Tafuri, Manfredo

Date born: 1935

Place born:  Rome, Italy

Date died:  1994

Place died:  Venice (?)

Marxist architectural historian of the renaissance and modern era; architectural theorist.  Tafuri was born to Simmaco Tafuri and and Elena Trevi (Tafuri).  His father was an engineer.  He attended the University of Rome when Guilio Carol Argan (q.v.) was chair of art history.  Although Argan had written on architectural history, there were no architectural historians in academic positions.  Tafuri's major influence was his design professor, Ludovico Quaroni.  He received a Master's degree in architecture in 1960 and was appointed professor at Palermo.  Tafuri wrote a small monograph on his mentor Quaroni in 1964. He married Guiseppina Rapisarda in 1966. As an architectural historian, his major counterparts were practicing architects who also wrote about architecture, Bruno Zevi (q.v.) and Paolo Portoghesi (q.v.). His 1967 book Teorie e storia dell'architettura outlined, among other things, the deficiencies of architects as historians. It also predicted the failure of modernism (cf. Walter Benjamin), outlining modern architecture's complicity with capitalism.  Tafuri led a celebrated dispute with Zevi and Portoghesi, particularly after his appointment as professor of architecture at the Instituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia, Tolentini, Italy, in 1968.  Tafuri accused them of viewing architecture with "operational criticism", i.e., using their agendas as practicing architects to frame the history of architecture.  He instead suggested that architectural criticism and history be considered the same thing, and that practicing architects abandon the prospect. In his 1973 Progetto e Utopia, he called on architects to simple act and not write. In Venice he was also the director of the  Institute of History, Instituto Universitario di Architettura in Venice. His ties with Marxist theory (and his re-organizational mandate at the Instituto) were such that he brought in members of the Italian Communist party in the department. His architectural history on an entire street in Rome, Via Guila, 1973, and L'armonia e i conflitti, 1983 (on San Francesco della Vigna in Venice) weave social and political history into a nearly comprehensive account of their topics.  In his final years, Tafuri became the exponent for serious architectural conservation carried out by trained architects.  He succeeded in halting the plans for Renzo Piano to modernize the environs of Palladio's Basilica in Vincenza.

Tafuri was one of the first professional (academic) architectural historians in Italy.  He embraced a Marxist critique of architecture.  In both Theories and History of Architecture and his (somewhat mis-translated English title) Architecture and Utopia (Progetto e Utopia in Italian), he asserted that architecture was a beautiful corpse, an art form no longer sustainable in the modern world.  Tafuri saw capitalist production and consumption eroding values, not stabilizing them, and hence the modern era was not able to create a context of believe in which architecture could flower. He castigated post-modern architects as not having the courage to stand up to fashion.  From the 18th century onward, Tafuri argued, architects had subconsciously built buildings contradicting a social reality they were powerless to control: instead of expressing the values of modern society, buildings concealed them. His opinions, always strongly argued, seemed uneven.  He praised Le Corbusier's architecture in Algiers, but despaired at his Chandigarh work.  Some of Tafuri's notions may have been drawn from the 1891 book, Architecture, Mysticism and Myth by William Lethaby (q.v.), but more directly assimilated the work of Michel Foucault (1926-1984), Galvano Della Volpe (1895-1968), Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), and Theodor Adorno (1903-1969).

Home Country:  Italy

Sources:  Hartoonian, Gevork. "Beyond Historicism: Manfredo Tafuri's Flight." Art Criticism 17 no. 2 (2002): 28-40; Sherer, Daniel. "Tafuri's Renaissance: Architecture, Representation, Transgression."  Assemblage no. 28 (December 1995): 34-45;  [transcript]  Manfredo Tafuri.  Interviews with Art Historians, 1991-2002. Getty Research Institute, Malibu, CA; [obituary:] Ackermann, James S. "The Historical Project of Manfredo Tafuri." Casabella 619-620, (January-February, 1995): 165-7;  Ackerman, James S. "In Memoriam: Manfredo Tafuri, 1935-1994."   The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians  53, No. 2 (Jun., 1994): 137-138;  Muschamp, Herbert. "Nocturne For the Marxist Of Venice." New York Times May 8, 1994, p. 37.

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