Architecture after utopia: the times of the historical “project”

Teresa Stoppani

ABSTRACT:
Manfredo Tafuri’s celebrated and often misinterpreted book Progetto e Utopia (1973) expands upon
his 1969 essay ‘Per una critica dell’ideologia architettonica’. In the book preface Tafuri dismisses the
critics that had defined the essay ‘an apocalyptic prophecy’ that pronounced the ‘death of
architecture’. He explains that the book aims to identify ‘those tasks which capitalist development
has taken away from architecture’, and pursue a form of engagement that can return architecture to
an active role in society. Here Tafuri sets the grounds for his long-term “project” of reinventing
architectural history as a necessary voice at work in architecture, tasked with exposing the
intersections of architecture with power and the complexity of the strategies of domination, and
arriving at their modes of production. The architectural history he advocates must look beyond
architecture, to explore architecture’s relation with power institutions and with their myths and
representations. The labour of this analysis has no end.

As Tafuri realises his “project” per exempla, he repeatedly returns to the urban projects that Le
Corbusier had developed for Algiers between 1930 and 1942, exploring in them those “beyond
architecture” and ideological constructions that the “project” of critical history had set out to dissect.
In instalments, Tafuri shows how Le Corbusier’s persistent engagement with Algiers is emblematic
of the modern project’s ambiguous relationship with capitalism and with power. This chapter argues
that Tafuri’s work, by returning and differently focusing his attention to the project, cuts deep
through the methods of historiography itself, revealing the “unsafe building” of historical analysis
and the need to render its project interminable.

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Architecture after utopia: the times of the historical “project”
Teresa Stoppani

[I]f Power – like the institutions in which it incarnates itself- “speaks many dialects”, the
analysis of the “collision” among these dialects must then be the object of historiography. The
construction of a physical space is certainly the site of a “battle”: a proper urban analysis
demonstrates this clearly. That such a battle is not totalizing, that it leaves borders, remains,
residues, is also an indisputable fact. And thus a vast field of investigation is opened up – an
investigation of the limits of languages, of the boundaries of techniques, of the thresholds “that
provide density”. […] The possibility of constructing the history of a formal language comes
about only by destroying, step by step, the linearity of that history and its autonomy: there will
remain only traces, fluctuating signs, unhealed rifts.

Manfredo Tafuri, ‘The Historical “Project”’1

Manfredo Tafuri’s celebrated and often misappropriated book Progetto e Utopia (1973)2, expands
upon his 1969 essay ‘Per una critica dell’ideologia architettonica’.3 In the preface to the book Tafuri
dismisses the criticism that the essay had attracted, accusing him of offering with it ‘an apocalyptic
prophecy’ that pronounced the ‘death of architecture’.4 Far from it, he explains that in the book he
aims to identify ‘those tasks which capitalist development has taken away from architecture’,5 and to
pursue a form of engagement that can see beyond ‘pure architecture’, ‘form without utopia’, and
‘sublime uselessness’,6 and return architecture to an active role in society. It is indeed in this work
that Tafuri sets the grounds for his long-term “project” of reinventing architectural history as a
necessary voice within architecture, and defines for the architectural historian the critical task of
exposing the complex intersections of architecture with power. From the study of contemporary
architecture and urbanism to the early avant-garde of Piranesi’s project, from the modern metropolis
in America to the social housing of Red Vienna, from a critique of the ‘boudoir’ architecture of the
1970s to the many studies of the Renaissance, and more, Tafuri’s historical “project” will then unfold
in a series of complex and rigorous investigations per exempla of the ‘conflicts, contradictions, and
lacerations’7 that inhabit the relationship of architecture with power.

1
Manfredo Tafuri, ‘The Historical “Project”’, in The Sphere and the Labyrinth. Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi
to the 1970s, trans. Pellegrino d’Acierno and Robert Connolly (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1987), 8.
2
Manfredo Tafuri, Progetto e Utopia. Architettura e sviluppo capitalistico (Bari: Laterza 1973); Architecture and Utopia:
Design and Capitalist Development, trans. Barbara Luigia La Penta (Cambridge MA and London: MIT Press, 1976).
3
Manfredo Tafuri, ‘Per una critica dell’ideologia architettonica’, Contropiano. Materiali marxisti, 1 (1969): 31-79. Translated
into English by Stephen Santorelli as ‘Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology’, in Architecture Theory since 1968, ed.
K. Michael Hays, 2-35 (Cambridge MA and London: MIT Press, 1998).
4
Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, viii.
5
Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, ix.
6
Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, ix.
7
Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 1.

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In the programmatic text that defines the ‘historical “project”’ and becomes the introduction of The
Sphere and the Labyrinth (La sfera e il labirinto, 1980)8 Tafuri explains that the history of
architecture cannot be reduced to a language and to linear simplifications, but must have a clear
understanding that ‘between institutions and power systems perfect identity does not exist [and that]
[a]rchitecture itself, inasmuch as it is an institution, is anything but a unitary ideological block.’9
Furthermore, ‘the language of history and the languages codified by critical analysis [are] also
“spoken” through a series of censures, repressions, negations’,10 and therefore Tafuri’s ambition is

to construct a history that, after having upset and shattered the apparent compactness of the
real, after having shifted the ideological barriers that hide the complexity of the strategies of
domination, arrives at the heart of those strategies – arrives, that is, at their modes of
production.11

Yet, Tafuri is well aware that

modes of production, isolated in themselves, neither explain nor determine. They themselves
are anticipated, delayed, or traversed by ideological currents. Once a system of power is
isolated, its genealogy cannot be offered as a universe complete in itself. The analysis must go
further; it must make the previously isolated fragments collide with each other; it must dispute
the limits it has set up. Regarded as “labor”, in fact, analysis has no end; it is, as Freud
recognized, by its very nature infinite.12

For Tafuri, the analysis performed by criticism can speak ‘only if the doubt with which it attacks the
real turns back on itself as well … [and] “true history” is … that which recognizes its own
arbitrariness, which recognizes itself as an “unsafe building”.13 At the same time the historian/critic
must remain alert to the fact that ‘[t]he manipulation of forms always has an objective that transcends
the forms themselves … [and it is against this] constant “beyond architecture” … that the historian is
obliged to measure himself’.14

A key example of critical history that looks beyond architecture to explore architecture’s relation
with power institutions and with the myths and representations of modernity are the texts that Tafuri
produces on Le Corbusier’s urban projects for Algiers. While Le Corbusier, as self-appointed city
architect and planner, repeatedly returns to his Algiers project and its variations, Tafuri’s analysis
will repeatedly return Le Corbusier’s proposals, exploring in them those “beyond architecture” and
ideological constructions that the “project” of critical history had set out to dissect.

If Le Corbusier’s reiterations of the Algies project end up exposing the internalised conflicts and
insufficiencies of the modern project, Tafuri’s returning attention to the project cut deep into the
methods of historiography itself, revealing the “unsafe building” of historical analysis and the need to
render its project interminable.

8
Manfredo Tafuri, ‘The Historical “Project”’, in The Sphere and the Labyrinth. Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi
to the 1970s, trans. Pellegrino d’Acierno and Robert Connolly (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1987), 1-21.
9
Tafuri, ‘The Historical “Project”’, 5.
10
Tafuri, ‘The Historical “Project”’, 9.
11
Tafuri, ‘The Historical “Project”’, 12.
12
Tafuri, ‘The Historical “Project”’, 10.
13
Tafuri, ‘The Historical “Project”’, 12.
14
Tafuri, ‘The Historical “Project”’, 14.

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Between 1930 and 1942 Le Corbusier produces a series of projects for Algiers, in a conflicting and
self-commissioned engagement with the city. In a remote and indirect parallel, Tafuri too returns to
Algiers and Le Corbusier’s proposal again and again: in 1973 (in Progetto e Utopia) to denounce the
crisis of the modernist utopia and the reduction of architecture to image; in 1984 (in ‘Machine et
Memoire’)15 to discuss the appropriation of technology for the transformation of the city; and finally
in 1993 (in Dignità dell’attimo)16 to explain the insufficiency of the modern project in relation to the
complex temporality of the city.

To better understand the coming into action of the historical “project” as a critical, open, relational,
and always revisable strategy, it is worth progressing backward through the key moments of its
definition, before examining its phased substantiation in the analyses of Le Corbusier’s Algiers
project.

History as a project (1980)

In The Sphere and the Labyrinth (1980)17 Tafuri identifies the key moments of architectural
modernity, in a fragmented history made of ruptures, redefinitions and constant self-questioning of
the architectural discipline in relation to the social, the political, and what he calls the ‘multiple
techniques of environmental formation’.18 It is here that he formally introduces the historical
“project” as ‘an intermittent journey through a maze of entangled paths, one of the many possible
“provisional constructions”’.19

As a “project”, Tafuri’s history is an open construct that reactivates past events in its reading of the
present. Not only determined by the objects it analyses but also determinant of the realities it
deconstructs and then recomposes, as it acts on multiple and non-linear times, the historical project
offers itself as an always provisional endless analytical construct. It is in this way that it can address
the future: not as a solution-finding method but as a wider question-raising strategy. Like
architecture, the historical project does not aim to offer a comprehensive and definitive solution;
open to forces that are external to architecture, it exposes how these are at work within it. Like
architecture, it works with partiality, precision and intention, operating through the specificity of its
objects and their material practices.

15
Manfredo Tafuri, ‘Machine et Mémoire: the city in the work of Le Corbusier’, part 1’, Casabella, 502 (May 1984): 44-51;
part 2, Casabella, 503 (June 1984): 44-51; reprinted in Le Corbusier: The Garland Essays, ed. H. A. Brooks (New York:
Garland, 1987), 203-18.
16
Manfredo Tafuri, La dignità dell’attimo. Trascrizione multimediale di ‘Le forme del tempo: Venezia e la modernità’
(Venice: IUAV and Grafiche Veneziane, 1994.). Tafuri’s lecture ‘Le forme del tempo: Venezia e la modernità’ was the
inaugural lecture for the academic year 1992-93 of the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia (IUAV, the Institute
of Architecture of the University of Venice, now renamed IUAV University of Venice).
17
Manfredo Tafuri, ‘Il “progetto” storico’, in La sfera e il labirinto. Avanguardie e architettura da Piranesi agli anni ‘70
(Turin: Einaudi, 1980), 3-30; ‘The Historical “Project”’, in The Sphere and the Labyrinth. Avant-Gardes and Architecture
from Piranesi to the 1970s, trans. Pellegrino d’Acierno and Robert Connolly (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1987). ‘Il “progetto”
storico’ was first published in Italian in Casabella, 429 (October 1977): 11-18, and then in English in Oppositions, 17 (Summer
1979). The essay then become the introduction of Tafuri’s book La sfera e il labirinto (The Sphere and the Labyrinth).
18
Manfredo Tafuri, ‘Introduction: The Historical “Project”’, in The Sphere and the Labyrinth. Avant-Gardes and Architecture
from Piranesi to the 1970s (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1987), 1- 2.
19
Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, 21. ‘Non uno spaccato storico in sé completo, dunque, ma un percorso a scatti
all’interno di un intrico di sentieri abbiamo inteso presentare, una delle tante possibili “costruzioni provvisorie” ottenibili a
partire dai materiali prescelti.’ Tafuri, La sfera e il labirinto, 30.

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For Tafuri ‘[t]he manipulation of forms always has an objective that transcends the forms
themselves’, and while architecture remains the object of his work, it is the ‘“beyond architecture”’
that is at the core of his interest.20 As the materials of history – architecture and it beyond – are
always in transformation, the work of history proceeds ‘over time, constructing its own methods as
supports in perennial transformations. […] By questioning its own materials, it reconstructs them and
continuously reconstruct itself.’21 ‘The historian is a worker “in the plural”, as are the subjects on
which he performs his work.’22
The work of the architectural historian must therefore go beyond form, and focus on the ideologies,
and these always operate in “bundles”.23 The work of the historian is to occupy the interstices
between ‘artificially pre-established fields of inquiry… : the sciences and techniques of the
transformation of the real, the systems of domination, the ideologies’,24 explore their distances, probe
‘what appears to be a void’,25 and think by “entanglements” of phenomena, of these phenomena
study the collisions, and of these collisions study the remains, the residues that are left at the edges.

The task of the historian is to identify in these “entanglements” the many independent histories and
lay them out next to each other, to identify and map relations, interdependencies and antagonisms.
Open and partial, the “project” of history proposes

not a section through history complete in itself, but rather an intermittent journey through a
maze of tangled paths, one of the many possible “provisional constructions” obtainable by
starting with the[se] chosen materials.26

Dangerously working on the fine line between detachment and participation, exposed and
intermittent, the work remains linear.27 Crucial to the work of a critical history are the notion of
distance and the tension through which it operates:

20
It is the ‘constant “beyond architecture” that triggers the moments of rupture within the tradition of the new”. And it is
precisely against such a “beyond” that the historian is obliged to measure himself. […] We are hence forced into a constant
process of dismantling with regard to the object of our research.’ Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, 14.
21
Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, 12.
22
Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, 12.
23
Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, 10-11. Tafuri uses the expression ‘fasci’, which is rendered with ‘groups’ in the
English edition. I prefer to use the term ‘bundles’, which is closer to the original Italian fasci, as it shares with it the idea of
linear elements tied together. Tafuri introduces the idea of “fasci” (bundles) in Teorie e storia dell’architettura in which the
work of historical criticism is described as an ‘activity of decomposition, description, comparison, recomposition in a new
order, of the “materials” of which architecture itself is composed, in the bundles of relations that make it one.’ [attività di
scomposizione, descrizione, confronto, ricomposizione in un ordine nuovo, dei “materiali” di cui è composta l’architettura
stessa, nei fasci delle relazioni che la uniscono)] Manfredo Tafuri, Teorie e storia dell’architettura (Bari: Laterza, 1968), 263.
My translation.
24
Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, 12.
25
Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, 13.
26
Tafuri, ‘Il “progetto” storico’, in La sfera e il labirinto, 30. My translation. The English language edition ignores the word
‘sezione’ (section), thus missing the geometrical, graphic and architectural dimension in Tafuri’s discourse.
27
‘Ideology never acts as a “pure” force. Not only does it “soil” praxis and is “soiled” by praxis, but it is entangled with other
ideologies, often antithetical to it. One could say that ideologies work in bundles and expand in a capillary way in the
construction of reality. […] We do not want to be misunderstood. We have no intention whatsoever to sing the praise of the
irrational or to interpret the complex interaction of the bundles of ideologies like “rhizomes” à Deleuze and Guattari. It is not
by chance that we consider it necessary “not to make a rhizome” of these bundles. Although it is implicated with the objects
and the phenomena it analyses, historical criticism must be able to play on the razor’s edge that marks the boundary between
detachment and participation. Here resides the “fecund uncertainty” of analysis, its endlessness, its having to return ever and
again on its material and, at the same time, on itself.’ Tafuri, ‘Il “progetto” storico’, La sfera e il labirinto, 15-16. My
translation). The English translation of Tafuri’s work misses the mathematical-geometrical implications and the linearity

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 Although it is implicated with the objects and the phenomena it analyses, historical criticism
must be able to play on the razor’s edge that marks the boundary between detachment and
participation. Here resides the “fecund uncertainty” of analysis, its endlessness, its having to
return ever and again on its material and, at the same time, on itself.28

The balancing act of the historical “project” is a complex one, not only strained between criticism
and its objects, but working within criticism itself (and of itself), and the cutting edge of the razor is
sharper when it challenges the role of analysis itself. What is defined here is the direction of
movement of the work of history, and – each time – the objects of its analysis, but not its boundaries
or (en)closures. History is and remains open and active, and offers itself as an always provisional and
intrinsically endless analytical construct. Active, it is not only determined by the objects it analyses,
but also determinant of the realities it deconstructs and recomposes. Open, this history acknowledges
the ‘irreducible tension between the analysis and its objects’, and it is therefore always a ‘project of a
crisis’29 because ‘[t]here is no guarantee as to the absolute validity of such a project, no “solution” in
it. One must learn not to ask history for pacitcvications.’13

Ineffectual utopias (1973)

In Progetto e utopia (1973) Tafuri re-read ‘the history of modern architecture in the light of methods
offered by an ideological [Marxist] criticism’.30 Dismissing accusations of defeatism and
renunciation, he explains in the book that his aim is to identify ‘those tasks which capitalist
development has taken away from architecture … [and] in general from ideological prefiguration.’31

Far from sentencing the death of architecture, Tafuri looks for a form of engagement able to go
beyond ‘pure architecture’ and ‘sublime uselessness’, in order to return architecture to an active role
in society. Not an easy task. It is here that Tafuri’s definition of the “project” of reinvention of
architectural history as a necessary voice within architecture begins. It is a “project” that sets out to
redefine the role of the historian of architecture and in architecture; its task [the task of architectural
history as Tafuri is here redefining it – he does not call it “historical project” here, but he is here
setting the ground to develop it in his later writings and expecially in the S&L] is to expose the
complex intersections of architecture with power, and thus both reveal and instigate its
environmental agency.

The use of “progetto” in the book’s original title is important. It is here that Tafuri claims for
architecture’s history a role that is independent from both art history and architectural design and
practice, while at the same time stressing that the history of architecture and the design and building
of architecture are both part of architecture. It is in their distance and in their relationship that the
criticality of architecture is maintained and reinforced. It is this history, with its tension of operating
both on and within architecture, that keeps architecture open, maintains its critical involvement, and
changes it (allowing it to change).

suggested by the term fasci (bundles), and therefore the significance of its use by Tafuri in opposition to the Deleuzian notion
of “rhizome”.
28
Tafuri, La sfera e il labirinto, 15-16. My translation.
29
Tafuri, La sfera e il labirinto, 5. My translation.
30
Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, vii.
31
Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, ix.

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Architecture and Utopia opens with one of the most quoted (perhaps misquoted) statements on
architecture’s problematic relation with the arts, the city and with society at large:

To ward off anguish by understanding and absorbing its causes would seem to be one of the
principal ethical exigencies of bourgeois art. It matters little if the conflicts, contradictions, and
lacerations that generate this anguish are temporarily reconciled by means of a complex
mechanism, or if, through contemplative sublimation, catharsis is achieved.32

Of the bourgeois arts that Tafuri refers to, architecture is obviously the most explicitly and directly
involved in the transformations of the city. It is the intricate relations of social and political agendas
that enable and influence the making of architecture in the city and of the city. The urban
environment is never only a receptacle of architecture, but always also its enabler and instigator. In a
few words we have here a very clear definition of architecture as an urban, social and political act, a
negotiated and never neutral cultural product intrinsic to the very idea and making of the city. Tafuri
observes, ‘It is not just by chance that the metropolis, the place of absolute alienation, is at the very
centre of concern of the avant-garde’.33

The artistic and architectural avant-gardes work on the metropolis to overcome the ‘conflicts,
contradictions, and lacerations’ and the anguish they generate by operationally and sympathetically
coexisting with them and introjecting them. Different though is the role of ideological criticism, and
here Tafuri offers a succinct anticipation of the historical “project”: the task of history and the work
of the historian is not to “ward off” that anguish, but to delve in it.

Informed by the courageous productive stance of Walter Benjamin’s ‘destructive character’,34 the
historical project is a process that digs deep and undoes, not only in order to interrogate a past, and
reconnect to the present, but also to suggest an ongoing self-critical act.

32
Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 1.
33
Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 1.
34
In Theories and History of Architecture (Teorie e storia dell’architettura (Bari: Laterza, 1968), Tafuri had produced an
analysis of the established methodologies of the history of architecture and a critique of the partisan histories produced by
‘operative critics’ actively engaged in support of specific trends in design. (Its English translation, Theories and History of
Architecture, published in New York by Harper & Row in 1979 and in London by Granada in 1980 is not always reliable).
Here Tafuri identifies the task of criticism as ‘an objective and unprejudiced historical diagnosis’, which ‘requires a great deal
of courage, since it [aims to] “understand” all contemporary myths by radically demolishing them.’ (Per la critica tornare ad
assumere su di sé il compito che le è proprio - quello della diagnosi storica oggettiva e spregiudicata… - richiede… una buona
dose di coraggio, dato che, nello storicizzare la drammatica pregnanza del momento odierno, essa rischia di avventurarsi in un
terreno minato. […] [L]a minaccia che pende sul capo di chi voglia “capire” demolendo radicalmente ogni mito contemporaneo
è [che] ogni giorno di più si è invitati a rispondere alla tragica domanda sulla liceità storica della continuità con la tradizione
del movimento moderno.’ Tafuri, Teorie e storia dell’architettura, 11-12; my translation and emphasis). For Tafuri such
diagnosis is produced through destruction, it is an ‘activity of decomposition, description, comparison, re-composition in a
new order, of the “materials” of which architecture is composed, in sets of relationships of which it is made.’ (‘Attività di
scomposizione, descrizione, confronto, ricomposizione in un ordine nuovo, dei “materiali” di cui è composta l’architettura
stessa, nei fasci delle relazioni che la uniscono.’ Tafuri, Teorie e storia dell’architettura, 11-12; my translation). This active
role of criticism is explicitly derived from Walter Benjamin’s conception of history and definition of the ‘destructive character’
who sees ‘nothing [as] lasting… [and] sees ways everywhere. […] What exists reduces to rubble, not for the sake of rubble,
but for the way leading through it.’ (Walter Benjamin, ‘The Destructive Character’ (1931) in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms,
Autobiographical Writings, New York: Schocken Books, 1986, 302-03. The role of destruction in historiography will be
further elaborated by Benjamin in his fundamental ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1940), (now in Illuminations: Essays
and Reflections, Hannah Arendt (ed.) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 253-264). For Tafuri only this form of
criticism can exist, and it is necessarily historical: it is on the materials of history that it works, dissects, operates; it is through
history, its distance and specificity that it is freed from a ‘compromising’ and instrumental relation with architectural practice.

7
By engaging with the modern and contemporary architectural production – both utopian and built –
together with its relationship with capitalism, market forces, production systems and planning, Tafuri
challenges the distinction between an inside and an outside of architecture. There is no outside of
architecture, affected as it is by the conditions of its production. Even the most exclusively
theoretical and apparently self-referential forms of architecture are affected by ‘the multiple
techniques of environmental formation’.35

The key questions that a critical history must ask of architecture are opened – but not answered – in
the book’s conclusion, ‘Problems in form of a conclusion’.36 It is here that Tafuri denounces the
reduction of the ideological role of architecture within general urban planning. Reduced to building
production, architecture seems unable to influence and even less direct the transformation of urban
and territorial structures. Here Tafuri exposes not the death of architecture per se, but the collapse
and final failure of the modernist dream in architecture, and the inadequacy of static ideological
models that define both planning and programming in terms of situations of equilibrium. For Tafuri
the evolution of planning and programming in the making of the city needs to go beyond the
established certainties and conventions of the architectural discipline. One of the key questions that
Tafuri asks at this point is, ‘to what extent are decisions taken in its own [architecture’s] specific
sphere reflected in larger systems?’.37 An answer to this question can only be attempted by a
reflection on architecture that performs ‘a criticism of the concrete “realised” ideology of
architecture… and arrive[s] at a specifically political dimension’.38

The “project” of history (1968)

In Teorie e storia dell’architettura (1968)39 Tafuri had prepared the grounds for the historical project
by distancing architectural history not only from the tradition of art history but also from the practice
of architecture. The critical task of architectural history is defined as the debunking of agiography,
exegesis, and of any compromise and involvement with the design and the practice of the architect.
History must distance itself from what Tafuri calls ‘operative criticism’: a form of manipulated and
intentionally biased history constructed by critics who are also active in architectural practice, or are
actively engaged in supporting specific trends in design – an instrumental history, like those been
produced by Giorgio Vasari, by Giovanni Pietro Bellori, and in Tafuri’s times by Bruno Zevi. For
Tafuri history can only be critical, and criticism must operate within history as a ‘diagnostic’ and
‘destructive’ tool.40 The ‘destructive’ work of history is already in itself a form of production: the
production of an independent discourse in architecture that is in itself a “project”, a form of making,
rather than a subservient and celebratory discourse applied ex post in support of the architectural
project.

Tafuri’s “project” is the construction, per exempla, of a work of history that, starting from
architecture, exposes the interconnectedness of architecture with the dynamics of the economic and

35
Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, 1-2.
36
Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 170-182.
37
Tafuri continues: ‘The present-day situation in architecture makes it difficult to find coherent answers to these questions.’
Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 176. ‘Indeed – he concludes – the crisis of modern architecture is … a crisis of the ideological
function of architecture.’, 181.
38
Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 182
39
Manfredo Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture (New York: Harper & Row, 1979; London: Granada, 1980).
40
Manfredo Tafuri, Teorie e storia dell’architettura, (Bari: Laterza, 1968), 11-12. My translation.

8
political forces that affect the shaping of the territory and the city. History itself is an ongoing
project, and must be uncomfortably and uneasily exposed to the influences of the many other forces
and disciplines that affect architecture. If the history of architecture is a project of crisis it is first of
all the project of a crisis of itself, before and more than a crisis of its object. Its construction is a
constantly endangered balancing act, and the task of the historian resides in the building and
inhabiting of this tension.

“At” Algiers
The complex case of Le Corbusier’s urban designs and architectural projects for the North-African
city of Algiers41 is emblematic of the modern project’s ambiguous relationship with capitalism and
with power. Tafuri will return to this project again and again in several of his writings, each time
slicing deeper and deeper through it. Le Corbusier too returns to the project with several design
proposal and an epistolary courtship of the local authorities. Courteous, deferential, arrogant in turn,
the true pursuit in Le Corbusier’s flirtation with power is indeed architecture itself (his architecture),
and its possibilities to embody and improve modernity, ultimately indifferent to whom or what may
be at the receiving end of his “missives”.

Between 1930 and 1942 Le Corbusier will produce different versions of the self-commissioned
project, and these are always accompanied by revealing exchanges with the city’s authorities, in
which he tries to get their interest and support. Tafuri’s various writings on the project show how Le
Corbusier will always remain “at” Algiers, without ever really managing to “enter” the city.

In Progetto e utopia Tafuri tackles the project in the chapter ‘La crisi dell’utopia: Le Corbusier ad
Algeri’. The “at” remains in the English translation of the book. ‘Le Corbusier at Algiers’ is not a
poor translation of the title, but a (possibly intentional) apt expression of Tafuri’s belief that Le
Corbusier never really “entered”, i.e. never fully understood, Algiers, and never managed to control it
with the modernist project.

Le Corbusier devises for Algiers a kit of parts with which he then plays in the different versions of
the project. His is a formal game, but also a political and colonialist one, which superimposes an idea
and a form of the city over the real one. Playing with his set of large urban figures to entice and
engage the local political powers, Le Corbusier superimposes on the city like a calligraphy of an
alien arabesques. Adapted to and transformed by local topography and history, the modernist grid
changes its configuration, but the divisions that the grid ‘effect’42 performs do not. Local culture, the
historical city, and the lie of the land are conflated into one under the label of “nature”, as something
that the modernist project aims to tame, control, design, use and benefit from. The project will never
be realised, and its figure remains a trace of otherness deeply infiltrated by complex existing urban
“organism”.

41
A thorough analysis of the Le Corbusier’s project s for Algiers is in Mary McLeod, ‘Le Corbusier and Algiers’,
Oppositions,19/20, (Winter/Spring1980), 54-85.
42
I have discussed the ‘grid effect’ in Teresa Stoppani, ‘Grid Effects’, ARQ Architecture Research Quarterly 12, 3-4 (2009);
255-262. ‘Unlike the modern pictorial grid, the ‘grid effect’ does not produce a separation from the world but, inseparable
from its implementation, it produces a dynamic and evolving space rather than a bi- or three- dimensional form. […] [257]
The grid effect is the operation of gridding once it is divested of the prefigured formal resolution of the grid (gridiron) … [and]
does not necessarily produce always ‘grids’. … [It] opens up the space between the representation of the grid and its
implementation, between the figure of the gridiron as a given and the effect of the grid as a process.’ [258-259]

9
In the same years while he was working on the self-commissioned Algiers project, Le Corbusier was
also working on the book La Ville Radieuse (1933), which presents his idea of the Radiant City as a
theoretical solution for inhabitation and urban design. On the frontispiece, near the title, is Le
Corbusier’s dedication of the book ‘to power’, or in French, ‘a l’autorité’, the power in power.

Becoming image (1973)

In Tafuri’s introduction of Le Corbusier’s Algiers project in the chapter of Architecture and Utopia
devoted to it, Tafuri seems to respond to the incipit of the book, addressing the anguish that
‘conflicts, contradictions, and lacerations’ generate in bourgeois art, or in this case, in Le Corbusier:

Absorb that multiplicity, reconcile the improbable through the certainty of the plan, offset
organic and disorganic qualities by accentuating their interrelationship, demonstrate that the
maximum level of programming of productivity coincides with the maximum level of the
productivity of the spirit: these are the objectives delineated by Le Corbusier with a lucidity
that has no comparison in progressive European culture.43

Tafuri looks at how Le Corbusier’s project considers Algiers as a whole ‘anthropo-geographic

landscape’,44 and respond to it by dropping onto the site ‘ready-made objects on a gigantic scale’45.
He points to the political implications of the project, as its implementation would require a new land
regime, and the availability of the whole city for a total and organic reorganization. But there is
more, as here Le Corbusier articulates a three-dimensional control over the city in a spatial hierarchy
where verticality is revealing.

Le Corbusier’s first plan for Algiers, developed in 1930-33 and aptly named Obus (Shrapnel)
proposes the reorganization of the city as a machine, or, as Tafuri points out, as the image of a
machine, and its communication through such image: ‘the old Casbah, the hills of Fort-l'Empereur,
and the indentation of the coastline are taken up as material to be reutilized, actual ready-made
objects on a gigantic scale’.46 The project operates on a territorial level, but it organises an image that
responds to the ‘ethical exigencies of bourgeois art’,47 in which the ‘conflicts, contradictions, and
lacerations’48 that generate anguish are absorbed to ‘ward off anguish’.49 The technology of the
motorway, the viaduct, the high risers of the port city becomes here image –with a difference: while
Le Corbusier’s projects for several South American cities reimagine them (rather than planned them)
from above in bird’s eye views,50 “at” Algiers Le Corbusier gets on the ground, and attempts to
“enter” a conversation with the government and the administration of the city. But what he offers is
an image, drawn with ‘enormous objects that mimic an abstract and sublimated “dance of
contradictions”’.51

43
Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 125.
44
Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 126.
45
Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 127.
46
Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 127.
47
Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 1.
48
Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 1
49
Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 1 and 131.
50
See Jean-Pierre Giordani, ‘Visioni geografiche / Visions géographiques / Geographical visions’, Casabella 531-532
(January-February 1987): 18-33 and 107-108.
51
Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 129.

10
 The restructuring of the total urban space and landscape necessitates the rationalization of the
overall organization of the city machine. On this scale technological structures and systems of
communication must be such that they can construct a unitary image […] the objets a reaction
poetique are now connected in an organic reciprocity….52

Tafuri remains quite positive about the project, even it offers an image rather than an effectual plan:

In the impetuous and “exalting” process of continual development and transformation, the
industrial vanguard, the “authorities”, and the users of the city are involved in theoretically
similar functions. From the reality of production to the image and the use of the image, the
entire urban machine pushes the “social” potential of the civilisation machiniste to the extreme
of its possibilities.53

Yet, the reasons of the failure of the project are clear. Le Corbusier works on the project ‘as an
“intellectual” in the strict sense of the term. He was not, … associated with the local or state
authorities’.54 The other reasons Tafuri identifiers are: the ‘backward structures’ that the project
addressed; the ‘international crisis of modern architecture’ already in progress; the ‘political
involutions of European’ dictatorial regimes; ‘the great economic crisis of 1929’; and, fundamental,
‘the appearance, just after [the crisis of 1929], of decisive new protagonists: the international
reorganization of capital, the affirmation of systems of anticyclical planning, and the realization of
the First Soviet Five-Year Plan’55. Here lies for Tafuri the crucial problem of Le Corbusier’s Algiers
projects: reducing architecture to image they remain incapable of dealing with the complexity of the
real and its transformations. ‘Architecture as ideology of the plan is swept away by the reality of the
plan… [and] the plan becomes an operative mechanism’.56

The ideology of form seems to abandon its dedication to a realistic outlook and fall back on
the alternative position inherent in the dialectic of bourgeois culture. […] Arrived at an
undeniable impasse, architectural ideology renounces its propelling role in regard to the city
and structures of production and hides behind a rediscovered disciplinary autonomy, or behind
neurotic attitudes of self-destruction.57

Technology and transformation (1984)

Ten years later Tafuri returns to Le Corbusier’s project in the long essay ‘Machine et Mémoire: the
city in the work of Le Corbusier’,58 where he focuses on Le Corbusier’s ‘apologia for technology that
nevertheless assumes exquisitely formal features’.59
Tafuri see Le Corbusier’s ability to assign forms to the multiplicity of different languages as an
attempt to claim power for the architect, and to invest the architect directly with a decisional power.

52
Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 128-129.
53
Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 133.
54
Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 133.
55
Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 134-135.
56
Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 135.
57
Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 136.
58
Manfredo Tafuri, ‘Machine et Mémoire: the city in the work of Le Corbusier’, part 1, Casabella, 502 (May 1984): 44-51;
part 2, Casabella, 503 (June 1984): 44-51. Also in H. A. Brooks (ed.), Le Corbusier: The Garland Essays (New York:
Garland, 1987), 203-18.
59
Manfredo Tafuri, ‘Machine et Mémoire: the city in the work of Le Corbusier’, trans. Stephen Sartarelli, in H. A. Brooks
(ed.), Le Corbusier: The Garland Essays (New York: Garland, 1987), 206.

11
Now more critical of the Algiers project, Tafuri considers ‘anachronistic’ the concerns of Le
Corbusier’s urbanism, as it still operates by ‘delimiting, classifying, differentiating, and
standardizing’.60 Even if we have here a system of relations of different architectural objects, the
proposal remains ineffectual because it renounces its utopian and transformative power, and its
relationality is reduced to a combinatory figure. Tafuri wonders then if it is possible to interpret ‘Le
Corbusier’s ideological formulations as consoling compensation for the irreparable contradiction
between the call for synthesis and the infinite multiplication of the forms of knowledge and power?’

Le Corbusier’s main concerns … are all of an anachronistic nature: delimiting, classifying,

differentiating, and standardizing are all operations that lead up to the absolute of the planned
unit. Given these premises, it is not surprising that Le Corbusier should have placed his hopes
in the prophecies of decision-making authorities whose power would be unequivocal and
centralized: moreover, it is significant that such authorities would eventually become incarnate
in Lenin and Mussolini, … in the Front Populaire and the Vichy government.61

Tafuri suggests that Le Corbusier must have been clearly aware of this, as he attempted to reverse the
situation and place technological responses beyond and above the political ones:

‘technology, for Le Corbusier … does not admit political reality as an external limit. On the
contrary technology lays siege to the political realm, claims to appropriate its languages, and
presents itself as a form of knowledge endowed with power. To politics is left only the task of
execution.’62

Yet in the Algiers project, Le Corbusier resolves technology into form –‘the figurative world of his
painting directly invades the structuring of the urban machine’63 – and the project into ‘an organic
exaltation of the forms’.64 Resolved into, or rather reduced to, forms, technology here becomes a
‘mythical machine’ in which the ‘new Acropolis contemplates, from above, the battle of technology
against nature’.65

The bridge that the project casts over the Casbah, leaves it ‘isolated, untouched, untouchable …
timeless’,66 treating it as ‘an anthropological relic that colonization could not destroy’. The bridge
then does not only represent a technological and political issue for the project, but highlights also the
issue of time, and with it the very possibility (or impossibility) of transformation.

[T]he Casbah is not a model that can be standardized. […] The Casbah’s time is an eternal
present.
The time of the “new Algiers” is that of the total uprooting from all here and now, the time …
of a moving-ever-onward that renders all lingering impossible.67

Here lies the problem that Tafuri will explore in future writings. The two structures –

60
Tafuri, ‘Machine et Mémoire’, in Le Corbusier: The Garland Essays, 206.
61
Tafuri, ‘Machine et Mémoire’, in Le Corbusier: The Garland Essays, 208.
62
Tafuri, ‘Machine et Mémoire’, in Le Corbusier: The Garland Essays, 209.
63
Tafuri, ‘Machine et Mémoire’, in Le Corbusier: The Garland Essays, 209.
64
Tafuri, ‘Machine et Mémoire’, in Le Corbusier: The Garland Essays, 210.
65
Tafuri, ‘Machine et Mémoire’, in Le Corbusier: The Garland Essays, 210.
66
Tafuri, ‘Machine et Mémoire’, in Le Corbusier: The Garland Essays, 210.
67
Tafuri, ‘Machine et Mémoire’, in Le Corbusier: The Garland Essays, 211.

12
Algiers’ Casbah and the motorway viaduct, and indeed the whole of Le Corbusier’s proposal – are
not only different in their cultural, social and physical fabric, but, crucially, they also operate in
different times. The void that separates the bridge from the casbah below marks not only the
impossibility of their relationships, but implicitly brings to the fore the dilemma of the relationship
with the past, be it the past in situ of the body of the city or the past of the architecture as the
discipline.

The city of times (1993)

In the 1993 lecture ‘Le forme del tempo: Venezia e la modernità’ (The forms of time: Venice and
modernity)68 Tafuri discusses the delay that characterises Venice’s modus operandi – the constant
working and reworking, the negotiation, the temporal ‘impossibility’ of Venice – as that which
makes Venice possible. Polemical against the urgency of recent events and proposed projects for the
city at the time – from the havoc wreaked by the 1989 Pink Floyd’s concert in Saint Mark’s Basin to
the proposed lagoon underwater metro system – Tafuri’s words are instrumental in defence of
Venice’s slow time and forms of making. As he gives his talk at the Institute of Architecture of the
University of Venice, Tafuri is here the historian of the here and now, but his considerations offer a
longer historical perspective to consider the forms of making of Venice as a possibility for
architecture to intervene in the contemporary city, avoiding the impasse of the architectural and
urban project of modernism.

Tafuri uses the shortcomings of Le Corbusier’s project for Algiers to explain Venice, and then uses
Venice to explain the contemporary city and suggest a possible way to approach it. Far from the
attributed defeatism of Architecture and utopia, Tafuri here offers a critical voice that aims to work
with – both within and against – practice, providing the intellectual grounding for a new architectural
activism. Rising from a public and academic forum, the words of the architect turned historian
continue to shake architecture, to call for engagement and to claim for the architect an urban and
political responsibility.

Discussing the practice of delay, the constant working, the negotiation, the spatial and temporal
uniqueness of Venice, Tafuri explains the present condition of the city, the crisis of its political
institutions and the difficulties encountered in it by both modern and contemporary architecture.
Mirroring the making Venice, Tafuri digresses, becomes circuitous and indirect, and uses the
ineffectuality of Le Corbusier’s Plan Obus for Algiers to introduce the idea of venetian time as a
possibility to approach the contemporary city.
For Tafuri, the Algiers project combined the time of chronography of the elevated roof-motorway –
‘the time of acceleration, the time that does not leave time, … the time of advertising … the time of a
time that cannot afford to rethink time’69 – with the time of consumerism of the modular residential
cells nested under the motorway, a solution in which constant change produces disposable objects.
But in Algiers the most enigmatic and ineffable time, addressed but not incorporated by the project,
appears in the ‘tragic’70 relationship with the Casbah, a still time with which Le Corbusier’s modern
project can have no contact. The long motorway bridge that bypasses the Casbah to connect the new

68
‘Le forme del tempo: Venezia e la modernità’ is the title of the lecture with which Tafuri inaugurated the academic year
1992–93 at the Institute of Architecture of the University of Venice (IUAV). The lecture is published in Manfredo Tafuri, La
dignità dell’attimo. Trascrizione multimediale di ‘Le forme del tempo: Venezia e la modernità’ (Venice: IUAV and Grafiche
Veneziane, 1994).
69
Tafuri, La dignità dell’attimo, 9. My translation.
70
Tafuri, La dignità dell’attimo, 10. My translation.

13
housing development to the administrative headquarters at the Marina is the key gesture of the
project, and a form that expresses its impossibility to produce a ‘relationship between our accelerated
and chronophagic times and the still time’71 of the Casbah.

For Tafuri the threefold notion of time that Le Corbusier expresses in the Plan Obus remains
incapable to incorporate the time of the Casbah, because it does not have or allow for the time of the
‘fleeting moment’. The ‘well grasped fleeting moment’ is for Tafuri ‘the form of time that annuls
time’72; it is the time which makes Venice both impossible and possible at once, and saves the city
from assimilation by utopian modernity. Subverting the usual understanding of the fleeting moment,
Tafuri’s critique of Venice explains the ‘now’ of the city as grounded in the here and now, and not a
redemptive one. ‘The time of Venice beats the eschatological time’,73 because it is practical and
immanent rather than redemptive or transcendental.

For Tafuri Venetian cyclical time combines progression with a constant reference and return to
(mythic) origins, and with the sudden revelation of the fleeting moment. And the latter, be it a birth, a
foundation, a resurrection, or a redemption, is, like the origin itself , always already plural.74

The fleeting moment of Venice as ‘time that annuls time’ is not the still time of the Casbah that
makes Le Corbusier’s project impossible. The fleeting moment in the circular time of Venice remains
connected to the city’s plural and mythical (and fabricated) origin, and continues to hold on to it
while always looking to the future. The articulation of different times in Venice is expressed both in
the political structure and in the physical body of the city, engaged as it is in the time of the moment,
the present of a “now” without escatological aspirations. This is a time that keeps at play
multiplicities: not an alien and untouchable past; not a thin present expressed only in terms of
consumption; but the moment of the now as moment of attention and ultimately of the (possibility of
the) project. For Tafuri, ‘harmony and conflict’75 as one multiplicity becomes a metaphor of the
venetian ‘collective mental time’ and of its government – a time of prudence that procrastinates and
delays decisions, in which ‘nothing is fixed’ and ‘I must be elastic because I must follow the rhythm
of life.’76

Modernity could not understand a ‘mental collective time’,77 and yet attempted to control it by
dividing and organizing it. For this reason ‘Venice throws an unbearable provocation to the modern
world’,78 proposing a ‘form of time in which the “mixed” do not come to a standstill, but, as
“mixed”, and insofar as they are dialectic, they proceed’.79

71
Tafuri, La dignità dell’attimo, 11. My translation.
72
Tafuri, La dignità dell’attimo, 9. My translation.
73
Tafuri, La dignità dell’attimo, 15. My translation.
74
Tafuri analyses the plurality of the origin of Venice in La dignità dell’attimo and, more extensively, in Massimo Cacciari,
Francesco Dal Co, Manfredo Tafuri, ‘Il mito di Venezia’, Rassegna, ‘Venezia città del moderno / Venice: City of the Modern’,
22 (June 1985): 7-9. See also Manfredo Tafuri, Venice and the Renaissance, trans. Jessica Levine (Cambridge MA: MIT
Press, 1995).
75
‘Harmony and conflict’ gives the title to one of Tafuri’s studies of the architecture of Renaissance Venice. Antonio Foscari
and Manfredo Tafuri, L’armonia e i conflitti. La chiesa di San Francesco della Vigna nella Venezia del ‘500 (Turin: Einaudi,
1983),
76
Tafuri, La dignità dell’attimo, 26. My translation.
77
Tafuri, La dignità dell’attimo, 9. My translation.
78
Tafuri, La dignità dell’attimo, 30. My translation.
79
Tafuri, La dignità dell’attimo, 31. My translation.

14
The argument remains suspended in Tafuri’s text, as his lecture returns to its main topic, the
temporalities of Venice. But it is here that, at last, we find the implicit suggestion that the mix of
“harmony and conflict” and the connectedness made possible by the ‘fleeting moment’ remain
outside of the three (four) temporalities of Le Corbusier’s Algiers project. And that is why the project
fails. It is in a sort of perverse (and inverse) self-preservation of the figures and forms of the modern
that Le Corbusier’s Plan Obus dies, of a wonderfully orchestrated suicide. From “Architecture or
Revolution” to “Negation or Death”.

15