The Concept of an Avant-Garde

Catalog description

No historian of architecture has written as intensely about the contradictions of architecture in late-modern society or reflected as deeply on the resulting problems and tasks of architectural historiography as Manfredo Tafuri (1935-1994). For many, the Italian historian's dismissal of "hopes in design" under conditions of advanced capitalism produced a disciplinary impasse. This in turn led to a call to outlier Tafuri - to move beyond his pessimistic and lacerating stance. The seminar will undertake a close reading of one of Tafuri's most complexly conceived and richly elaborated books, The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s. Initially published in Italian in 1980 and translated into English in 1987, the book represents the first effort to define and historicize the concept of an avant-garde specifically in architecture. Its content centers on the radical formal and urban experiments of the first three decades of the twentieth century. Yet Tafuri surprisingly begins his account with the eighteenth-century inventions of Piranesi, and he concludes with an examination of the "neo-avant-garde" of his own day. In addition to traversing The Sphere and the Labyrinth chapter by chapter - starting with the extraordinary methodological introduction, "The Historical 'Project'"-we shall also read a number of primary and secondary sources on the historical contexts under discussion and consider a number of important intertexts that shed light on Tafuri's position. The objectives of the course are at once historical and historiographic: we shall be concerned both with actual events and with how they have been written into history. Finally, we shall reassess the role of an avant-garde in architecture and compare Tafuri's conception to that advanced in other disciplines. Is the concept of an avant-garde still viable today? Or should…