L’histoire assassinée. Manfredo Tafuri and the architecture of the present

A new attentionIn recent years the work of Italian architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri has attracted a lot of interest in the world of architectural theory and practice.After the publications that celebrated Tafuri's work immediately after his demise in 1994 -most notably, Casabella's 'The Historical Project of Manfredo Tafuri' (1995) i -or produced a first collective critical reconsideration of his legacy shortly thereafter -seminal, ANY's 'Being Manfredo Tafuri ' (2000) ii -, the last few years have seen the publication of the English translation of Tafuri's last book on the Renaissance iii and of new studies on Tafuri's works, iv which in different ways have returned Tafuri's legacy to the forefront of the architectural debate.The interest in Tafuri's work had never entirely died off.Beyond the immediate applications of Tafuri's historiographical method by his colleagues and students at the Department of Architectural History at the Institute of Architecture of the University of Venice (IUAV), v who continued his investigations in certain areas of research (for instance, the vast series of studies produced on the architecture of the Renaissance) and beyond the embracing of his critical 'historical project' in the ambit of recent architectural theory, vi Tafuri's work on history as an open project and on the crisis of the architectural discipline has remained a constant point of reference for architectural practice as well. Critical historyThe recent books on Tafuri address -albeit partly and indirectly -the issue of a reconsideration of Tafuri's work not only in terms of its relation with the history of a remote architectural past (the Renaissance of his late studies), but also in the ever difficult relationship with the history of the present of the discipline.The theme of the history of the present, and particularly the relationship of history with the present of the architectural project is the main focus of Tafuri's early writings.In texts that range from Theories and History of Architecture (Teorie e storia dell'architettura, 1968), to Architecture and Utopia (Progetto e utopia, 1973) to The Sphere and the Labyrinth (La sfera e il labirinto, 1980) vii Tafuri redefines the role and the method of architectural history as a history whose 'project' is a never-ending, open and self-questioning process rather than a finite and defining story.Tafuri wants the 'historical project' viii to be separate and distanced from the project of architectural design, but only in order to provide the tools to return, independently, to the architectural project with a critical analysis.It is in this sense that Tafuri provocatively declares that criticism does not exist and only history does: ix his history is necessarily critical and can only be critical; on the other hand, a criticism without history, without the analytical tools and the distance of history, does not exist, can not be critical. History of the presentTafuri's work in historiography leaves behind the crucial legacy of the definition, through an argued and structured provocation, of a history of architecture that is both differentiated from the history of art and detached from the project of architecture.Situated in the difficult space of this distance, the history of architecture thus redefined is precariously constructed as an autonomous and yet always compromised discourse that proceeds in parallel with architecture, and is also, like architecture itself, open and exposed to the forces of 'multiple techniques of environmental formation.'x The crucial test of this history (and indeed of all histories) takes place in its relation to the present.This is an issue that Tafuri addresses mainly in his earlier works, preferring to devote the later part of his career to the research and investigation of particular moments of architecture's more distant past.And yet, even when the objects of Tafuri's research are those of a remote past, they are never quietCopyright reverts to the author The Role of the Humanities in Design Creativity International Conference 2007Received 19.7.07 and appeased objects, but always complex scenarios of crisis, breaking points, sites of ambiguities, moments of shifts in mentalities and in power relations.The history of these moments remains open, bearing questions and unresolved problems that find echoes in the present, and that the present needs to address.The present in relation to Tafuri's work is then a complex and complicated system of relationships rather than a singular and circumscribed moment.It is the present of his contemporaries, architects and historians that operated at the time when Tafuri was defining his 'historical project'; it is the present of the effects of the crisis of Modernism on contemporary architecture; it is also the present of the crisis of the architectural language, within the definition of a long modernity that finds it roots in the Renaissance and in its manipulations of classical languages; it is -finally but not conclusively -the present in-progress of the evolving definition of the 'historical project' itself.For these reasons, for its openness to both the past and the future, the 'historical project' remains a present issue and a work to be continued.The recently published works that return Tafuri's writings to the present are important as a starting point for further reconsiderations of Tafuri's work and, more importantly, for a continuation of his project in the present.xi History as researchTafuri's last book Ricerca del Rinascimento (1992) was recently published in English under the reductively rendered title of Interpreting the Renaissance (2006).xii The book is a specialist study of the complex relationships between the urban architecture of the Renaissance and its physical cultural and political contexts, and focuses in particular on the power systems that affect (then as they do now) architectural production.Relevant in Renaissance studies for its specificity and for its innovative interpretations of specific buildings, projects and urban environments, Tafuri's work confirms a method of constructing a history to which the present cannot be indifferent.In his methodological and critical preface Tafuri relates the formal research of the Renaissance to the more recent uncertainties and moments of experimentation of the modern avant-gardes, explicitly linking an 'unresolved past' to the 'unsettled present'.xiii Tafuri's 'research' is twofold and bidirectional, tense and dynamic.Research is the architectural research that the Renaissance struggled through, a difficult, problematic, discordantly polyphonic, heterogeneous research that took on different religious political and architectural instances and progressed at different and uneven speeds.Research is the historical research ('project') conducted by the historian on a material that is still partly hidden, partly invisible, often ambiguous and susceptible of different interpretations; a research that does not restrict itself to the presentation of the past but links it to the present, addressing issues that remain topical today in the complexity of the political decision-making processes, and in the compromises, social implications, criticism and choices of languages that architecture always deals with, now as then.The past of Tafuri's Renaissance constantly challenges the present with its unresolved problems, unsettling the very role of the historical research on it.There is therefore a third level of research that is the true object of this book.Beyond the research conducted by the artists, architects, intellectuals, princes and politicians of the Renaissance, and beyond the research produced today by the historian on these events, contexts, projects and buildings, there exists a third level of an exquisitely Tafurian research on the tension that relates the two.This is a research on the discipline of architecture, a research on the reasons why it is necessary today (or fifteen years ago, when Tafuri's work was first published) to consider the architectural problem of the crisis of languages incubated in the Renaissance in order to understand the question of contemporary architecture xiv after the crisis of modernism. History and the presentTafuri's relationship with the present -both in the definition of a historical methodology and in the critical work on his contemporaries -was recently analyzed by Marco Biraghi in Progetto di crisi (2005).