Re-visiting the Political Context of Manfredo Tafuri's " Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology " : 'Having Corpses in our Mouths'
Published 2013
216 Pages
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In this thesis I revisit Manfredo Tafuri’s 1969 article “Per una critica dell’ideologia architettonica” (Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology) within the political context of Italy in the 1960s. I address the research question: what is the contemporary relevance of the essay read in this context? I suggest that testing the arguments in Tafuri’s 1969 essay against his complete oeuvre and his subsequent career as a critic or a historian obfuscates and misconstrues the context and the essay. I argue that the essay was published in a moment when operaisti protagonists were processing the implications of the operaisti discourse they constructed in relation to the intensification of the social conflict in Italy in the late 1960s and the 1970s. This provides a convincing context for Tafuri’s application of this discourse as a total rejection of the possibility of the existence of an architectural profession outside participation in capitalist development. I conclude that, located with precision within the context of the journal Contropiano, where his essay was first published, “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology” is more likely to agitate intellectuals and architects than it has previously. It is important for the generation who has not yet acquired professional autonomy, such as architectural students or interns, to be reminded of Tafuri’s critique within its context as they assume their social vocation. Thus this is my target readership for this thesis. It is particularly important to revisit Tafuri and his 1969 essay at a time when there is a growing discussion around a social vocation or discourse on sustainability, participatory design, radical architecture and such. The social agenda still makes the art and the profession of architecture resilient to transforming political, economic and social structures. In this light, it is not only necessary but also relevant to revisit the nature of the social vocation of architects as it had been criticized in Tafuri’s 1969 essay within the intellectual debates Italian operaisti project initiated.
The Making of Italian Radical Architecture
49 Pages
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This paper is a study of the making of Italian Radical Architecture in its material form, as represented in selected key exhibitions from 1966-1978 and retrospectives from 2003-2012. It seeks to understand the political, cultural, and economic factors that construct 'Radical' as critique, to explore the dialogical relationship between the exhibitions and coeval publications in architectural journals as modes of production, and to assess the reception and impact of the works.
Deschooling, Manual Labour, and Emancipation: The Architecture and Design of Global Tools, 1973-1975
27 Pages
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Collaboration and its (Dis)Contents: Art, Architecture, and Photography since 1950
Published 2017
183 Pages
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Collaboration has been a component of art making for centuries—from ancient Greek potters and painters to nineteenth-century photographers Hill and Adamson to the contemporary Raqs Media Collective—yet it remains a complex topic for art historians of all periods. Taking its cue from Sigmund Freud’s 1929 publication, Civilization and its Discontents, in which the psychoanalyst wrestled with tensions between the individual and society, Collaboration and its (Dis)Contents: Art, Architecture, and Photography since 1950 asks what it means to produce work together as individuals and why this might matter for the creation of art and scholarship in the twenty-first century. This digital book stems from The Courtauld Research Forum’s 2013 flagship research initiative, led by Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow Meredith A. Brown, which brought together a group of early career scholars based in London and New York who spent the year engaged in transatlantic conversations about collaboration and its influence on the histories of modern and contemporary art, architecture, and photography. The resulting collaboratively written essays and artists’ projects are timely contributions to the growing art historical debates around collaboration and collectivity and their relationship to modernism, feminism, Marxism, and contemporary practice. Collaboration and its (Dis)Contents explores not only what constitutes collaboration in recent art globally but also opens up possibilities created by collaborative historical and artistic research in a field that historically has privileged the traditional single-author text.
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