The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s

by Manfredo Tafuri, Pellegrino D'Acierno (Translator), Robert Connolly (Translator)

This major work by Manfredo Tafuri, one of today's most important theoretical historians and critics of architecture and urbanism, presents his critique of traditional approaches to historical investigation and criticism in a penetrating analysis of the avant-gardes and discourses of architecture. Instead of transforming reality, modern avant-garde artists, in Tafuri's tough judgment, are merely playing with techniques, their private dialogue a "glass bead game." Tafuri's essays throw down a gauntlet to avant-garde movements in architecture, theater, painting, film and literature: he mocks today's New York architects who work in self-defined limbo to entertain a select public; he examines the "total theater" of such architects as Moholy-Nagy and Gropius, who envisioned a "counter-city" as a global alternative to the real; and he makes provocative connections between the arts, showing, for example, why Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein saw Piranesi's drawings as a forerunner of new film language.

Tafuri probes the lines between reality and ideology, the gap that avant-garde ideology places between its own demands and its translation into techniques, the ways in which the avant-garde reaches compromises with the world, and the conditions that permit its existence. Interweaving intellectual models and modes of production and consumption, Tafuri constructs an elaborate network of references, comparisons, and analogies — drawing on such intellectual giants as Marx, Nietzsche and Freud — that leads to an interpretation of history as an archaeology of fragments and interpretations rather than a linear progression or compact block. These wide-ranging essays, moving from the cross-pollination of German and Soviet artists in Berlin of the 1920s, to the designs of architects like Venturi, Graves and Rossi, challenge an avant-garde that has lost its moorings in contemporary life.

"As it traces the derailing and mistranslations of utopian intentions, [The Sphere and the Labyrinth] offers a powerful corrective to conventional histories emphasising the heroism of the avant-garde. It also forces the question of whether an ethical architecture is possible." — Christina Spellman, Telos

"Tafuri's work is probably the most innovative and exciting new form of European theory since French post-structuralism, and this book is probably the best introduction to it for the newcomer. His diagnosis of the dilemmas of modernity and of late capitalism extends the Frankfurt School in new ways, and is bleak, implacable, and for that very reason, therapeutic and painfully stimulating." — Frederic Jameson

Genres: Architecture, Art, History

383 pages, Paperback

First published May 9, 1987

About the author

Manfredo Tafuri an Italian architect, historian, theoretician, critic and academic, was arguably the world's most important architectural historian of the second half of the 20th century.[1] He is noted for his pointed critiques of the partisan "operative criticism" of previous architectural historians and critics like Bruno Zevi and Siegfried Giedion and for challenging and overturning the idea that the Renaissance was a "golden age" as it had been characterised in the work of earlier authorities like Heinrich Wolfflin and Rudolf Wittkower.
For Tafuri, architectural history does not follow a teleological scheme in which one language succeeds another in linear sequence. Instead, it is a continuous struggle played out on critical, theoretical and ideological levels as well as through the multiple constraints placed on practice. Since this struggle continues in the present, architectural history is not a dead academic subject, but an open arena for debate. In his view, like other cultural domains, but even more so, due to the tension between its autonomous, artistic character and its technical and functional dimensions, architecture is a field defined and constituted by crisis.
During the 1970s, Tafuri published important essays in Oppositions, the journal directed by Peter Eisenman. Although he always had a strong interest in this area of research, in the last decade of his career he undertook a comprehensive reassessment of the theory and practice of Renaissance architecture, exploring its various social, intellectual and cultural contexts, while providing a broad understanding of uses of representation that shaped the entire era. His final work, Interpreting the Renaissance: Princes, Cities, Architects, published in 1992, synthesizes the history of architectural ideas and projects through discussions of the great centres of architectural innovation in Italy (Florence, Rome, and Venice), key patrons from the middle of the fifteenth century to the early sixteenth century, and crucial figures such as Leon Battista Alberti, Filippo Brunelleschi, Francesco di Giorgio, Lorenzo de' Medici, Bramante, Raphael, Baldassare Castiglione and Giulio Romano.
Tafuri held the position of chair of architectural history at the University Iuav of Venice.

Reviews

[Anna · Rating 2 out of 5]

Probabilmente avrei amato questo libro se lo avessi trovato per caso, perché io ho sempre amato piranesi, ma me l'ha fatto leggere quel coglione del mio professore di laboratorio e per colpa sua adesso odio piranesi. Bella merda bello ciao

[Calmbob · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book is a collection of essays, loosely ordered and connected. As a group they demolish presuppositions and self-deceptions of Modernism and Post-Modernism, for example in the Hitchcock or the Sculley lineages. The essay on Piranesi is pretty widely cited, and justly so; but it's the essay on new York skyscrapers, "The New Babylon..." that shines in its narrative of New York highrise architecture after World War I. Maybe Tafuri is not always convincing, but his ideas and explanations are at least seductive.