth. Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the


36. 37.

38.

39. 40. 41.

42. 43.

1970s. P. D’Acierno, R. Connolly (trans.) (The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, 1987). Translated from: La sfera e il labirinto. Avanguardie e architettura da Piranesi agli anni ’70 (Einaudi, Turin, 1980). M. Tafuri, ‘Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology’, op. cit., p. 20. M. Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, op. cit., p. 308. – Franco Fortini, ‘Due avanguardie’, in Avanguardia e neoavanguardia (Sugar Editore, Milan, 1966), pp. 9–21. Georg Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, in On Individuality and Social Forms, Donald N. Levine (ed.) (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1971), p. 336. Translated from ‘Die Grossstadt und das Geistesleben’ (1903), in Brücke und Tür (Koehler, Stuttgart, 1957). Ibid., p. 338. Hilde Heynen, Architecture and Modernity. A Critique (MIT Press, Boston, 1999), p. 133. Yet as a footnote, it is important to note that Tafuri’s judgements about Expressionists such as Bruno Taut will undergo doubt, when he wrote ‘The Stage as Virtual City’ in 1975, which was reprinted in The Sphere and the Labyrinth. In this article, when he is tracing the genealogy of avant-gardist theatre, Tafuri confronts the ‘avant-gardism’ of Taut. His different ideas about Taut in these essays, and the extent to which Taut challenges Tafuri’s thesis on avant-garde as well as the strict opposition he constructs between the homelessness of the metropolis and the nostalgia of those who are anxious about this homelessness, is a theme I hope to explore in the future. M. Tafuri, F. dal Co, Modern Architecture, op. cit., p. 89. Ibid., p. 87.

44. Ibid., p. 113. 45. M. Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, op. cit., pp. 173–177. 46. M. Tafuri, ‘Introduction: The Historical Project’, in The Sphere and the Labyrinth’, op. cit., p. 17. The early version of this article was written in 1977. It is one of the last articles in the book. 47. M. Tafuri, F. dal Co, Modern Architecture, op. cit., p. 269, 277. 48. Manfredo Tafuri, ‘There is no criticism, only history. Interview by R. Ingersoll’, Casabella, 619–620 (Jan/Feb 1995), p. 99. Originally published: 1986. 49. M. Tafuri, ‘Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology’, op. cit., p. 19. 50. M. Tafuri, F. Dal Co, Modern Architecture, op. cit., pp. 111–112. 51. Heidegger briey mentioned his answer to Hegel’s judgement about the end of art in the ‘Epilogue’ of his essay ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’. However, unpacking this reply would not be possible unless it is interpreted in the light of Heidegger’s theory of art in general, that was developed in a number of essays including the ones in Poetry Language Thought and the rst volume of Nietzsche. This task would require another paper, which I have taken elsewhere: ‘Geçmiste Kaldigi Çagda Sanat. Bir Heidegger Yorumu’ (Art in an Age of its Own Oblivion. An Interpretation of Heidegger), Defter 25 (1995), pp. 65–87. Reprinted in: Stüdyolar (July 1996), pp. 18–27. 52. M. Tafuri, Theories and History, op. cit., p. 29. 53. M. Tafuri, ‘Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology’, op. cit., p. 20. 54. Ibid., p. 19. 55. For instance, the phrase ‘death of art’ in the article in Contropiano (p.21), becomes ‘death of aura’ in Architecture and Utopia (p.101). 56. Tafuri also uses the term ‘crisis of object’ to dene this situation. Upon being asked why he never really


57.

58.

59. 60.

61.

62.

63.

elaborates what he means by these terms in an interview; Tafuri answers that they were already analysed by Benjamin and therefore needed little further explanation Manfredo Tafuri, ‘The Culture Markets. Françoise Very interviews Manfredo Tafuri’, K. Hylton (trans.) Casabella, 619–20, (Jan/Feb 1995), p. 41. Originally published: 1976. Walter Benjaimin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, H. Arendt (ed.) (Schocken Books, New York, 1968), pp. 217– 253. Translated from: ‘Das Kunstwerk in Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’, 1936. Walter Benjamin, ‘Author as Producer’, in Reections, P. Demetz (ed.) (Schocken Books, New York, 1978), pp. 220–239. Translated from: ‘Der Autor als Produzent’, 1937. M. Tafuri, ‘Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology’, op. cit., pp. 6–7. The fact that Bürger’s theory can not explain all of the avant-gardes but some of them is also true for Tafuri. For example, the historian’s relative silence on the fascism of futurism or Italian Rationalism should hardly be neglected. Chronologically speaking, Tafuri could not have read Bürger, and he refers to Poggioli for an unrelated subject. Yet these two facts do not necessarily falsify my assertion here. ‘USSR-Berlin, 1922: From Populism to “Constructivist International” ’ was written in 1972; ‘Sozialpolitik and the City in Weimar’ was written in 1971. Tafuri’ s analysis of Le Corbusier could be the subject of another paper. While Le Corbusier’s Algiers project can be considered as the ultimate avant-garde in relation to the ‘end of architecture’ argument in Architecture and Utopia, Tafuri’s silence about Le Corbusier’s single houses – which are auratic objects par excellence standing in the landscape – is ques-

64. 65.

66. 67. 68.

69.

70. 71.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

tionable. On the other hand, after Architecture and Utopia, Tafuri would stop working on Le Corbusier until his article ‘Machine et Mémoire’ where he would mention ‘Le Corbusier’s anti-avant-gardism’. – Manfredo Tafuri, ‘Machine et Mémoire: The City in the work of Le Corbusier’, in Le Corbusier, H.A. Brooks (ed.) (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1987). p. 208. M. Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, op. cit., p. 198. M. Tafuri, F. Dal Co, ‘The Dialectic of European Modern Movement: Expressionism vs. Rigourism’, in Modern Architecture, op. cit., pp. 142–152. Ibid., p. 143. M. Tafuri, ‘Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology’, op. cit., p. 23. M. Tafuri, ‘USSR-Berlin, 1922: From Populism to “Constructivist International” ’, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, pp. 119–149. Tafuri explains how the ethics of ‘freedom from work’ in the Dadaist manifestoes would also t into this context. M. Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, op. cit., p. 131. I can note that this point is also mentioned by Michael Hays, in his study on Meyer. Michael Hays, Modernism and the Post Humanist Subject. The Architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer (The MIT Press, Cambridge, London, 1992). M. Tafuri, ‘Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology’, op. cit., p. 21. Ibid., p. 22. Ibid., p. 22. M. Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, op. cit., p. 221. Ibid., p. 197. M. Tafuri, F. dal Co, Modern Architecture, op. cit., p. 158.


78. Ibid., pp. 153–155. 79. At the risk of leaving the German context momentarily, it would support the argument to mention Tafuri’s interpretation of Oud and van Eesteren. ‘Both Oud and van Eesteren were members of the De Stijl group. For them, the prophecy proclaimed by Mondrian – a future in which art will disappear from life in the measure in which life itself will have absorbed the demand for “equilibrium” expressed by Neo-Plasticism – was something to be translated immediately into concrete experiments.’ The concrete experiments Tafuri mentions in this text that would translate the avant-gardist desire for the disappearance of art into architecture are the social housing projects by Oud and van Eesteren. In other words, Tafuri interprets social housing experiments in Holland as a continuation of avantgardist ideals, as he did in Germany. Quotation from: M. Tafuri, F. Dal Co, Modern Architecture, op. cit., p. 166. 80. Ibid., p. 161. 81. Ibid., p. 161, M. Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, op. cit., p. 117. 82. M. Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, op. cit., p. 117. 83. M. Tafuri, F. Dal Co, Modern Architecture, op. cit., p. 153. 84. Ibid., p. 153. 85. Although Ciucci admits that Tafuri’s practice as a writer and intellectual would go through some transformations after he met Cacciari, Astor Rosa and Negri in Venice, these early years of interest in planning issues were indicative of his future work. In that sense Theories and History was not only a ‘breakthrough’, but also a ‘point of arrival’. Giorgio Ciucci, ‘The Formative Years’, Casabella (Jan/Feb. 1995), pp. 13–25. 86. David Dunster, ‘Critique: Tafuri’s Architecture and Utopia’, AD, 73 (1977), p. 3. 87. M. Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, op. cit., p. 182.

88. David Cunningham, ‘Architecture, Utopia and the futures of the avant-garde,’ The Journal of Architecture, Vol. 6 (Summer 2001), p. 171. Cunningham also suggests that Tafuri’s assertion itself is part of an historically conditioned tradition of the critique of romanticism in architecture. Tafuri follows the Marxist critics of romanticism (such as the critique of utopian socialism in The Communist Party Manifesto) who were sceptical of any possibility for the artist and architect to alter social structure through their work. 89. M. Tafuri, F. Dal Co, Modern Architecture, op. cit., p. 158. 90. Ibid., pp. 162, 166. 91. Tafuri lists several reasons for failure such as the inability to confront the free play of market forces (p. 210); the inability to control related sectors other than social housing (p.212); the 1929 economic crisis (p. 218), etc. – Manfredo Tafuri, ‘Sozialpolitik and City in Weimar Germany’, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, op. cit., pp. 197–233. Originally published: 1971. 92. M. Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, op. cit., p. 179. 93. Fredric Jameson, ‘Architecture and the Critique of Ideology,’ J. Ockman (ed.), Architecture Criticism Ideology (Princeton Architectural Press, NY, 1985), p. 55. 94. M. Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, op. cit., p. 233. 95. In that sense Tafuri shares another point with Bürger. For Bürger, the fact that we still have art as (institutionalised) Art is proof that the avant-gardist project was never accomplished. 96. G. Simmel, ‘Metropolis and Mental Life’ . . ., p. 329. 97. Ibid., p. 333. 98. Walter Benjamin, ‘Thesis on the Philosophy of History,’ in Illuminations, H. Arendt, (ed.) (Schocken Books, New York, 1968). Originally written: 1940. 99. W. Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art . . . op. cit.,


100. Walter Benjamin, ‘On some Motifs in Baudelaire’, in Illuminations, p. 169. Translated from: ‘Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire’ 1939. 101. Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin. An Aesthetic of Redemption (Columbia University Press, New York, 1982). – Miriam Hansen, ‘Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology’ NGC, 40, (Winter 1987), pp. 179–224. – A. Arato, E. Gebhart, ‘Aesthetic Theory and Criticism’, in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (Continuum, New York, 1995), pp. 209–215. 102. Benjamin interpreted children’s mimetic and collectors’ non-instrumental relation to things with the metaphors of looking back. For Benjamin’s early essays on children see: – ‘A Child’s View of Colour’, (1914–15). – ‘Painting and the Graphic Arts’, (1917). – ‘Riddle and Misery’, (1920–21). – ‘Old Forgotten Children’s Books’, (1924). – ‘A Glimpse into the World of Children’s Books’, (1924). – ‘One-Way Street’, (1923–26). reprinted in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol 1., M. Bullock, M.W. Jennings (ed.) (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, London, 1996). For Benjamin’s essays on collectors, see: – Paris, Capitale du XIX. Siécle, E. Jephcott (trans.) (Les Editions du Cerf, 1989). – ‘Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian’, in The Essential Frankfurt Reader, A. Arato, E. Gebhart (ed.) (Continuum, New York, 1995), pp. 209–215. Translated from: Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, Vol. 6, 1937. – ‘Unpacking My Library. A Talk About Book Collecting’, in Illuminations, H. Arendt, (ed.) (Schocken Books, New York, 1968). Originally written: 1931. 103. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, in Illuminations . . . op. cit., pp. 83–109. Translated from: ‘Der Erzähler’, 1936.

104. For a discussion and possible implications of different treatments of aura in Benjamin, see: – Samuel Weber, ‘Mass Mediauras; or, Art, Aura, and Media in the work of Walter Benjamin’, in Walter Benjamin. Theoretical Questions, D.S. Ferris (ed.) (Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1996). pp. 27–49. – Miriam Hansen, ‘Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology’ op. cit. – Esra Akcan, ‘Duvarlar Ona Geri Bakar. Walter Benjamin, Modern Aura ve siirsel Düsünce’ (“Walls Look Back to Him. Walter Benjamin, Modern Aura and Poetical Thinking”), Gelenek ve Modernite. Kemal Aran’a Armagan, E. Aközer, N. Ögüt (eds) (METU Architectural Press, Ankara, 2001). 105. Tomas Llorens, ‘Manfredo Tafuri: Neo-Avant-Garde and History’, AD, 51, no. 6/7 (1981), pp. 83–95. Hilde Heynen, Architecture and Modernity. A Critique, op. cit., pp. 136–141. 106. H. Heynen, Architecture and Modernity. A Critique, op. cit., p. 138. 107. Ibid., p. 140. 108. Perhaps it is not so surprising that many of these architects are handled in chapters written by dal Co in Modern Architecture. 109. It would obviously exceed the scope of this paper to discuss this long history, which I am working on for my dissertation: ‘Modernisation and Melancholy. Cross-cultural Translations in House-Culture between Germany and Turkey,’ (provisional title) PhD dissertation in process. Graduate School of Architecture, Columbia University. 110. D. Cunningham, ‘Architecture, Utopia and the futures of the avant-garde’, op cit., pp. 175–178; Heynen, ‘ “What belongs to architecture?” Avantgarde ideas in the modern movement,’ op cit., pp. 136–143.

MAnfredo Tafuri's Theory of the Architectural Avant-garde

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