Manfredo Tafuri

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Manfredo Tafuri (Rome, 1935–Venice, 1994) was an Italian architect, Art Historian, and Social Historian/Theorist. He is noted for contrasting the "operative critique" of much architectural historians like Bruno Zevi, Leonardo Benevolo, Nikolaus Pevsner and Charles Jencks. He also has been anti-modern and anti-postmodern. During the Seventies he wrote some crucial essays for "Oppositions", the architecture magazine directed by Peter Eisenman. After 1980 Tafuri began studying the theory and practice of Renaissance architecture, offering new and compelling readings of its various social, intellectual and cultural contexts, while providing a broad understanding of uses of representation that shaped the entire era. He synthesizes the history of architectural ideas and projects through discussions of the great centers of architectural innovation in Italy (Florence, Rome, and Venice), key patrons from the middle of the fifteenth century to the early sixteenth century, and crucial figures such as Leon Battista Alberti, Filippo Brunelleschi, Francesco di Giorgio, Lorenzo de’ Medici, Bramante, Raphael, Baldassare Castiglione, and Giulio Romano. He held the position of chair of architectural history at the IUAV University of Venice.

[edit] Books and articles by Tafuri

  • Teoria e storia dell’architettura. Bari, Laterza, 1968.
  • « Per una critica dell’ideologia architettonica ». Contropiano, Materiali Marxisti, no. 1 (1969).
  • Progetto e utopia: Architettura e sviluppo capitalistico. Bari, Laterza, 1973.
  • w/ Francesco Dal Co. Architettura contemporanea. Milan, Electa, 1976.
  • La sfera e il labirinto : Avanguardia e architettura da Piranesi agli anni ’70. Turin, Einaudi, 1986.
  • Interpreting the Renaissance: Princes, Cities, Architects, Yale University Press, 2006

[edit] Secondary sources on Tafuri and the "Venice School"

  • BIRAGHI, Marco. Progetto di crisi. Manfredo Tafuri e l'architettura contemporanea. Milan, Marinotti ed., 2005.
  • CACCIARI, Massimo. Architecture and nihilism: on the philosophy of modern architecture. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1993.
  • COHEN, Jean-Louis. « La coupure entre architectes et intellectuels, ou les enseignements de l’italophilie ». Extenso, no. 1 (1984), pp. 182-223.
  • DE SOLÀ-MORALES, Ignasi (editor). « Being Manfredo Tafuri: Wickedness, Anxiety, Disenchantment ». ANY, no. 25-26 (février 2000).
  • Special issue of Casabella, no. 619-620 (jan.-feb. 1995).
  • HEYNEN, Hilde. « The Venice School, or the Diagnosis of Negative Thought ». Architecture and Modernity: a critique. Cambridge, Ma., MIT Press, 1999, pp. 128-148.
  • HOEKSTRA, Titia Rixt. « Building versus Bildung. Manfredo Tafuri and the construction of a historical discipline ». Ph.d. dissertation, Groningen, University of Groningen, 2005. Online : http://dissertations.ub.rug.nl/faculties/arts/2005/t.r.hoekstra/
  • KEYVANIAN, Carla. « Manfredo Tafuri's Notion of History and its Methodological Sources: From Walter Benjamin to Roland Barthes ». MArch dissertation, Cambridge, Ma., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1992.
  • LEACH, Andrew. « Choosing History: A Study of Manfredo Tafuri’s Theorisation of Architectural History and Architectural History Research ». Ph.d. dissertation, Gent, Universiteit Gent, 2006. Online : http://eprint.uq.edu.au/archive/00003989/
  • LEACH, Andrew. Manfredo Tafuri: Choosing History. Ghent, A&S Books, 2007.
  • TOURNIKIOTIS, Panayotis. « History as the Critique of Architecture ». The Historiography of Modern Architecture. Cambridge, Ma., MIT Press, 1999.


D. SHERER, "Progetto and Ricerca. Manfredo Tafuri as Critic and Historian," Zodiac 15 (1996), 32-56.

[edit] References