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

4.5/5 ( ratings)

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