MAnfredo Tafuri's Theory of the Architectural Avant-garde

135

The Journalof ArchitectureVolume 7Summer 2002

Manfredo Tafuri’s theory of thearchitectural avant-garde1

Esra Akcan GSAPP, Columbia University, New York, USA

© 2002 The Journal of Architecture 1360–2365 DOI: 10.1080/13602360210145088

Despite its frequent use, the meaning of the term architectural avant-garde is ambiguousand an explicit theory delineating its parameters has not been written. What would bethe theoretical glue that binds various architectural movements of the early twentiethcentury, which are commonly referred to as historical avant-gardes? What might be aspeci� c theory of architectural avant-garde, one that is not necessarily synonymous withthe theories of avant-garde in visual arts or literature? In this paper, I suggest that atheory of architectural avant-garde is inscribed in Manfredo Tafuri’s writings, and I exca-vate this theory in relation to three related themes: End (death) of history, metropolitancondition and end of architecture as auratic object.

Tafuri considers ‘death of history’, in the sense of the rejection of the past or aspirationfor newness, as one of the leading principles of avant-garde movements. The metropoli-tan condition that requires a brave confrontation with the ‘intensi� cation of nervous stim-ulation’, ‘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 feelinganguished for the lost past, the avant-gardes confront the new chaos of metropolis as afruitful condition of existence. Yet these two themes alone have the risk of culminating inthe cult of novelty as the sole ground of avant-gardism, and of dissolving the distinctionbetween avant-garde and fashion. Though Tafuri accepts the description of avant-garde interms of the shock of the new, contingency and ephemerality, I suggest that it is the thirdtheme 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 ofaura’, 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 cultobjects, ‘the dialectic between architectonic object and urban organisation’ enters into aradically new phase with the avant-garde. If one translates (Tafuri’s reading of) Benjamin’sand Hegel’s theories into architecture, it follows that the ultimate architectural avant-gardewould mean the end of architecture in the sense of its total dissolution into the urban struc-ture of the modern metropolis. The ful� llment of the architectural avant-garde would be thetotal dissolution of Architecture into something outside itself, of aura into mass, of form intoprocess, 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-

Framing the questionDespite its frequent use in professional discourse,

the meaning of the term ‘avant-garde’ in architec-

ture is ambiguous and an explicit theory delin-

eating its parameters has not been written. Giorgio

Grassi even claimed that an architectural avant-

garde is a contradiction in terms, not only because

the avant-garde movements have had a minor in�u-

ence on the major shifts in architecture; but also

because architectural avant-gardes have desperately

tried to accommodate themselves to the avant-

garde ‘isms’ that were born and developed within

the sphere of plastic arts (such as Cubism, Suprem-

atism, or Neoplasticism).2 Grassi challenged the task

of theorising an architectural avant-garde, since for

him this would by de�nition 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 sympo-

sium on the American architectural avant-garde

attempted to show the importance of the term forunderstanding architectural practices in this coun-

try, 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 post-

war 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 avant-

garde’.4 Both of these publications critically yet

brie�y mentioned Manfredo Tafuri and confronted

his judgement about the impossibility of a new

or ‘neo-avant-garde’ to emerge. It seems that adiscussion on both Tafuri’s use of the term and clar-

i�cations 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, bycomparing and contrasting their propositions with

Manfredo Tafuri’s ideas.

In 1962, Poggioli5 outlined four types of avant-

garde attitude: activism, in the sense of ‘sheer joy

of dynamism’,6 mobility, speed or sportive enthusi-asm; antagonism, in the sense of opposition to

academic or established schools, as well as nega-

tive 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 thesense of antagonism that reaches the level of

136Manfredo Tafuri’s

theory of thearchitectural avant-garde

Esra Akcan

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

self-destruction and welcomes this self-ruin as asacri�ce for future movements.

For Bürger7 writing in 1974, on the other hand,

it was more important to acknowledge the his-

toricity of the avant-garde (situate the avant-garde

in its historical context) than to propose someahistorical 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 movedfrom being a collective form of production and

reception to an individual affair; art works gradu-

ally lost their meaning as cult objects and became

portrayals of ‘bourgeois self-understanding’.8 This

line of development enabled the artists to attaintheir ‘freedom’ from religiosity and royalty, at the

expense of cutting the very veins that connected

them to life praxis. In other words, with the bour-

geois world, art moved towards its own autonomy,

gaining its own place as an institution separatedfrom 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 orcourt, but to contemporary problems of the soci-

ety; 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 de�ned avant-garde as a ‘minority cul-

ture’10 with an ‘aristocratic taste,’ in essential ‘oppo-

sition to mass culture and proletarian art’.11

Furthermore, Poggioli claimed that any presumedaf�nity between artistic radicalism and political rad-

icalism 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 opposesBürger’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’sand Bürger’s theories in explaining the architectural

avant-garde have been pointed out by several archi-

tectural critics.14 For Bürger, I would add questions

such as: Can we talk about an autonomous archi-

tecture in any period in the �rst place? Would theattack on institutionalisation of art hold true for

architectural avant-gardes who unavoidably situ-

ated themselves in a profession that is necessarily

tied to institutionalisation of pedagogic and pro-

duction processes? Nevertheless, this does notmean that Bürger’s theory is useless to understand-

ing 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 tofall short in explaining the architectural avant-

gardes 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 asa 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

137


twentieth century, which are commonly referred toas 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 shall

suggest that a theory of architectural avant-gardeis 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 Sphereand the Labyrinth).

Throughout his writings, I suggest that Tafuri

uses three related themes to refer to the architec-

tural avant-garde. I would like to name and dis-

cuss them as follows: death of history, confronta-tion with the metropolitan condition and death of

architecture as auratic object.

1. Death of historyAs becomes clear in Theories and History of Archi-tecture,16 the concept of history is key to under-

standing Tafuri’s theory of architectural avant-garde.

The term history as well as its derivatives such as his-

toricism, historicity or historicisation can have multi-

ple meanings. Therefore, Tafuri’s use of these termsneeds to be clari�ed. 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 ‘deathof 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 ofrejection of the past – and aspiration for new-

ness as one of the leading principles of the avant-

garde movements. Yet, this desire to break with his-

tory should be conceived as an historically legitimate

point of arrival within the course of a process thathad 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 theQuattrocento. 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 artis-

tic activity; it is the adventure of man that takes onthe 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 ofBrunelleschi 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 reinforcethe 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 con�rms their timeless truth

value. The modern conception of history accepts

the pastness of the past.



Esra Akcan

In the �rst chapter of Theories and History, Tafurigives a quick history of the ‘eclipse of history,’ from

the Renaissance’s radical break to the resurrection

of historicism in the 1960s. In this history, avant-

garde refers to a particular moment whose rejec-

tion of history is an historically conditioned pointof arrival.

[T]he artistic avant-gardes of the twentieth cen-

tury 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 continu-

ity. 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 historic-ally legitimate act of the time . . . The anti-

historicism 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, andits 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 eclipseof history, which began in the Renaissance. Rejec-

tion of the past, and self-conscious or selective use

of historical forms on the grounds of their per-

ceived validity for the present – anti-historicism and

historicism – shared the same consciousness oftime. The formation of avant-gardes was intrinsi-

cally 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 theabstract de�nition 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 avant-garde and another trajectory of the modern move-

ment. They say ‘it is important to realise that not all

modern architecture has had its roots in the avant-

garde movements. . . . [I]n opposition to the

Dionysiac vitalism of Futurism and Dada there is alsothe classical style or the unloquacious reserve of

those who, speaking the language of renunciation,

reject the notion of death postulated by the avant-

garde’ (my emphasis).25 Tafuri and dal Co consider

Behrens, Loos, Tessenow, Garnier and Perret to beamong the classicist trajectory of the modern

movement, as these architects sought ‘a new dignity’

and for forms with ‘petri�ed words’26 (Figs 1–3). For

those architects who ‘shunned avant-garde experi-

mentalism but without falling into the populist ornationalist 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 thecon�ict 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 Theoriesand History, but seems reluctant to pursue it to its

logical conclusion.

What is the signi�cance, for the artistic object,

of the loss of its traditional value as a thing

139


Figure 1. Peter

Behrens, AEG

Turbine Factory,

1909. Included in

Tafuri, Dal Co,

Modern Architecture,

Fig. 130, p. 82.

Figure 2. Heinrich

Tessenow, Single-

Family 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.



Esra Akcan

subject to ageing, and of its renunciation to alife 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 itslife-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 missingword 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 ‘des-

tiny’ of avant-garde is fashion, in the sense of

‘impos[ing] and suddenly accept[ting] as a new ruleor norm what was, until a minute before, an excep-

tion or whim, then abandon[ing] it again after it has

become a commonplace, everybody’s “thing” ’.29

After recalling Charles Baudelaire’s de�nition of

the genius as the person who continuously cre-ates stereotypes, Poggioli claims that avant-gardism

means entering into a fashion system in which the

artist continuously cycles on a spiral. Being radi-

cal, then fashionable and then stereotypical is the

repeating pattern. For Poggioli, it should follow thatavant-gardes are the makers of fashionable objects,

though not the buyers; they are the élite who pro-

duce new things and throw them out after their

assimilation by the masses.

If we considered this as the only criterion, theavant-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 andbeing 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 fascinationwith the new �ippant, lightweight. I get the

point. But it just expresses my desire to be dif-

ferent, to see different things and yet to stay

perfectly centered within the system. I am not

out to change anything. I am just �ghting offboredom. . . . 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 sug-

gest that he further re�nes this de�nition with thehelp 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 sur-

prisingly mean similar things for him – that release

Tafuri’s theory of the avant-garde from a de�nitionbased 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 metropolitanconditionFrom his article ‘Toward a Critique of Architectural

Ideology’ in Contropiano (1969) onwards, Tafuri

141


puts metropolis at the centre of his explanationsof 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 metropol-

itan life to the expanded and reworked version of

his article, which appeared as Progetto e utopia.

Architettura e svillupo capitalistico (Architectureand Utopia) in 1973.31 In Architettura contem-

poranea (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 metropo-

lis in terms of ‘intensi�cation of nervous stimula-

tion’, ‘rapid crowding of changing images’, ‘blaséattitude’, ‘regulation of money economy and com-

modi�cation of objects’. Although the differentia-

tion of these three writers and their in�uence

on Tafuri would have been useful for the sake of

adequate detail, for our purposes I shall shift myemphasis to the avant-garde responses to this met-

ropolitan condition.

In the article in Contropiano, Tafuri explains the

speci�c characters of avant-gardism as follows:

To remove the experience of shock from allautomatism, to use that experience as the

foundation for visual codes and codes of action

borrowed from already established characteris-

tics of the capitalist metropolis, . . . to reduce

the structure of artistic experience to the statusof pure object, to involve the public, as a uni-

�ed whole, in a declaredly interclass and there-

fore antibourgeois ideology: such are the tasks

taken on, as a whole, by the avant-gardes of

the twentieth century. . . . [A]s a whole – thatis beyond any distinction between construc-

tivism 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 metropo-lis . . . contained in nuce the problems that

were to be at the centre of the historical avant-

garde movements . . . The problem was, in

fact, how to render active the intensi�cation

of nervous stimulation; how to absorb theshock provoked by the metropolis by trans-

forming it into a new principle of dynamic

development; how to ‘utilise’ to the limit the

anguish which ‘indifference to value’ con-

tinually provokes and nourishes in the metro-politan experience.33

As these quotations suggest, even though Tafuri

adds the parts on Simmel afterwards, his de�ni-

tion of the avant-garde in terms of the accommo-

dation of shock experience in the metropolis doesnot change. Almost all of Tafuri’s avant-gardes at

the dawn of the twentieth century confronted the

speedy, stimulated and nervous life of the metrop-

olis with a sharp, brave and cool performance



Esra Akcan

(Fig. 4). In that sense, they be�t the military con-

notations of the term ‘avant-garde’. If metropolitan

life were the battle�eld to �ght for the ideology of

progress and modernity, the self-image of theavant-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, unlikeSimmel, could not deal with several layers of loss

imposed on the individual by metropolitan life. By

constructing the opposition between civilisation

and culture or between society and community

(Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft) and by not hidinghis sympathy for the latter, Tönnies nostalgically

longed for the ‘organic’ community, the peasant life

and the spirit of neighbourliness, which was putinto 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 subjec-tive, no longer mattered . . . the metropolis

became the very sickness to which the intellec-

tual felt himself condemned: exile in his home-

land: . . . Baudelaire deliberately and in full

awareness laid the bases for a personal attitudethat was to remain constant in all the European

avant-gardes: the redemption of the intellec-

tual can come about if he will accept his own

condition as a sickness that can be sublimated

only through the eccentricity of the clown. (Myemphases.)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. WhileTönnies still longed for an essential home in the

era of homelessness with an anguish typical to nos-

talgic people, the avant-gardes – according to Tafuri

– confronted and accepted the ‘disease’ of the

metropolis as a normal and actually a fruitful con-dition of existence.

In relation to this de�nition who would be the

avant-gardes? In the article in Contropiano of 1969,

Tafuri differentiates two trajectories of the avant-

garde, that are nevertheless dependent on eachother 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 avant-

gardes such as De Stijl and Bauhaus represented

Figure 4. Georg

Grosz,

Friedrichstrasse,

1918. Included in

Tafuri, Architecture

and Utopia, Fig. 15,

p. 97.

143


order, while Dada and Surrealism represented and

con�rmed 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 shouldnot 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 pro�t-

ruled consumption, one must draw upon all its

progressive valences.36

As this quotation suggests, Tafuri interprets these

two avant-gardes as two necessarily related posi-

tions. 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 apparentorder, but seeming chaos in the capitalist metropo-

Figure 5. Herbert

Bayer, cover of the

Bauhaus journal,

1928. Included in

Tafuri, Dal Co,


Fig. 223, p. 131.

Figure 6. George

Grosz and John

Heart�eld, Dada-

merika, 1919.

Included in Tafuri,

The Sphere and the

Labyrinth, Fig. 96.



Esra Akcan

Figure 7. Theo van

Doesburg, colour

study for architec-

ture, 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.

145


lis. Tafuri is indebted to Franco Fortini in differentiat-ing 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 subjectivityand absolute objectivity’. Fortini differentiates

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 bydiscursive and rational means’. Although Tafuri and

Fortini do not refer to Simmel at this point, the oppo-

sition between a ‘subjective’, ‘irrational’ response

and ‘objective’, ‘rational’ culture is noticeably simi-

lar 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 de�ning two avant-garde responses.

For Simmel, the ‘over-individuation’, ‘strangesteccentricities ’ 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 metropo-lis.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 rootof 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 metrop-olis and indeed appear to its residents as the

saviours of their unsatis�ed yearnings.39

Chaos and Order, eccentricity and organisation are

two forces pulling the tensioned rope of metropo-

lis from two sides. Their presence depends not onlyon 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 isfundamental to modern mechanised civilisation: the

dialectic between the apparent chaos of the con-

stantly 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 theother.’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 bemore speci�c, 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’, ‘mys-

tical’, – not to mention ‘Orientalist’ that needsanother 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 metropol-itan phenomenon, to overcome the inertia of the

pure anguish’.42 They did not try to reconcile the

individual with the metropolis. Rather than ‘sub-

limating’ or ‘dispelling’ the experience of shock,



Esra Akcan

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 onthe avant-garde, Tafuri continues to contrast ‘a

“progressive” ideology – typical of the historical

avant-gardes’ to a ‘regressive ideology’ that pro-

moted ‘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 treat-

ing Expressionism as a proto-fascist movement.

Tafuri uses the fact that some late romantic and

Expressionist architects took sides with Nazism asthe means to prove that ‘the ambiguity of certain

basic theses in the debate over the modern archi-

tecture became dramatically obvious’. Tafuri draws

a similarity between Speer’s monumental plans for

Berlin, striving to unify the whole city as if theywould 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 with-

out contradictions’,47 on the other. Such analogies

make Tafuri’s interpretation of Expressionism one of

his weakest. In an attempt to justify his pejorativecomments 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 againstthe instrumentalisation of history for design prac-

tices 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 nostal-gia, 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 partof 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 intol-

erance for any nostalgic ‘anguish’ is directly relatedto 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 cultof 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 architec-

ture on mountain-

scapes around

Lake Lugano’, from

Alpine Architecture,

1917–19, included

in Tafuri, Dal Co,


Fig. 189, p. 111.

147


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

3. Death of architecture as auratic objectIn 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 avant-

gardist 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 justi�-

cation 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 super-

�uous . . . Then we will no longer need

pictures and statues because we will be livingin 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 intoLife’. However, this theory is hardly Hegelian and

actually – speaking within the discourse of aesthet-

ics as an area of philosophical investigation rather

than art history – it may at best be a Heideggerian

response to the Hegelian question.51 Neverthe-less, this still seems to be a basic mental tool for

Tafuri himself, and I will therefore continue to dis-close 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 themetropolitan 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 avant-

gardist attempt to dissolve art in life.53 Thus, unlike

Grassi for whom architectural avant-garde alwaysfollows behind the artistic avant-garde, for Tafuri

architecture and city are necessary for the accom-

plishment 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 speci�cally,

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 whichNeoplasticist 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 vitalexplanatory power to differentiate the architectural

avant-gardes from their precedents, since architec-

ture has always been more closely tied to life. Yet,

viewed from another angle, this observation also

suggests the speci�c locus of architecture and thecity 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?



Esra Akcan

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 Architectureand Utopia Tafuri uses the ‘death of art’ and ‘death

of aura’ in an interchangeable way55 and never

elaborates any distinction between the two con-

cepts.56

In the late 1960s, the texts Tafuri examines ofBenjamin 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 andthey provide a useful background especially for the

historical avant-garde movements that were polit-

ically on the left. In the ‘Work of Art’ essay of

1936, Benjamin celebrates the mechanical repro-

duction technologies, since mechanical reproduc-tion 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 avant-garde 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 radicalchange in the way art works are produced and

received. Benjamin celebrates the new reproduc-

tion 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 wouldbe produced and consumed collectively.

I will suggest that when Tafuri formulates avant-

gardism as the death of art, what he means is the

end of art as an auratic object whose aura is depen-

dent on its authenticity, uniqueness and productionby 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 archi-tectural 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 anobject standing independently in the city struc-

ture. Subsequently, the end of architecture would

also require the death of the architect as the

individual creator. The ful�llment of the architec-

tural 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 archi-tecture’ 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

149


radical challenge to the institution of architectureitself, to the ways architecture is produced and

consumed within the modern metropolis. In that

sense, we can assert that Tafuri’s de�nition 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 speci�c 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 veri�es thatTafuri’s ideas on the de�nition 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 andUtopia in 1973.62 Therefore, it is quite legiti-

mate 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 ownwords, seems to be the main context in the histo-

rian’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 Expression-

ism 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 urbanworld. 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-

Figure 10. Hugo

Häring, elevation

and ground plans,

single-family houses,

1922. Included in

Tafuri, Dal Co,


Fig. 272, p. 149.



Esra Akcan

lution brought about by the Bauhaus andthe Constructivist currents) and the exaspera-

tion of the object (typical of the lacerating

but ambiguous eclecticism of the Expression-

ists), 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 in�uence of ‘the East’ wouldno 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 massproduction for society as a whole. The German

adventure from craft-oriented design to industrial

production is a perfect example that veri�es Tafuri’s

thesis of architectural avant-garde as the destruc-

tion of aura, as well as the death of the designeras 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 andSiedlung projects of Weimar Germany as a sequel

of avant-gardism. Already in 1969, he says:

Accepting with lucid objectivity all the avant-

garde’s apocalyptic conclusions as to the ‘death

of art’ [‘death of aura’ in Architecture andUtopia] and purely ‘technical’ role of the intel-

lectual, 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 thesingle 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 theideology 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 elemen-

tary cells building up the urban organism as awhole, holds a speci�c 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

151


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 identi�ed in

the city, the only task the architect can have isto 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) – ErnstMay (Figs 17–19), and Schumacher, as the ‘master-

pieces of German avant-garde’.76

For its part, the architectural object as such

proved in Frankfurt as in the Berlin of Martin

Figure 11. Ludwig

Hilberseimer,

illustrations from

Grossstadtarchitektur,

1927, included in

Tafuri, Dal Co,


Figs 307–308,

p. 165, and Tafuri,

Architecture and

Utopia, Fig. 18,

p. 108.



Esra Akcan

Wagner and Bruno Taut to be truly a thing of the past: the Siedlung was a clearly de-

�ned 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 single-

family house standing as an architectural object out

of the urban fabric as a ‘unicum’ refers to aura;whereas typological study that makes mass-hous-

ing 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. Forinstance, he treats Taut’s early Magdeburg hous-

ing as well as the Weissenhof and Siemensstadt

Siedlung as unsuccessful projects that hardly ful-

�lled the aspiration for urban reform. Tafuri inter-

prets Taut’s early Magdeburg project (Fig. 20) thatstill had ‘anarchic-libertarian ’ and ‘messianic’ expec-

tations 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 hous-

ing projects that were leading towards not only anurban 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 his-

torians 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 speci�c

dialectic between the house and the metropolis that

was, by that time, already realised by May, Taut and

Wagner.80 An equally ‘less signi�cant’ and ‘excep-tional’ housing was the Siemensstadt in Berlin

(Fig. 22). In this project, while the blocks by Gropius

Figure 12. Bruno

Taut, Martin Wagner,

Siedlung Britz, site

plan and aerial view,

1925–31. Included

in Tafuri, Dal Co,


Figs 292–293, p. 159.

153


and Bartning accomplished the requirements of thenew 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 controlof urban development’.83 In terms of the building

industry, the Siedlung projects – of May in par-

ticular – were based on studies of modules, pre-fabricated concrete panels, standardised minimum

cells and the idea of Existenzminimum (Fig. 23).

Such production techniques became available only

through the latest developments in building indus-

try, and thus made the social housing projects real-istic. 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. Histor-

ically they represented one of the few moments

where the political potential that Benjamin cele-brated in the era of mechanical reproduction

was translated into architecture. Mass production

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.



Esra Akcan

Figure 14. Bruno

Taut, Siedlung Onkel-

Toms-Hütte, Berlin,

general ground plan,

1926–31, included in

Tafuri, The Sphere

and the Labyrinth,

Fig. 243.

155


Figure 15. Bruno

Taut, Siedlung Onkel-

Toms-Hütte, Berlin,

1926–31, included in

Tafuri, Dal Co,


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 collabora-

tors, Siedlung

Praunheim, Frankfurt,

1926–30, included

in Tafuri, Dal Co,


Fig. 288, p. 158.



Esra Akcan

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


Figure 19. Ernst

May, H. Boehm, W,

Bangert, Siedlung

Römerstadt,

Frankfurt, 1926–28,

included in Tafuri,

The Sphere and the


157


techniques would make it possible for the architects

to build for society as a whole rather than for a priv-

ileged 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

to Tafuri for their administrative process. From 1919on, ‘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 con-

trol of urban environments especially where socialhousing 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.

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 ontotal planning, administrative centres, and the rela-

tion 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 thena journal committed to presenting large urban

projects and the importance of planning, Ciucci has

suggested that these formative years signi�cantly

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 plan-ning.86 However, Tafuri’s whole historical narrative

in this book is constructed to prove the impossi-

bility of any critical action towards political change

through architecture. The book is written as a

Figure 20. Bruno

Taut, project for an

agricultural and

livestock pavillion,

Magdeburg,

1921–22, included

in Tafuri, Dal Co,


Fig. 281, p. 154.



Esra Akcan

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 historicallyconditioned 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 crit-

ical architecture, whose attempts he labels as ‘neo-avant-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 possi-

bility 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 offutile nostalgia which fails to understand “histori-

cally 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 histor-

ical avant-garde was a failed attempt. As Tafuriadmits both in Modern Architecture and The

Sphere and the Labyrinth, the urban reform

Figure 21.

Weissenhof Siedlung,

aerial view, Stuttgart,

1927, included in

Tafuri, Dal Co,


Fig. 305, p. 163.

159


projects of the Weimar period came to an end by1933, 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 per-

ceived historicity, failure and anachronicity of theavant-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 anyeffect on the overall organisation of land use. The

whole ideology of ‘rationalisation of building

production’ or studies of Existenzminimum col-lapsed 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 institutionalreforms 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 Siedlungprojects,90 whereas in The Sphere and the Labyrinth,

the historian �nds even this explanation naive. After

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,


Fig. 299, p. 160.



Esra Akcan

narrating in detail all the alternatives Martin Wagner

tried one by one, and all the failures each alternativehad 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 anintrinsic 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:

‘there can be no class architecture, only class criti-cism 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 sum-

marising words, ‘an architecture of the future willbe 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 whodesperately 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 reor-ganisation and politics. The encounter was

transformed into a clash: only one who refuses

to cross the mined terrain of this new battle-

�eld will be able to see the funeral drapes �ut-

tering over it.94

The ignored dilemma of modernity – acritique of Tafuri’s theory of architecturalavant-gardeTafuri explains architectural avant-gardism (espe-cially of Weimar Germany) as an historically condi-

tioned, 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 politicalpotentials for the working class be ful�lled.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


161


auratic object, constructs a convincing theory ofarchitectural 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 avant-

gardist project. Was the death of history, celebra-

tion of the confrontation with the metropolitan

condition and destruction of aura, the only criticalstrategy of its present, as Tafuri seems to argue as

much as he denies any possibility for the avant-

garde to change society? In doing this, I would like

start by criticising Tafuri’s one-sided reading of

Simmel and Benjamin, whose ideas on metropolisand 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 Tafurihimself 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 ‘objectiveculture’ 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 hesi-tant. 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 withthe 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 inde-

pendence and differentiation that the modernperson 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 metropol-itan life. Portrayals of the metropolitan individual

swing from his/her inability to judge any quality

requiring a re�ned sensitivity, to the pleasure of

freedom no non-metropolitan enjoys. On the one

hand, Simmel is critical of the metropolitan indi-vidual’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 regardsthe 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



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Benjamin was far from celebrating ‘the storm wecall 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 treat-ments 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 de�ned

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 theperson (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 theauratic 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 cele-

brate the decline of aura against another set thatbemoans its loss are written during similar years,

makes it harder to explain Benjamin’s treatment of

aura in terms of chronologically oriented cate-

gories. In other words, Benjamin seems less to

change his mind essay after essay, than to be atthe 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 pointedout, 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 ForCacciari, Heynen suggests, the attempt to rescue

values such as individuality and personal freedom,

as did Simmel, is nothing but retreating into nos-

talgic and bourgeois values. In that way, Cacciari

criticises even what he considers to be the most pro-gressive writers that have helped him develop his

own radical critique of modernisation. For Cacciari,

in the last analysis the modern life of the metrop-

olis is false consciousness based on the asser-

tion that it is essentially tied to capitalism. InHeynen’s words: ‘Apparently he excludes the possi-

bility that any form of critical thought could emerge

that would do anything other than con�rm the

system it claims to condemn.’107

Tafuri seems to follow Cacciari’s approach in nothighlighting 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’savant-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

163


s/he desires from another writer. However, I wouldlike 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 nothave 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 archi-

tecture’ 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 theexperiences 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 archi-tects such as Loos, Tessenow and Expressionists.108

Unfortunately, this also caused Tafuri to ignore any

possible dialectical relation between his avant-

gardes and non-avant-gardes. Despite his commit-

ment to dialectical analysis, it is surprising to realisethat Tafuri’s interpretations of this period do not

allow much dialectic between anguish and cele-

bration of loss. Tafuri does not come to terms with

the dilemma of modernity that many of his intel-

lectual sources confronted. One may also challengethe 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 justi�cation 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 anguishof loss to the brave confrontation with the metrop-

olis achieved as a result of the avant-garde. Reread-

ing this period by tracing the post-Weimar days of

architects such as Taut, Wagner and Margarete

Schütte-Lihotzky in Turkey (and Japan for Taut) orMay in Africa would also con�rm that the archi-

tects 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 thepossibility of criticism and critical practice today,

whether we call it the new avant-garde or not.

Tafuri’s interpretation of Benjamin may also be ques-

tioned for not admitting the critical power that

Benjamin himself saw in the avant-garde. Critics suchas 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 Char-

acter’ and the Arcades, allows much more criticalpower 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 moti-

vates the artist for the demand toward change. Iwould 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 mod-

ern ‘crisis’. In the last analysis, capitalism and the



Esra Akcan

oppression of the working classes seem to lie at theroot of this crisis according Tafuri. Yet with a pre-

dictable North American twist, one may be justi�ed

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 gen-

der, 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 thatthe 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 valu-

able change possible or whether they have actuallyretarded and concealed the confrontation with the

‘real question’ is something that is up to each indi-

vidual’s own judgement.

Notes and references1. This paper was �rst written in 1999 and revised in

2002 for this publication. I would like to thank Mary

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 ref-

erees 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.

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,

also see: Joan Ockman, ‘Venice and New York’,

Casabella, 619–20 (January-February 1995), pp.

57–71.

4. Cunningham, Goodbun, Jaschke, ‘Introduction’, The

Journal of Architecture, Vol. 6 (Summer 2001),

p. 107.

5. Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, G.

Fitzgerald (trans.) (The Belknap Press of Harvard

University Press, Cambridge, London, 1968). Trans-

lated from Teoria dell’arte d’avanguardia (Il Mulino,

Bologna, 1962).

6. Ibid., p. 25.

7. 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).

8. Ibid., p. 48.

9. Clement Greenberg, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, in Art

and Culture Critical Essays (Beacon Press, Boston,

1961). Original publication: 1939.

10. P. Poggioli, op. cit., p. 108.

11. Ibid., p. 123.

12. Ibid., p. 89.

13. Ibid., pp. 96–101.

14. 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.

15. Hilde Heynen, ‘What belongs to architecture?’ Avant-

garde ideas in the modern movement,’ The Journal of

Architecture, Vol. 4 (Summer 1999), pp. 129–147.

16. Manfredo Tafuri, Theories and History of Architec-

ture, G. Verrecchia (trans) (Harper and Row, New

York, 1980). Translated from: Teorie e storia

dell’architettura (Laterza, Bari, 1968).

165


17. Ibid., p. 14.

18. Ibid., p. 26.

19. Ibid., p. 20.

20. Ibid., p. 20.

21. Ibid., p. 20.

22. Ibid., pp. 30–1.

23. 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 con-

nections between Tafuri’s reading of the Renaissance

and the modern world, in the sense that the his-

torian 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 Archi-

tecture 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).

26. Ibid., p. 91.

27. Ibid., p. 96.

28. M. Tafuri, Theories and History, op.cit., p. 40.

29. R. Poggioli, Theory of the Avant-Garde, op. cit., p. 79.

30. Philip Johnson, Jeffrey Kipnis, ‘A Conversation

Around the Avant-Garde’, in Autonomy and

Ideology, R.E. Somol (ed.), op cit., p. 46.

31. 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 (‘Archi-

tecture 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 Archi-

tectural Ideology’, (trans.) S Sartarelli, in Architecture

Theory since 1968, M. Hays (ed.) (Columbia Uni-

versity 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). Trans-

lated from Progetto e utopia. Architettura e sviluppo

capitalistico (Laterza, Bari, 1973).

32. M. Tafuri, ‘Toward a Critique of Architectural

Ideology’, op. cit., pp. 17–18.

33. M. Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, op. cit.,

pp. 88–9.

34. M. Tafuri, dal Co, Modern Architecture, op. cit.,

p. 87.

35. Manfredo Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth.

Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the



Esra Akcan

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).


Ideology’, op. cit., p. 20.

37. 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.

38. 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).

39. Ibid., p. 338.

40. Hilde Heynen, Architecture and Modernity. A Critique

(MIT Press, Boston, 1999), p. 133.

41. 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 con-

structs 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.

42. M. Tafuri, F. dal Co, Modern Architecture, op. cit.,

p. 89.

43. Ibid., p. 87.

44. Ibid., p. 113.


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.


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.



50. M. Tafuri, F. Dal Co, Modern Architecture, op. cit.,

pp. 111–112.

51. Heidegger brie�y 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 else-

where: ‘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.



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 de�ne

this situation. Upon being asked why he never really

167


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.

57. 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.

58. Walter Benjamin, ‘Author as Producer’, in Re�ec-

tions, P. Demetz (ed.) (Schocken Books, New York,

1978), pp. 220–239. Translated from: ‘Der Autor als

Produzent’, 1937.


Ideology’, op. cit., pp. 6–7.

60. 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.

61. 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.

62. ‘USSR-Berlin, 1922: From Populism to “Constructivist

International” ’ was written in 1972; ‘Sozialpolitik

and the City in Weimar’ was written in 1971.

63. 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 rela-

tion to the ‘end of architecture’ argument in Archi-

tecture and Utopia, Tafuri’s silence about Le

Corbusier’s single houses – which are auratic objects

par excellence standing in the landscape – is ques-

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.


p. 198.

65. M. Tafuri, F. Dal Co, ‘The Dialectic of European

Modern Movement: Expressionism vs. Rigourism’, in

Modern Architecture, op. cit., pp. 142–152.

66. Ibid., p. 143.



68. M. Tafuri, ‘USSR-Berlin, 1922: From Populism to

“Constructivist International” ’, The Sphere and the

Labyrinth, pp. 119–149.

69. Tafuri explains how the ethics of ‘freedom from

work’ in the Dadaist manifestoes would also �t into

this context.

70. M. Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, op. cit., p.

131.

71. 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).



73. Ibid., p. 22.

74. Ibid., p. 22.


p. 221.

76. Ibid., p. 197.


p. 158.



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78. Ibid., pp. 153–155.

79. At the risk of leaving the German context momentar-

ily, 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 mea-

sure 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 men-

tions 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 hous-

ing experiments in Holland as a continuation of avant-

gardist 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.


p. 153.

84. Ibid., p. 153.

85. Although Ciucci admits that Tafuri’s practice as a

writer and intellectual would go through some trans-

formations after he met Cacciari, Astor Rosa and

Negri in Venice, these early years of interest in plan-

ning issues were indicative of his future work. In that

sense Theories and History was not only a ‘break-

through’, 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.


88. David Cunningham, ‘Architecture, Utopia and the

futures of the avant-garde,’ The Journal of Archi-

tecture, 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 possi-

bility for the artist and architect to alter social

structure through their work.


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.


93. Fredric Jameson, ‘Architecture and the Critique of

Ideology,’ J. Ockman (ed.), Architecture Criticism Ideol-

ogy (Princeton Architectural Press, NY, 1985), p. 55.


p. 233.

95. In that sense Tafuri shares another point with Bürger.

For Bürger, the fact that we still have art as (insti-

tutionalised) 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.,

169


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 Experi-

ence: 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 collec-

tors’ 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 Uni-

versity 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. Trans-

lated from: Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, Vol. 6,

1937.

– ‘Unpacking My Library. A Talk About Book Collect-

ing’, 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 archi-

tects 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 disser-

tation 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?” Avant-

garde ideas in the modern movement,’ op cit.,

pp. 136–143.



Esra Akcan

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MAnfredo Tafuri's Theory of the Architectural Avant-garde