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Manfredo Tafuri: Choosing HistoryDaniel Sherer aa Columbia University GSAPP / Yale University School of Architecture , USAPublished online: 16 Nov 2009.

To cite this article: Daniel Sherer (2009) Manfredo Tafuri: Choosing History, The Journal of Architecture,14:6, 731-741, DOI: 10.1080/13602360903357146

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Book reviews

Manfredo Tafuri: Choosing History

By Andrew Leach

A&S Books, 2007

ISBN 978-9076714301

$40, Paperback, pp. 323

Of the two books to appear so far on Manfredo

Tafuri, Andrew Leach’s Manfredo Tafuri: Choosing

History is the only one which provides a sustained

analysis of his entire output as historian, critic and

theorist.1 Uncovering a wide array of facts regarding

its protagonist, many of which will be new to an

English-speaking audience, this study is essential

reading for anyone interested in its subject. Yet

despite its high level of research, the critical

interpretation Leach offers is problematic. As he

makes his way through the double maze of life and

work, the author often loses sight of the deeper

aims of an historical project which, like many others

of its period, carried considerable theoretical stakes

within itself.

The reader would like to know what these were

and the role they played in Tafuri’s thought, but the

excessive attention given to biographical factors and

their historical circumstances impedes a thorough

investigation of this aspect of his contribution. As a

result, although Leach is alert to the central problems

that occupied Tafuri, he does not consistently do

justice to them. Above all, this is due to the fact

that Tafuri’s conceptual presuppositions are arbitrarily

detached from their contexts and examined in

isolation, as is evident from the initial decision to

separate the study into two parts, the first largely

devoted to biography, the second, to ideas. This

division skews the entire analysis, preventing the

crystallisation of a hermeneutic framework adequate

to the scope of Tafuri’s achievement and hence

capable of making it more fully intelligible.

Needless to say, the question of intelligibility is

urgent in the case of an historian like Tafuri. The

difficulties one confronts in this regard do not only

derive from a complex prose style rich with multiple

levels of reference; they are intrinsic to the pattern

of thought, the project itself. Multifaceted, hetero-

geneous, at times contradictory, Tafuri’s approach

holds diverse strands of argument together and

presupposes a seemingly endless proliferation of

problems, objects and fields of inquiry. These

features of his scholarship have challenged and

frequently disconcerted those more used to the

narrow focus of the specialist.

In reality, it is not part of the mythologising which

often surrounds this scholar, which Leach rightly criti-

cises, to observe that Tafuri combined highly special-

ised knowledge with an historical vision that was as

deep as it was broad. Indeed, these qualities are so

evident in his work that one might say that there is

not one Tafuri but many: an observation that will

not seem all that controversial when we consider

that he wrote over twenty-two books and hundreds

of articles that encompass every era of architectural

history from the Renaissance to the present.

The Tafuris that most occupy Leach — the young

militant, the Roman architect, the orchestrator of

the ‘School of Venice’, the innovative scholar of

Baroque architecture — have generally eluded even

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the most well-informed English and American

readers. Leach excels when he reveals the less

visible sides of this exceptionally prolific scholar

and critic. At the same time, however, important

facets of Tafuri’s historical analysis — his interpret-

ation of the Renaissance as the inauguration of

modernity, his unique conception of the relationship

of architecture and utopia, rationalisation as a key to

understanding the inner workings of architectural

ideology, his novel reading of the modern

metropolis as a locus of social and architectural

contradiction — are inexplicably underplayed. So

are the numerous critical perceptions and misunder-

standings his work has generated. Before entering

into a concrete discussion of the strengths and

weaknesses of Leach’s book, it might prove useful

to summarise some of the basic facts concerning a

reception that has favoured yet also in some ways

hindered a solid grasp of Tafuri’s achievement

among English-speaking audiences.

Despite considerable shifts in the parameters of

theory and criticism since 1974, the year of his

debut in the Anglophone world in the pages of

Oppositions with his seminal essay ‘L’Architecture

dans le Boudoir’, the challenge issued by Tafuri’s his-

toriography and criticism has lost none of its

cogency.2 In its synthesis of the theory of language,

sociological insight and the critique of ideology, this

essay exemplified a new understanding of contem-

porary practice centered on the means by which cri-

ticism enters the project, altering its meanings and

conditioning its reception. As Tafuri’s books and

articles were translated over the next three

decades, the last of which was the Ricerca del

Rinascimento in 2006, it became increasingly

evident that his accomplishment was radical in all

senses of the word.3 Politically as much as intellec-

tually, nothing even remotely resembling Tafuri’s

work had ever been seen before in Anglo-Saxon

architectural history and criticism: overturning

established certainties, his approach, in which

every theoretical move had precise historical

implications, reframed the trajectories of the disci-

pline from the Renaissance onwards. It did this

by proposing genealogical as well as dialectical

affiliations between architecture’s multiple pasts

and its unsettled present, without falling back on

the teleological assumptions that characterise

more conventional historiographical strategies.

In so doing, Tafuri greatly expanded the scope of

architectural history, introducing, alongside new

critical possibilities, an entire horizon of inter-

pretation. Yet a more comprehensive view of his

achievement was lacking, at least in the English-

speaking world. This was due not only to a spate of

poor translations, but, in a more profound sense, to

the seemingly insuperable divisions between fields

of knowledge that is one of the quandaries of our

contemporaneity. If Tafuri has so often been misun-

derstood, this is at least partly due to the fact that

specialists have tended to focus on isolated aspects

of his historical inquiries without connecting, as

Tafuri himself did, their diverse areas of implication.

Like the blind experts in the old Indian parable who

touched different parts of the body of the same ele-

phant and gave widely diverging accounts of the

animal under consideration, those who exclusively

studied modern architecture could not see how

Tafuri’s investigations of the Renaissance, the

Baroque and Enlightenment architecture were all of

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a piece, in that they registered, from their own

standpoint and without compromising their historio-

graphical specificity, the emergence of modern uses

of representation and the architectural, cultural and

epistemological crises this entailed.

Of fundamental importance in this regard was

Tafuri’s unique historicism, which owes as much,

especially in its later phases, to Annales historiogra-

phy as it does to a sustained critique of operative dis-

tortions of history and their underlying teleological

assumptions. Both were indelible features of a mod-

ernist discourse that, in the years of his intellectual

formation, became the object of radical questioning

in Italy and elsewhere. Relating architecture to

historical time through reference to a dialectic of

long periods and sudden events, Tafuri broke with

the myths of the heroic period of Modern architec-

ture, reading the project as index of wider cultural,

political and social changes and continuities. In his

view these were not mutually exclusive, but inher-

ently related: for him, as Carlo Olmo has pointed

out, ‘the architectural project is a complex tool with

which one can read the layers of values deposited

by society, culture, religious beliefs and specialized

knowledge.’4 This approach grasped architecture as

a specific cultural phenomenon that preserves these

layers over time, despite shifts in the critical par-

ameters that condition historical interpretation.

For all of these reasons Tafuri’s contribution has

shown itself to be such a crucial reference point

for contemporary architectural culture that it tends

to be taken for granted. Leach’s study is therefore

both welcome and necessary, insofar as it sheds

new light on a specific set of problems formulated

by the Italian historian that have elicited a broad

international reception — the ideological function

of architecture in modernity, teleological and oper-

ative abuses of historical knowledge, the relation-

ship of the individual work to wider cycles of

architectural production — without ceasing to

generate an equally extensive controversy. Indeed,

if the stridency of those who currently take issue

with his work may be said to reveal anything, it is

Tafuri’s continuing ability to resist idees-recues, the

inevitable corollary of his will to investigate, from

provocative and new angles, the complex relation-

ship between architecture’s external and internal

determinations.

For these critics, and especially for those who,

with tiresome regularity, claim that Tafuri has

nothing more to tell us, since he was a Marxist hope-

lessly caught up in obsolete debates, Leach offers a

powerful, if not always explicit corrective. He does

this by showing how reductive it is to characterise

Tafuri solely in terms of Marxism, especially since

he drew on a wider spectrum of intellectual

resources than any other architectural historian or

theorist of his time. And in fact to see in Tafuri the

recapitulation of Marx’s philosophy of history trans-

posed to architecture, as a pervasive reading would

have it, is wide of the mark for many reasons. For

one thing, Tafuri was as much of a Weberian as he

was a Marxist; for another, when trying to assess

the impact of those strains of Marxism that one

does find in his work, Massimo Cacciari’s revisionist

theses have made them almost unrecognisable,

and, in any case, Franco Fortini on the one hand,

and Mario Tronti on the other, figures who both

played important roles in shaping Tafuri’s cultural

and economic theorisations at different moments,

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can by no means be characterised as orthodox

interpreters of Marx. One strong point of Leach’s

analysis is that it throws a large number of Tafuri’s

intellectual inspirations into high relief, many of

which have not received sufficient attention. Leach

is aware in any case that what matters most are

not the sources themselves but how Tafuri trans-

formed them when bringing to light, through a rig-

orous combination of historical research and

theoretical insight, the ideological and critical

dimensions of architecture.

Leach inserts Tafuri within a wide range of cultural

and political contexts, all of which, in varying

degrees, illustrate the turbulent era of the Italian

1960s and 1970s and the crises architecture experi-

enced at this time. In his zeal for completeness,

however, the author seems to forget that, when

tracing the intellectual path of his protagonist,

some contexts should be given more prominence

than others. In general, Leach seeks to reveal the

complex interaction between the critical positions

the Italian thinker adopted and the historical

imperatives and architectural developments to

which he responded. Unfortunately this approach,

which privileges a diffuse attention to external

factors over an immanent critique of Tafuri’s under-

lying premises, tacitly diminishes the role they

played in the elaboration of his historical project.

To be more precise, Leach has very little to say

about Tafuri’s penchant for dialectical criticism.

Both before and after the appearance of his first

major work, Theories and History of Architecture

(1968), this essential facet of Tafuri’s historiography

was tied to the debates of his time precisely because

of its ability to expose the ideological mystifications

that were the object of its critique. By examining

multiple points of articulation between the rational-

isation processes characteristic of modernity and the

internal logic of form, this mode of historical analysis

enabled Tafuri to put his finger on a pulse linking

cycles of architectural production to capitalist ideol-

ogy in accordance with rhythms of development

joining disparate domains of knowledge and prac-

tice, as is succinctly demonstrated in Architecture

and Utopia of 1973 and with greater comprehen-

siveness in The Sphere and the Labyrinth of 1980.

This is a delicate point, given the fact that Tafuri’s

historiography was poised precariously between a

crisis of master narratives and a master narrative

of crisis. Exploring different aspects of Tafuri’s

critique of architectural ideology with a heightened

awareness of the intricate problems this involves,

Leach focuses on the major phases of the Italian

historian’s investigation of the shifting relationships

between the relative autonomy of the discipline

and the multiple parameters —social, economic

and political — that impinge on it. Leach is especially

convincing when dealing with the metacritical and

metahistorical aspects of Tafuri, a strength that is

particularly evident in Theories and History of

Architecture (1968), a tour-de-force in the examin-

ation of the intellectual currents, theoretical cat-

egories and critical assumptions that traversed the

architectural thought of his time. When trying to

evaluate Tafuri’s readings of built forms and their

particular cultural circumstances (something

which, in any case, he does not often do), he is

less persuasive. Leach’s variable performance in

these areas is related to the fact that throughout

his study no effort is made to provide an adequate

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mediation between the theoretical scope of the

concept of critical autonomy and its historical speci-

ficity.5 Architecture, its various lines of force and

conditions of historical possibility, could have pro-

vided this mediation, but unfortunately there is no

real architectural analysis in the book, as is evi-

denced by its lack of illustrations, and above all by

its unwillingness to confront Tafuri’s readings of

actual works of architecture.

As with these readings, all too often only fleeting

attention is given to decisive conceptual innovations

the Italian historian introduced into the field, and in

particular to his theorisation of a fundamental

tension between the architectural project and the

historical project (an aspect of his method that,

besides being a crucial determinant of his criticism

of contemporary practice, clearly distinguished

Tafuri’s analyses of Renaissance, Baroque and

modern architecture from more conventional

approaches). Puzzling in itself, this last oversight is

especially glaring, since Leach’s book is organised

around the trope of Tafuri’s turn from architectural

practice to history. This emphasis leads the reader

to expect some account of the residues, afterlife or

contradictions deriving from the internal knowledge

of architecture within Tafuri’s historiography, which

often underscores the critical distance necessary for

historical knowledge to arise on the site of a practice

which is about to disappear, or whose viability is in

question. Yet only the barest outline of this kind of

reading is provided, scattered throughout the

chapters of Part II, and this is inconclusive.

One of the strongest parts of Leach’s book is the

first chapter, detailing Tafuri’s early activities as a

student radical and as an emerging architect in

Rome in the 1960s, and his decision to give up the

practice of architecture in favour of the intertwined

vocations of historian, theorist and critic. Drawing

on a heterogeneous body of sources (little-known

archival sources, out-of-the-way articles, Federico

Rosa’s 2003 IUAV thesis on Tafuri’s early career,6 a

well-known 1992 interview with Tafuri conducted

by Laura Passerini),7 Leach weaves a narrative

which offers some fascinating surprises. But even

here there are problems. Although it is important

to find out how decisive the work of such an

obscure figure as Bruno Widmar was for Tafuri’s

subsequent intellectual development (p. 8), in that

he identified philosophical reflection per se, and

particularly the German idealist tradition from Kant

to Hegel and Marx, as a uniquely civil vocation,

the reader looks in vain for any analysis of the perti-

nence of this insight for new readings of such pivotal

works as Theories and History of Architecture and

Architecture and Utopia.

And it is precisely in the first work, which makes

the point, essential for understanding the specificity

of Tafuri’s contribution, that the historical project

and the architectural project come together in an

inherent tension, where one would have liked to

have seen a more thorough examination of the

relationship between Tafuri’s architectural and urba-

nistic practice in AUA (Architetti e Urbanisti Asso-

ciati), his student radicalism and his subsequent

historiographical production. Clearly the deep ties

to practice helped ground his reading of drawings

and his comprehension of the multiple constraints

of the design process. Indeed, it is fair to state that

few other theoretically sophisticated historian-

critics had such a many-sided competence, a fact

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that is somewhat obscured by Leach’s exceedingly

tight focus on his protagonist, which leads him to

downplay, and at times totally to neglect, the

contributions of other historians and thinkers from

Tafuri’s intellectual world, especially from non-

Italian contexts.

What does come out quite clearly from this focus,

however, is that Tafuri was equally at home tracing

the urban strategies at work in sixteenth-century

Italian cities, exploring the meanings of a Borromini

church or analysing the political implications of

twentieth-century German Siedlungen. Arguably

he was at his best when exposing the myths of the

European avant-gardes, both in architecture and in

art (domains that, in his view, were never completely

separate), even as he decoded their aspirations. One

of the most striking features of the historical avant-

gardes was their obsessive concentration on tech-

nique. This aspect of their trajectory is brought out

superbly in what is in all likelihood the most effective

reading of Leach’s entire study, the lapidary analysis

of the intellectual armature and key theses of

The Sphere and the Labyrinth.

Here Leach finally jettisons his biographical obses-

sion and turns to the problem of analysing the

internal logic of one of Tafuri’s most important

works. At this juncture Leach’s metacritical predilec-

tions serve him well: the parallel he draws between

the technical focus of the historical avant-gardes

and Tafuri’s own fascination with historiographical

technique is both illuminating and new, and truly

clarifies the underpinnings of the argument so that

its structure becomes understandable in a flash.

As such it will provide scholars of architecture (and

of Tafuri) with much food for thought.

What Leach has demonstrated more clearly than

anyone else is that, for Tafuri in 1980, that is, just

before he turned away from any direct engagement

with the contemporary architectural scene, the

defeat of the avant-gardes and the aporias inherent

in architectural writing, in the structuring of the

historiographical argument itself, are not only

complementary, but also critically and epistemologi-

cally linked by the same constitutive act, at once

dividing and joining the competing discourses of

the historical project and the architectural project.8

One project, divided into two halves: that is what

Leach argues for as the basic antinomy at the

heart of one of the most challenging and important

works of Tafuri’s career, one which can rightly be

seen as an integral part of his critical legacy.

At this point, however, it is necessary to recall

that Leach repudiates the very idea of a legacy in

connection with Tafuri: at the outset of his book

he explicitly refuses to ‘intentionally offer up for

consumption Tafuri’s legacy or legacies’, a reference

to the Columbia Conference ‘The Critical Legacies

of Manfredo Tafuri’ (2006) at which he was a

speaker.9 He goes on to clarify his stance in a

passage that balances an ironic mea culpa against

a methodological credo that, in reality, promises

more than it delivers: ‘Despite various attempts to

force the contemporary relevance of Tafuri’s work

— of this of I am of course also guilty — I have

opted to immerse myself in the internal logic of his

historiography, figuring out the mechanics of his

own positions.’ ( p.vii).

Yet neither Tafuri’s positions, nor, for that matter,

the points of transition between them, were

mechanical. That we are not simply dealing with

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an unfortunate choice of metaphors is borne out by

the equivocations concerning historical method that

Leach’s study evinces. These stand out with particu-

lar clarity when, as in the sentence just quoted,

Leach’s attempts to distance his own work from

the positions of other scholars, utilising to this end

what might be called a rhetoric of disavowal.

Yet, despite this carefully considered strategy, it

remains clear that Leach is doing precisely what

they do, albeit from his own perspective and with

his own arsenal of erudite research: addressing the

horizon of interpretation and the critical significance

of the specific historiographical corpus or legacy

under consideration.

As with the idea of the legacy, the problem pre-

sented by ideology — one of the themes most

closely associated with Tafuri’s approach — is that

it seems to contaminate the very critical instruments

the historian attempts to mobilise in order to move

beyond established readings. Yet when trying to

clarify Tafuri’s intellectual path, the possibility of

drawing a significant distinction between criticism

and ideology appears to be essential, despite the

contradiction between Tafuri’s early endorsement

of Marx’s identification of ideology with false

consciousness and his subsequent refusal of this

definition. Leach does not note the early endorse-

ment, put forward in Theories and History

(1968),10 but merely emphasises the later dis-

avowal, articulated in a key methodological essay,

Architettura e Storiografia of 1975 (p. 192). As a

result, he overlooks an important dimension of

Tafuri’s critical aims: with greater acuity than many

other architectural historians of his time, Tafuri

understood just how ideologically charged history

could become in the hands of architects and histor-

ians (especially those with an unabashedly operative

orientation), and it is precisely because of this that

he found it necessary to criticise the ideological

content and function of architecture, even if his

concept of ideology shifted towards the end of his

career.

Thus, in spite of Tafuri’s rejection of the idea that

theory or historiography can be entirely free of

ideology, this does not mean that, in his view,

these areas of inquiry must inevitably succumb to

its mystifications. This, indeed, is an integral aspect

of his critical legacy, which is obscured by Leach’s

somewhat evasive analysis of this area of his histori-

cal inquiry, despite the fact that he quite clearly

understands that for Tafuri the discipline, the very

institution of architecture, has an intrinsic ideologi-

cal function in the modern world, and that this,

not the anticipation of a solution based on a hitherto

inconceivable ‘class architecture’, is the proper

object of historical criticism.

Although Leach is careful to trace Tafuri’s recep-

tion of the work of seminal figures outside of

architecture who elaborated potent critiques of

the continuing cogency not only of Marx’s con-

ception of ideology, but of other aspects of leftist

political and social thought (eg, Foucault, Derrida,

Deleuze), it is striking that he makes no attempt to

relate Tafuri’s position to those of other historians

and critics within the field except in passing (Zevi,

Argan, Portoghesi), and then only with an Italian

focus. One wonders, for instance, why Leach

eschewed a comparative assessment of Tafuri’s

historical analysis of the ideological aspect of

modern architecture and rival accounts advanced

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by contemporaries such as Kenneth Frampton, Alan

Colquhoun or Reyner Banham. (This last would have

been apt, given the fact that Tafuri included sub-

stantial discussions of his work in Theories and

History of Architecture and that he characterised

his position, not without irony, as that of a

‘paladin of technological orthodoxy’, a stance

which is understandable given his deep

intellectual affinity with Banham’s sometime

antagonist Ernesto Nathan Rogers.)11

To a large extent the same criticism applies to

Leach’s refusal to address Tafuri’s critique of lines

of inquiry initiated by the protagonists of the study

of Renaissance architecture and, in particular, by

Rudolf Wittkower. This oversight is especially con-

spicuous because Tafuri expressed great admiration

for this scholar, maintaining, in Interpreting the

Renaissance, that even if Wittkower’s ‘harmonicist’

picture of the Renaissance is no longer tenable,

one must nevertheless acknowledge that even

those who disagree with his approach tend to

articulate their divergence in terms laid down by

Wittkower himself.12

What Leach has achieved, then, can only be

described as paradoxical: an indispensable but

flawed book, ambitious in its aims yet inconsistent

in its focus. Indispensable, in that it is the only

comprehensive study to appear of Tafuri that

exploits a broad range of primary sources (Marco

Biraghi’s Progetto di Crisi does not even come

close, as it is mired in a presentist perspective that

distorts Tafuri’s historical project by offering a

truncated account of its aims). Flawed, in that no

real synthesis — not even a provisional one — is

offered to the reader. This is regrettable for a

number of reasons, none of which are connected,

as is the case with Tafuri’s scholarship, with the

idea of the ‘open work’, but with more substantive

lacunae of an historiographical and critical kind.

Bearing this idea of the opera aperta in mind, no

one who reads Tafuri with the requisite sensitivity

would reasonably expect Leach, or any other histor-

ian for that matter, to claim for his interpretation a

perfect hermeneutic closure. Yet one can reasonably

expect a prise de position, a reading informed not

only by an awareness of the incompleteness of all

possible readings (which Leach certainly does give

us, in spades), but also by an attempt to formulate

hypotheses that one could use when trying to

make sense of Tafuri’s intricate universe of dis-

course. After reading Leach’s book, this reviewer,

at least, cannot answer the question: what are

these basic hypotheses, and how can they help

readers approach a phenomenon as complex, and

as consequential, as the historical project of

Manfredo Tafuri?

However we respond to this question, one thing

remains certain. Coming to grips with Tafuri involves

a complex negotiation between distinct, and at

times opposed, historiographical imperatives. In

Leach’s case, the outcome of this negotiation

remains unclear. Yet, having stated this, it would

be too easy to claim that Leach is among the

many scholars whom Tafuri has defeated in the

attempt to gain an integrated view of that which,

in many ways, defies integration. It would be more

accurate to state that Leach is one of the more

astute historians at present whose confidence in

the synthetic power of historiography has been

shaken by Tafuri’s vertiginous lesson and whose

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sensitivity to the internal tensions, fissures and con-

tradictions that Tafuri identified as essential features

of both architecture and its histories has been

heightened as a result. To have understood the

precariousness of historical writing, together with

its inherently provisional status, is an achievement

that is by no means insignificant, however ambiva-

lent it may seem to be at first glance.

As Tafuri observed: ‘It is possible for history to lend

its voice to a dialectical process that does not take

the outcome of the struggles it narrates for

granted. Hence it must suspend its judgments if it

is to proceed at all. Nothing is given as past. Histori-

cal time is, by its constitution, hybrid.’13 The more

profound lesson of Leach’s study could consist pre-

cisely in having grasped this point, even if the book

from which it is taken, Interpreting the Renaissance,

is largely absent from his analysis. In the current cul-

tural climate, marked by a pervasive disconnection

between historical research and critical insight, it is

particularly important to bear the fragility of the

process of historical interpretation in mind, and to

recall the delicate balance it presupposes between

the critic’s intellectual boldness and the scholar’s

need for renewed methods of verification.

Implicit in much of Leach’s concern for context

is not only a positivist attachment to the conventions

of the monographic approach (and to the genre

of intellectual biography as such) but also a specific

philosophical orientation which comes to the fore

in the final pages of his book: existentialism

(pp. 251ff). Paradoxically enough, this orientation —

even in its Sartrean variety, which Leach adduces as

an important current within Tafuri’s early intellectual

development — reinforces a widespread tendency

(whose problematic character Leach does not seem

adequately to recognise) to give undue emphasis to

the historian’s subjectivity instead of considering

the place of the latter within a wider spectrum of

historical phenomena.

Rejecting the hagiographical excesses of much of

the secondary literature on Tafuri, Leach is careful

not to fetishise his protagonist’s intellectual

achievement. But one gets the sense that, in con-

centrating so heavily on the biographical side of

his task (his opening disavowal, ‘This book is not

a biography’ [p. 3] — in the first sentence of the

text — suggests that this side of his work was a

source of methodological anxiety to the author),

he ends up substituting one set of myths for

another. Indeed, it is as if, in order to avoid the mys-

tification of the great demystifier of architectural

ideology, he errs in the opposite direction of a

too-zealous attachment to the ‘objective’ qualities

of the life history in its various, and at times contra-

dictory historical situations and their ambiguous

impact on the subject. In reality, a via di mezzo

would have been the more prudent course

to follow, balancing the claims of intellectual

biography against those of biography tout court.

(Models for this kind of equilibrium are not

all that hard to find: one thinks, above all, of

E.H. Gombrich’s classic account of the intellectual

itinerary of Aby Warburg, or, more recently,

Nigel Whiteley’s study of the life and work of

Reyner Banham.)14

Yet, since he avoids this middle path, another kind

of myth creeps in at the end: that of the existential

(anti-) hero. Tafuri the nihilist, in accordance with a

well-known cliche, would thus be complemented

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by Tafuri the heroic loner in search of meaning

in architecture. Clearly Tafuri had more than a

passing interest in Sartre, Camus, et al: but that

does not necessarily mean that he was a crypto-

existentialist, or that existentialism should be con-

sidered to be a privileged key for reading the

relationship of Tafuri the man to Tafuri the scholar.

That would be perilously close to erecting one

mythical construction on the site of another which

had been so carefully dismantled. The problem

here is similar to, but not identical with, Leach’s

evaluation of Tafuri’s reception of Freud (pp.159ff),

since both involve an overemphasis on subjectivity

and biographical conjecture, a psychologistic

reduction that operates at the expense of the theor-

etical and methodological sides of what is being

investigated. For what is really significant in this

respect is not how one can ‘psychoanalyse’ Tafuri

the individual subject, but the question of examining

the ways in which Tafuri the scholar utilised Freudian

methods of interpretation as a means of reformulat-

ing the complex relationship between history, the

problematics of collective and individual memory,

and the culture of architecture at any given

moment.

Consequently, the usefulness of Leach’s study

does not derive from its stated aims, nor from the

critical correctives it claims to offer, but from the

diverse areas of intellectual interest which converge

in its subject: one that is simultaneously theoretical,

critical and historical, and which emerges as if from

a huge historical mosaic, from the innumerable

details which the author patiently assembles. Thus,

in spite of its methodological inadequacies, and

the uneven texture of its argument, this book

undoubtedly makes an important contribution. Yet

it does so almost inadvertently, by underscoring

the irreducible singularity of Tafuri’s historical

project: one that comes through not because of,

but rather despite its multiple immersion in a plural-

ity of contexts. Tafuri thus stands out as a figure who

rises above circumstances, in spite of Leach’s deter-

mined attempt to show that he was conditioned

by them.

Seen from this perspective, many of the historical

contingencies, psychological crises and anguished

decisions that Leach uncovers seem beside the

point, if they are taken in themselves, without an

eye to their wider significance. At the same time,

one must not forget the more focused, analytically

effective side of Leach’s investigation in which inten-

tion and result coincide: for it is just as necessary to

recall that Leach comes through with flying colours

in his discussion of what is arguably Tafuri’s most

difficult and heavily theorised work, The Sphere

and the Labyrinth, as it is to dwell on the deficiencies

of his analysis. Bearing both of these aspects in mind,

and weighing their advantages and disadvantages

against the critical horizon delineated by what has

been written up to now about this historian, it

seems fair to say that Choosing History remains the

book of choice for those interested in Tafuri’s

achievement. Due as much to the comprehensive

scope of its research as to the challenges inherent

in its subject, it is likely to occupy this position for

many years to come.

Daniel Sherer

Columbia University GSAPP/Yale University

School of Architecture

USA

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Notes and references1. The other study is Marco Biraghi, Progetto di Crisi:

Manfredo Tafuri e l’architettura contemporanea

(Milan, 2005).

2. Tafuri, ‘L’Architecture dans le Boudoir: The Language

of Criticism and the Criticism of Language’, Opposi-

tions, 3 (1974), reprinted in The Oppositions

Reader, ed., K. Michael Hays (New York, Princeton

Architectural Press, 1998), pp. 291ff.

3. Interpreting the Renaissance: Princes, Cities, Architects,

trsl., with an introduction by Daniel Sherer and a

preface by K. Michael Hays (New Haven and London,

Yale University Press in association with Harvard GSD,

2006).

4. C. Olmo, ‘One Story, Many Histories’, in Casabella,

619/20 (1995), p. 79.

5. As is the case, on the other hand, in the excellent study

of Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Project of Autonomy: Poli-

tics and Architecture within and against Capitalism

(New York, Buell Center, FORuM Project/Princeton

Architectural Press, 2008) which situates Tafuri in the

context of the political and theoretical debates

surrounding this concept in the late 1960s and early-

to-mid-1970s.

6. F. Rosa, ‘Progetto e critica dell’urbanistica moderna.

I primi anni di attivita di Manfredo Tafuri, 1959-68’

(unpublished Tesi di laurea, Universita Iuav di

Venezia, 2003).

7. L. Passerini, interview with Manfredo Tafuri (1992),

ANY, 25/26 (2000), pp. 10–70.

8. Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture, op. cit.,

p. 109.

9. For a statement of the goals of the Conference, which

was organised by the Author of this Review, see http//

arch.columbia.edu/indexphp.page.data¼59939. On

the Conference and its reception, see T. Stoppani,

review of M. Tafuri, Interpreting the Renaissance:

Princes, Cities, Architects, in The Journal of Architec-

ture, 13, 3 (June, 2008), pp. 348–9; J. Goodbun,

‘The Critical Legacies of Manfredo Tafuri’, review in

Radical Philosophy, 138 (2006), pp. 62–64 and the

internet forum posted at architettura.dada.net.

instant/20070414.index_en.htm.

10. Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture, op. cit., p. ii.

11. Ibid., p. 14.

12. Tafuri, Interpreting the Renaissance, op. cit., p. 3.

13. Ibid., p. 22.

14. E. H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biogra-

phy (Chicago/London, University of Chicago Press,

1970). N. Whiteley, Reyner Banham: Historian of

the Immediate Future (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT

Press, 2003).

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