FRANCISCO J. DÍAZ | MAY.

2012 1

Is Tafuri Still Valid?

A contemporary reading of Architecture and Utopia

Abstract

Manfredo Tafuri’s book Architecture and Utopia, Design and Capitalist Development, deploys what is

perhaps the strongest critique on modern architecture and the city. In the book the Italian Architect and Historian

argues that, since architecture has been employed as a tool for the development of capitalism, it is unable to become

an instrument for social transformation. But Architecture and Utopia was written between 1969 and 1973, when both

the organization of the world and the very logics of capitalism were different, so we cannot avoid the question of

how such critiques have been addressed since the text was published. This paper is an initial attempt to review

Tafuri’s main questions and the responses to them that we can find within architecture as well as outside the

discipline.
 FRANCISCO J. DÍAZ | MAY. 2012 2

0.- Re-reading Tafuri

In his seminal book Architecture and Utopia, Design and Capitalist Development, 1 published in 1976,

Manfredo Tafuri deploys -in an incredibly brief way- what is perhaps the strongest critique on modern architecture

and the city. This book was the English edition of his 1973 book Progetto e Utopia which was also a further

elaboration of his 1969 essay Per una critica dell’ideologia architettonica (“For a critique of Architecture

Ideology”).

The main argument of this book is the inability of architecture to become an instrument for social

transformation, since it has been an integral part of the capitalist project. Here, Tafuri developed what has been

called a “negative dialectic,” translating his Marxian approach to architecture and its relation to the city. In this way,

the Italian architect and historian demonstrates his pessimistic point of view when he recalls that, as history has

shown that architecture has failed in its attempts to engage in social transformation, the main architectural tool –the

project- becomes useless in this regard, so the only chance to present a valid point of view in architecture lies in the

work of the critique. Since this argument declares useless any socio-reformist aim through regular practice of

architecture, it has led many critics to interpret it as a claim for the death of architecture.

Such a strong claim, along with the deep and complex way of presenting his arguments, has generated a sort

of polarity around Tafuri’s legacy. On the one hand, there are people that simply reject any argument from Tafuri

(considering him a radical), while on the other hand, there are people that think that his texts should be analyzed

carefully, in order to look for possible operative spaces, within a proposal that supposedly leads architecture to a

degree zero.

Whatever the case, Tafuri’s ideas force us to question the very nature of architecture and its relation to

capital. After reading him, we are compelled to leave aside those naïve hopes in the transformative power of

architecture (namely, to believe that it has the power to change the world), because we become aware of how easy it

lends to the requirements of capitalism, even when the discourse and intentions of its practitioners indicate the

contrary.

But Tafuri’s proposals were raised three or four decades ago, when both the organization of the world and

the very logics of capitalism were different. Since the seventies we have witnessed incredibly significant events such

1
Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, Design and Capitalist Development (Cambridge, Mass; London, England: The MIT Press, 1976)
 FRANCISCO J. DÍAZ | MAY. 2012 3

as the emergence of neo-liberalism, the fall of communism, the rise of internet, the so-called “war on terror,” or even

an economic crisis of a magnitude similar to the one of 1929. All these events and novel conditions lead us to ask,

what happened with Tafuri’s proposals in these new contexts?

As a primary answer to that question, this paper is an attempt to look for actualizations of Tafuri’s ideas

within these new contexts. The analysis will be based in four axis, which address the main ideas raised in

Architecture and Utopia, namely “city as superstructure,” “art, architecture and capital,” “new languages,” and

“architecture and ideology.” By this way we will try to discover if, after almost forty years, Tafuri’s ideas are still a

valid lens to see both architecture and the city.

1.- City as Superstructure: from accumulation to revolution

In the most basic terms, there is just one visible factor that lets us establish a difference between a city and

the countryside: architecture density; 2 the less the density of architecture, the less urban the place (wild nature has no

architecture), and vice versa. This is the simplest way to explain that the city is, in its purest sense, a human creation,

and hence, the product of an idea.

Starting from the contingent dimension of a human creation, Tafuri understands that if the city has persisted

as form of human organization over the territory, it is because it was functional to something. Deepening in that

argument he believes that, as a way to organize the movements of masses of people minimizing the frictions, the city

is completely functional to capitalist logics; that is, its condition as a of tool of capitalism has allowed the city to

persist in time and crystallize as the most common form of human organization over territory. This means that the

city is not a natural phenomenon of human organization, but a contingent one.

Here is where –for a Marxist historian like Tafuri– lays the “original sin” of the city, and the reason why he

uses the “negative dialectic” to describe it. This point of view was shared by part of the team of the magazine

Contropiano, mainly by the Venetian editor Massimo Cacciari who in his essay “Metropolis” 3 (original from 1973)

proposes that, as a form of organization, the metropolis appears when social relations became highly rationalized, up

to the point of needing an abstract form that allows them to deal with an increasing scale; the need for a bigger scale
2
The presence of Architecture implies the permanence –or establishment- of certain social relations that allow urban life; then, its density is an indicator of the
density of established social relations, which is what is behind the nature of the urban condition. Human density, on the contrary, cannot indicate by itself the
presence of a city because it may be only temporary, as it happened in Woodstock.
3
In: Massimo Cacciari, Architecture and Nihilism: On the Philosophy of Modern Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993)
 FRANCISCO J. DÍAZ | MAY. 2012 4

in social relations would be the result of the rationalization of the relations of production required, of course, by the

growth of capital. According to these arguments, the city would be the structure which allows less friction to the

accumulation of capital.

But if it is purely a structure, then the city would show capitalism in its most raw way; here is when Tafuri

realizes of the functional use of naturalism in its double sense, as an aesthetic as well as an ideological principle:

What, on the ideological plane, does reducing the city to a natural phenomenon signify?

On the one hand, such an enterprise involves a sublimation of physiocratic theories: the city is no longer

seen as a structure that, by means of its own accumulation mechanisms, determines and transforms the

processes of the exploitation of the soil and agricultural production. Inasmuch as the reduction is a

"natural" process, a-historical because universal, the city is freed of any considerations of a structural

nature. At first, formal naturalism was used to make convincing the objective necessity of the processes

put in motion by the pre-revolutionary bourgeoisie. A bit later, it was used to consolidate and protect

these achievements from any further transformation.

On the other hand, this naturalism has a function of its own, which is that of assuring to artistic activity

an ideological role in the strictest sense of the term. 4

In this way, art was in charge not only of compensating the lack of nature generated by the city, but also of

ornamenting it in order to hide its structure.

However, Tafuri also observed that after the crisis of 1929, a process of reorganization of capitalism took

place, and that it changed the view on the city: no longer a productive structure to be hidden behind artistic motifs,

but a superstructure that gives place to speculation (both economic and artistic). This shift, from structure to

superstructure, led the city to be understood as a given, as an “inevitable” consequence of human organization

(hiding the fact that it was a capitalistic mode of organization).

This is, in simple terms, the reasoning behind Tafuri’s negative understanding of the city: a human invention

absorbed by capitalism turning it into something inevitable, or rather “natural.”

In his 1981 lecture on Tafuri’s Architecture and Utopia entitled “Architecture and the critique of Ideology,”

Fredric Jameson refers to the dialectical method, and to its often negative conclusions. Placing Tafuri at the same

level of Adorno and Barthes, Jameson recalls that “dialectical interpretation is always retrospective, always tells the
4
Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 7
 FRANCISCO J. DÍAZ | MAY. 2012 5

necessity of an event, why it had to happen the way it did; and to do that, the event must already have happened, the

story must already have to come to an end.” 5 But later on, in the same text he adds:

One of the more annoying and scandalous habits of dialectical thought is indeed its identification of

opposites, and its tendency to send off back to back seemingly opposed positions on the grounds that

they share and are determined and limited by a common problematic, or, to use a more familiar

language, represent the two intolerable options of a single double-bind. 6

Despite the fact that Jameson would later change his mind regarding the value of dialectical thinking, 7 the

strategy of presenting the dialectical method as such –that is, as a methodological possibility as many others– allows

Jameson to raise other alternatives of similar value that must be explored, in order to find a way out from the degree

zero in which Tafuri had left both architecture and the city.

But, why do we speak of Jameson in reference to the “city as superstructure”? Because one of the

alternatives that the American critic presents as way out from Tafuri’s dialectic –namely Lefevbre– leads us to the

main view on the city that Marxian theory currently offers.

As we know, Lefebvre coined concepts such as “the right to the city” or “the production of space,” which

were later recovered by David Harvey not only through the analyses of the logics of capital on urban land, 8 but also

considering that if urban space is produced by the people who live the city, then these people can be considered as

the “new proletarians” and hence, they would be the new revolutionary class. 9

Under a similar argument, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri present a hopeful view on the city. Even though

they recognize the capitalist origin of the city –and, as Harvey does, the way in which it is useful to extract surplus-

value from land– they bet, as Lefebvre, for a revolution from within the city. For Hardt and Negri, the city is the

place where the commons –the so-called “externalities” generated by urban agglomeration– are produced, so if it is

possible to create wealth from the proximity of people (the multitude), then it should be also possible that that

proximity may create common-wealth. Taking account of the changes in social organization generated by

postmodernism (networks and other hybrid models of production), they propose a new concept of commons, now

5
Fredric Jameson, “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology” (1981), in Architecture, Criticism, Ideology, ed., Joan Ockman (New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 1985), 59
6
Fredric Jameson, “Architecture and the critique of Ideology,” 87
7
See, Fredric Jameson, “The Three Names of the Dialectic,” in Valences of the Dialectic (Brooklyn: Verso, 2009)
8
David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1982)
9
David Harvey, Rebel Cities: from the right to the city to urban revolution (Brooklyn: Verso, 2012)
 FRANCISCO J. DÍAZ | MAY. 2012 6

defined as “the incarnation, the production, and the liberation of the multitude.” 10 This view of the city as the only

place for liberation is reinforced in a passage that clearly rejects Tafuri’s ideas on the city:

The metropolitanization of the world does not necessarily just mean a generalization of the structures of

hierarchy and exploitation. It can also mean a generalization of rebellion and then, possibly, the growth

of networks of cooperation, the increased intensity of the common and encounters among singularities.

This is where the multitude is finding its home. 11

No matter if we believe or not in Hardt and Negri’s hope, what is clear is that, given the current urbanization

of the world and the physical proximity that a revolt needs, it is hard to believe that a revolution may come from the

countryside or that it can happen in the suburbs; the city seems to be, without any doubt, the right place for a

revolution.

But if the city is the form in which the relations of production are organized under the logics of capital, we

may think that if revolution happens, then it should be followed by a restructuring of this mode of organization;

otherwise, the superstructure would remain untouched.

2.- Art, Architecture and Capital: the functionalism of abstraction

Free the experience of shock from any automatism; found, on the basis of that experience, visual codes

and codes of action transformed by the already consolidated characteristics of the capitalist metropolis

(rapidity of transformation, organization and simultaneousness of communications, accelerated tempo

of use, eclecticism); reduce the artistic experience to a pure object (obvious metaphor for object-

merchandise); involve the public, unified in an avowed interclass and therefore antibourgeois ideology:

these are the tasks that all together were assumed by the avant-garde of the twentieth century… The

problem now was that of teaching that one is not to "suffer" that shock, but to absorb it as an inevitable

condition of existence… 12

Perhaps one of the main concerns that Tafuri develops in Architecture and Utopia is the role that modernist

avant-gardes played in the process of growth of metropolis. As it has been registered and mentioned by many

10
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 303
11
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 260
12
Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 84-86
 FRANCISCO J. DÍAZ | MAY. 2012 7

authors, 13 in its initial stages the metropolis was the place of shock, in which the speed of modern life and the

abstraction of the relations of production generated a sense of anxiety or estrangement in most people.

As we previously saw, Tafuri says that artistic avant-gardes were initially in charge of naturalizing the city to

make it seem as inevitable. But then, when the city became a superstructure, avant-gardes also played a key role, no

longer dressing the structure, but developing tools to create the superstructure. According to Tafuri, “De Stijl and the

Bauhaus introduced the ideology of the plan into a design method that was always closely related to the city as a

productive structure; Dada, by means of the absurd, demonstrated –without naming it– the necessity of a plan.” 14

Through this dialectical example, Tafuri shows how two different approaches to modern art ended up

unconsciously working for the same purpose. Although it is hard to believe that artistic avant-gardes have had such

influence on the realm of production, we must acknowledge that Tafuri has a point when he recalls that avant-gardes

did explorations on abstraction, and that such explorations not only mirrored the rise of abstraction in social

relations, but also led avant-gardes to a degree zero:

The city was the object to which neither Cubist painting, nor the Futurist "cuffings,” nor Dadaist

nihilism refer specifically, but which –precisely because continually presupposed– was the benchmark

of the avant-garde movements. Mondrian was to have the courage to "name" the city as the final object

toward which neoplastic composition tended. But he was to be forced to recognize that, once it had been

translated into urban structures, painting –by now reduced to a pure model of behavior– would have to

die. 15

This branch, namely the relation between abstraction and artistic manifestation, has been actualized by

Fredric Jameson in his essay “The Brick and the Balloon: Architecture, Idealism and Land Speculation.” In this text,

the American critic follows Simmel and Tafuri to seek for urban manifestations of the new abstractions. If for

Simmel the money was the most abstract form of social relation, Jameson tries to unpack this relation in postmodern

society:

Simmel’s essay places us on the threshold of a theory of modern aesthetic forms and of their abstraction

from older logics of perception and production; but it also places us on the threshold of the emergence

13
See for example: Marshall Berman, All that is solid melts into air: the experience of modernity (New York, Viking Penguin, 1988), Specially Chapter 3
“Baudelaire: Modernism in the Streets”
14
Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 93
15
Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 92
 FRANCISCO J. DÍAZ | MAY. 2012 8

of abstraction within money itself, namely what we now call finance capital. …discussing the new

internal dynamics of abstraction, the way in which, like capital itself, it begins to expand under its own

moment, Simmel tells us this: ‘This may be illustrated by the fact that within the city the “unearned

increment” of ground rent, through a mere increase in traffic, brings to its owner profits which are self-

generating.’16

After a long detour to analyze the logics of capital in the urban field (a detour in which he can’t avoid

mentioning Tafuri again), the key connection that Jameson does is linking a postmodern form of money abstraction –

finance capital– with postmodern architecture, in order to discover which possible relation can be established among

them; this move indicates to us that he considers architecture as a manifestation of social relations, so a change in the

latter should have an effect in the former; but since architecture is also an artistic manifestation, this change imposed

by post-modernity should have an aesthetic effect. Then, he realizes that finance capital has indeed generated a new

kind of architecture, the “curtain-wall building” which has –in counter of what the discourse of postmodern

architecture claimed– an abstract aesthetic that mirrored both the abstraction of the economic procedure that gives it

place as well as the social relations it houses:

The ‘enclosed skin volumes’ then illustrate another aspect of late capitalist abstraction, the way in

which it dematerializes without signifying in any traditional way spirituality: ‘breaking down the

apparent mass, density, weight of a fifty-storey building,’ as Jencks puts it. The evolution of the curtain

wall ‘decreases the mass and weight while enhancing the volume and the contour—the difference

between brick and a balloon’. 17

From architecture, this relation has been addressed by Reinhold Martin through several articles and the book

Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again. 18 In his analyses, Martin deepens in the path traced by

Jameson, in order to clarify this relation between architecture and economic abstraction. For Martin, the curtain-wall

is not only a mirror of economic abstraction, but also an architectural response to standardization in its double sense:

both as the standardization of the building industry as well as the standardization of the spaces in which a new kind

of abstract labor is developed. Furthermore, since the curtain-wall building communicates –through reflections– the

context in which it is inserted (while at the same time it produces that context), and its modulations share the DNA of

16
Fredric Jameson, “The Brick and the Balloon: Architecture, Idealism and Land Speculation.” New Left Review (March-April, 1998), 28
17
Fredric Jameson, “The Brick and the Balloon…” 44
18
Reinhold Martin, Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011)
 FRANCISCO J. DÍAZ | MAY. 2012 9

its own reproduction, the curtain-wall building becomes media. 19 But Martin also realizes that finance abstraction

and contemporary architectural abstraction share in common a similar claim: faith. That is, architecture becomes a

sort of anchor which ties to land the flux of the markets, because in the same way than believers need a concrete

place to give actual materiality to the invisibility of their faith –the church-, the building becomes the place in which

the developer materializes his faith in the invisible flux of the market. In this way, architecture would not be just a

by-product of urban speculation but rather a constitutive element of financial markets; thus, both kinds of abstraction

(architecture and financial capital) would be religiously tied:

…the rise of the developer and the rise of the signature architect go hand-in-glove but not only in the

sense of one serving as client or patron for the other. Much more significant, the rise of these two iconic

figures has to do with a hidden religiosity that architecture and money still share, a religiosity that

becomes clearer when we recognize the affinities between so-called iconic buildings and the visual

icons that characterize many but not all religious traditions. These affinities are based on a common

language of “faith.” To the extent that the financial crisis is ultimately a crisis of faith, in the crypto-

religious sense of “faith” in higher forces such as the self-regulating, autopoietic financial markets that

seem to lie outside of human control. 20

This path demonstrates how the relation between art, architecture and capitalism changes in time, keeping

the same topics. In this case, we must acknowledge Tafuri’s ability to detect the problem and its point of origin.

Abstraction changes its forms, but around this concept –and over the city– it has been developed a continuous

relation between architecture and capital. Unfortunately, the analytical productivity that this path shows, and the fact

that Tafuri was right, demonstrates that architecture is still a key tool in the permanent reformulation of capitalism.

3.- New Languages: blind-spots in-between conditioned bubbles

Another interesting topic raised in Architecture and Utopia is related with the rise of the programming

languages. Tafuri opened this debate as a critique to the formalistic approach of the so-called neo-avant-gardes of the

sixties. According to the Italian historian, the re-launching of modern language at the end of the sixties was

19
See: Reinhold Martin, “Atrocities, Or, Curtain Wall as Mass Medium,” Perspecta 32 (2001)
20
Reinhold Martin, “Financial Imaginaries: Toward a Philosophy of the City,” Grey Room 42 (Winter 2010), 67
 FRANCISCO J. DÍAZ | MAY. 2012 10

completely naïve, not only by its detachment of socio-political concerns (something that had been praised by Colin

Rowe 21), but also because of a deep historical fact.

As we previously saw, modern avant-gardes of the twenties developed the concept of “the plan,” which was

employed as a tool for re-organizing the new kind of social relations that appeared after the crisis of 1929, when

capital saw the need of reorganizing its structure. Wanted or not, the avant-gardes of the twenties understood the key

problem of their age, so the tools they developed became socially useful a few years later, no matter if it were in

favor or in counter of their original ideas. On the contrary, when the neo-avant-gardes of the sixties recovered a

language developed forty years earlier, they were avoiding the problems of their age, so the tools they developed

couldn’t became socially useful; hence, they didn’t deserve the label of avant-garde. As Tafuri says:

The attempt to revitalize architecture by means of an exploration of its internal structures comes about

just at the moment when avant-garde studies in the linguistic field are abandoning "ambiguous"

communications and taking their place in the heart of the productive universe, through the creation of

artificial programming languages. 22

In this paragraph, Tafuri is not only demonstrating the naivety of neo-avant-gardes but also one of their main

blind-spots. By the end of the sixties it was taking place a new process of reorganization of the productive universe –

similar to the other that Tafuri discovered after the crisis of 1929– which was no longer based on the plan but in the

programming languages. This new concept is related with the rise of cybernetics, and its capacity to give a dynamic

response to changing conditions: in other words, if the plan implied the planning of production –a long-term process,

which included stages and goals, according to fixed conditions that allows the projection of spending and returns–

the programming languages implied the dynamic response in a context where the equilibrium has disappeared –

which makes impossible to predict the conditions, implying the necessity of a language able to adapt itself to an

ever-changing environment.

In that context, cybernetic and programming languages were the response to the dynamic fluxes of capital.

But achieving that goal implied two new features: on the one hand, a permanent monitoring of the conditions –the

so-called real-time analysis– and on the other, the neutrality of the language –its abstraction almost to a degree zero

(literally a binary code based in ones and zeros).

21
See: Colin Rowe, “Introduction,” in Five Architects (New York: Witternborn & Company, 1972)
22
Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 158-160
 FRANCISCO J. DÍAZ | MAY. 2012 11

Once that concept is clear, the question is then, is it possible to find in architecture the traces of this new

language anticipated by Tafuri?

Gilles Deleuze, in his essay “Postscript on Control Societies,” 23 draws the main characteristics of the society

generated around the logics of the real-time analysis. According to Deleuze, “control societies are taking over from

disciplinary societies;” 24 using new technologies in its own benefit, this kind of social organization forms a complex

“system of varying geometry whose language is digital.” 25 Given the diffuse and even formless nature of control

societies, Deleuze explains its features in contrast to old forms, for example, the disciplinary societies:

…the factory was a body of men whose internal forces reached an equilibrium between the highest

possible production and the lowest possible wages; but in a control society businesses take over from

factories, and a business is a soul, a gas. There were of course bonus systems in factories, but businesses

strive to introduce a deeper level of modulation into all wages, bringing them into a state of constant

metastability punctuated by ludicrous challenges, competitions, and seminars… In disciplinary societies

you were always starting all over again (as you went from school to barracks, from barracks to factory),

while in control societies you never finish anything-business, training, and military service being

coexisting metastable states of a single modulation, a sort of universal transmutation. 26

Within this societal organization, given the fact that control needs real-time tracking, the individual is

divided in two abstract forms –mass and digit– for then being re-unified in a database:

The digital language of control is made of codes indicating whether access to some information should

be allowed or denied. We are no longer dealing with a duality of mass and individual. Individuals

become “dividuals,” and masses become samples, data, markets, or banks. 27

But, what kind of architecture is generated under this system of organization?

Rem Koolhaas coined in 1995 the concept of Generic City, which is the urban form that appears once the

programming languages have taken over the plan. Indeed, for Koolhaas “the Generic City is what is left after large

sections of urban life crossed over to cyberspace,” 28 but what is more important is that “the Generic City presents the

final death of planning... its most dangerous and most exhilarating discovery is that planning makes no difference

23
Gilles Deleuze, "Postscript on Control Societies" in Negotiations: 1972-1990 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995)
24
Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript…,” 178
25
Ibid, 178
26
Ibid, 179
27
Ibid, 180
28
Rem Koolhaas, “The Generic City,” in S,M,L,XL (New YorK: The Monacelli Press, 1995), 1255
 FRANCISCO J. DÍAZ | MAY. 2012 12

whatsoever…” 29 The Generic City –the city without center and identity– mirrors in its urban form the characteristics

of control societies: hybrid organization and the lack of individuality.

But if in “The Generic City” Koolhaas accounts these new urban formations, in his 2001 article “Junkspace”

he observes the architecture that control societies have generated. If the Generic City is the city without identity, the

junkspace is the space without quality. As Koolhaas says:

Continuity is the essence of Junkspace; it exploits any invention that enables expansion, deploys the

infrastructure of seamlessness: escalator, air-conditioning, sprinkler, fire shutter, hot-air curtain… It is

always interior, so extensive that you rarely perceive limits; it promotes disorientation by any means

(mirror, polish, echo)… Junkspace is sealed, held together not but structure but by skin, like a bubble…

If architecture separates buildings, air-conditioning unites them… Because it costs money, is no longer

free, conditioned space inevitably becomes conditional space; sooner or later all conditional space turns

into Junkspace… 30

Here the Dutch architect shows a pessimistic point of view, quite similar to Tafuri: no matter what the

architects do, capital takes over architecture but imposing its own rules. Since junkspace proliferates throughout the

world like mushrooms, it is clear that its growing rate is intrinsically tied to the expansive nature of capital.

Curiously, the fact that this pessimism came from a practitioner architect –indeed, Koolhaas won the Pritzker

prize one year before writing “Junkspace”– generated a sense of confusion and even anxiety among younger

architects. Was this article a call to lay down the arms and surrender to the omnipresent powers of capital?

Perhaps this was the reading that one of the most famous “young architects” did, when he published in 2008

–in the form of a theory and taxonomy– a call to architects to concentrate on the narrow space left to architecture

once it was completely controlled by capital.

In “Politics of the Envelope: a Political Critique of Materialism,” the Spanish architect –and former

Koolhaas assistant– Alejandro Zaera-Polo, says that “the envelope has become the last realm of architectural

power,” 31 so architecture should focus on working in that narrow space. In other words, if architecture consists of

designing the skin for the spaces generated by capitalist development, then the work of the architect lies in creating

bubbles. This means that there’s no need to deal with junkspaces or to get concerned about control societies, because
29
Ibid, 1255
30
Rem Koolhaas, “Junkspace,” October 100, Obsolescence (Spring, 2002)
31
Alejandro Zaera-Polo, “The Politics of the Envelope, A Political Critique of Materialism” Volume 17 (3, 2008), 79
 FRANCISCO J. DÍAZ | MAY. 2012 13

the architect still has a degree of freedom in dressing them both. This positive view on the changes imposed on

architecture by the postmodern version of capitalism results paradoxical if we consider that the title of the article

mentions the word “political.” Does this mean that the political power of the architect lies in giving a face –or a

dress– to the abstract spaces generated by capitalism? At this point, Zaera-Polo indicates that his aim is to:

…produce an updated politics of architecture in which the discipline is not merely reduced to a

representation of ideal political concepts, but conceived as an effective tool to produce change. Rather

than returning to ideology and utopia (as some critical theorists are proposing) a contemporary

politicization of architecture needs to relocate politics within specific disciplinary domains – not as a

representation of an ideal concept of the political but as a political effect specific to the discipline. 32

The question that remains is in which way these ideas can be related to Tafuri’s anticipation of programming

languages. Strangely enough, at the end of the passage just quoted, a superscript number leads us to this note:

This was a condition already announced by Tafuri: ‘From the criticism of ideology it is necessary to

pass on to the analysis of techniques of programming and of the ways in which these techniques affect

the vital relationships of production. For those anxiously seeking an operative criticism, I can only

respond with an invitation to transform themselves into analysts of some precisely defined economic

sector, each with an eye fixed on bringing together capitalists development and the processes of

reorganization and consolidation of the working class’. Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia:

Design and Capitalist Development (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1979), xi. 33

This reading of Architecture and Utopia is –at least– curious. Since Tafuri never mentions a projective

application of his proposal, and he even rejects the possibility of an operative criticism, it is curious that Zaera-Polo

used that argument to support a projective theory (mostly if it is a theory that claims for the specificity of the

discipline). As we have seen, the only possible relation that exists between the envelope and the programming

languages is that the former covers the latter. If that is the political power of the architect, this implies a return to the

seventies when five architects claimed that the power of architecture lies in its autonomy, while other five claimed for

a recovering of the communicative power of architecture; “The Politics of the Envelope” compiles these two claims,

proposing that the autonomy of architecture can be found in the skin, where the architect finds the power to

32
Alejandro Zaera-Polo, “The Politics…,” 77
33
Ibid, 77 (footnote number 3)
 FRANCISCO J. DÍAZ | MAY. 2012 14

communicate. But this argument has the same weaknesses that Tafuri discovered in the proposals raised by the neo-

avant-gardes of the sixties: behind that envelope autonomously designed by the architect, the relations of production

generated by the programming languages remain untouched.

However, in this topic, Tafuri’s argument has also a blind-spot. In his deep analysis of avant-gardes and neo-

avant-gardes, Tafuri forgot to look beyond the architectural academic establishment. If he would have done so, he

could have realized that the programming languages have been actively addressed in architecture not by the five

from the east nor the west, but –as Reinhold Martin has noted– by Buckminster Fuller. 34 Perhaps such a wider look

would have prevented Tafuri of making the same mistake that Banham endorsed to Giedion and Pevsner; but in any

case we must acknowledge that, since this blind-spot has not generated offspring –and in fact was completely

eclipsed by the five on five polemics– the architectural engagement in programming languages remains as a valid

example of a missed opportunity.

4.- Architecture as Ideology: lost in time, lost in translation

Finally, there is another topic raised by Tafuri in Architecture and Utopia that we have left by the end, since

recently there have been some polemics around it: the understanding of “architecture as ideology.”

In his essay from 2011 called “Reloading Ideology of Architecture,” Nadir Lahiji says that “it is also

perplexing how Tafuri on several occasions contradicted himself on the “naïve” Marxist theory of ideology as ‘false

consciousness.’” 35 Such critique is reiterated in several passages of the text, being contrasted with the conceptual

clarity of Jameson, or the lucidity of Zizek’s interpretation of ideology.

Although it is understandable that in a book on Jameson the editor needed an opponent to highlight the

relevance of the honoree, it is curious that the character selected as nemesis had been precisely the architect that

raised the relation between architecture and ideology. Perhaps Tafuri’s tendency to lead architecture to its degree

zero (leaving no room for a conscious practice) could have generated a resistance against his ideas and figure.

34
Martin said: “Fuller can stand here as a late representative of the counterproposition, incipient in modern architecture and urbanism and thoroughly manifest in
midcentury modernization discourse and the policies and practices that it generated, that the modern city was a node in a much larger network that could be
apprehended and managed only from above…” In Reinhold Martin, “Financial Imaginaries: Toward a Philosophy of the City,” Grey Room 42 (Winter 2010),
61-62
35
Nadir Lahiji, “Reloading Ideology of Architecture,” in The political unconscious of architecture: re-opening Jameson's Narrative edited by Ndir Lahiji
(Farnham, Surrey; Burlington, VT : Ashgate, 2011), 218
 FRANCISCO J. DÍAZ | MAY. 2012 15

Pier Vitorio Aurelli has recalled in this fact, arguing that Tafuri’s undress of the nature of intellectual work

may have been the cause of the intellectual resistance he generates:

Tafuri was the first intellectual in the field of architectural history and criticism to understand that for

intellectuals it was no longer possible to address the issue of social and cultural changes provoked by

capitalist development from an outside perspective. Indeed, for Tafuri there was no outside position

within capitalist development, since the totality of such development was constituted by the reality of
36
“waged labor,” which also incorporated the role of intellectual.

Whatever the reasons that some intellectuals may have had to feel compelled to oppose Tafuri’s proposals, I

would like to argue here that the apparent contradictions that Lahiji observes in Tafuri about the “critique of

ideology,” are not only an erroneous interpretation of the concept –as Aureli has argued 37– but also a misreading due

the translations available in certain dates.

For example, when in 1981 Fredric Jameson was giving his famous lecture “Architecture and the Critique of

Ideology” at the IAUS, Tafuri had already dismissed the label of “critique of ideology.” In this regard it might be

helpful to show an interview given by Tafuri in Argentina in 1981; in it, the Italian historian says:

I wouldn’t want that the work I do would be interpreted, as many people often do (usually from Anglo-

Saxon origin), through the vague and imprecise label of “critique of ideology.” Long ago that ideology

is not interesting for me… Usually we give the term ideology an interpretation based on Lukacs –say,

classical- which is the one of the false consciousness. Now, if we speak about intellectual false

consciousness, the question is: which is the true one? The term “false” implies its opposite, falseness

imply trueness. In fact, being deeply Nietzschean supposes to be deeply convinced of the disappearance

of any concept of true, thus the concept of ideology as false consciousness is a contradiction in its

terms. To skip that obstacle, we can refer to something most simple, so we will speak of representations.

They do interest me. We know that societies have had the need for representations, but they haven’t

36
Pier Vitorio Aurelli “Intellectual Work and Capitalist Development: Origins and Context of Manfredo Tafuri’s Critique of Architectural Ideology,” Site
Magazine, 26-27, Venetian Views (2009)
37
In this regard, it is helpful to see a footnote in Aureli’s text on Tafuri, where it is explained the origin of the idea of “critique of ideology” within the Italian
cultural context. Given its relevance, I provide the full transcription of it: ““Critique of Ideology” was re-introduced and re-formulated in the 1960’s by Mario
Tronti as a critique not so much of Capitalism per se, but as a critique of the way the working class movement itself was often the embodiment of values dictated
by Capitalist development. Critique of ideology must be understood as critique of the left itself. Tafuri himself clarified this use if the notion of critique of
ideology in his writings when he said that “For us critique of ideology was a critique of the left. My own program was to develop a critique of the ideological
thought that has pervaded architectural history, art history, and history in general… One should always address the critique of ideology towards his or her own
ideology, not the ideology of his or her enemy. What needs to be de-ideologicized is precisely the cultural context to which one fight for.” Manfredo Tafuri, La
Storia come Progetto, Interview by Luisa Passerini for the Art History Documentation Project (Los Angles: The Getty Centre for the History of Art and
Humanities, 1993), 44. For a general understanding of the concept of critique of ideology as it was developed by the Operaists see: Mario Tronti, Operai e
Capitale (Turin: Einaudi, 1966). In: Pier Vitorio Aurelli “Intellectual Work…” Footnote 20
 FRANCISCO J. DÍAZ | MAY. 2012 16

always been met in the same way; they haven’t been described, architecturized, drawn, or painted.

Representations are often hidden within different practices and they form a substrate common to all

individuals: the inter-subjective code of a society or a social group. We can understand them as lenses,

not necessarily distorting, through which reality is seen… But the systems of representation of the

world lie outside our control: we are not the ones who speak through them; it is they that are expressed

through us. This means that representations are always actual constructions of reality, which supposes

that reality as such does not exist, but only as we construct it. …That’s why the problem for architects is

not to build those representations, provided that as representations we understand this collective mode

of understanding the reality. Architects and non-architects –whether we like it or not- we are built once

we came into the world, we are built and simultaneously we built those images of reality. However,

there are movements which can alter those representations, but they are not subjective. For example,

critique. Critique (let’s note that I don’t say the critic, but critique, that is an inter-subjective work,

social, international), constantly undressing the representations as such, can introduce so much doubts

on current representations that it can force to make an effort to go further, it can force a jump. 38

But to discover this interpretation there was no need to go to Buenos Aires. Indeed, Tafuri mentioned a

similar argument in “The Historical Project” the introduction to the book The Sphere and the Labyrinth, written in

1980, where he raises the idea of representations, leaving aside the concept of ideology:

Let us return to Marx: if values pass into ideologies that repress initial needs, we can interpret these

ideologies as “delirious representations” in a Freudian sense. On the other hand, a delirious

representation is produced socially… And yet, these delirious representations turn out to be historically

necessary. By suturing the “discontents of civilization,” they permit the survival of the same

civilization. 39

More than the evidence of Tafuri’s shift from the concept of ideology to the idea of representations, what is

important in this passage is the relation that he established with Freud and psychoanalysis. Indeed, at the beginning

of the eighties Tafuri defined his work as “historic analysis,” establishing a connection with psychoanalysis that has

been overlooked by many of his critics:

38
“Interview with Manfredo Tafuri” Materiales n°2 (March, 1983). The interview was realized in 1981. Translated by the author.
39
Manfredo Tafuri “Introduction: The Historical Project,” in Manfredo Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant‐Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to
the 1970's (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 9-10
 FRANCISCO J. DÍAZ | MAY. 2012 17

The psychoanalyst doesn’t tell us what we should do; s/he simply analyzes our reactions looking for

those pieces of the past weighing on our present. The historic analyst – and not by chance we have

called our center of investigation as “Department of historical and critical analysis”– does exactly the

same. S/he doesn’t tell the architect what s/he should or should not do, but s/he simply analyzes those

pieces of the past that return as nightmare on the subject. The case of the psychoanalyst is a mere

example, but the affinity is really deep. 40

At this point, it might be useful to revisit the character that Lahiji praises as the one that most deeply has

developed the concept of ideology: Slavoj Zizek. In his essay from 1994 “How did Marx invent the symptom?” 41

Zizek unpacks the concept of “ideology” by tracing surprising and fruitful connections between Marx and Freud.

According to the Slovenian philosopher, both Marx and Freud developed the same articulation to analyze their

respective subjects, Marx on the “commodity-form” and Freud on the “dream-work.” Here, Zizek recalls that the act

of exchange –the basis of the commodity form– presupposes a double abstraction (basically, to believe in the

commodity-form and in the equivalent value of the other commodity for what it is being exchanged); but given that

that kind of abstraction was operating even before the scientific method, this means that market-exchange operates in

a level below reasoning, so it has an unconscious nature. After that reasoning, Zizek cleverly observes that if market-

exchange implies the non-knowledge of its participants, then this unconscious nature is part of its essence. As he

explains:

Ideology is not simply a ‘false consciousness’, an illusory representation of reality; it is, rather, this

reality itself which is already to be conceived as “ideological” –“ideological” is a social reality whose

very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence– that is, the social

effectivity, the very reproduction of which implies that the individuals ‘do not know what they are

doing’. 42

This operation of relocating the origin of ideology in an unconscious level is perhaps the main contribution

that Zizek has done to the contemporary Marxian thinking. In this way he certainly surpasses the notion of ideology

that Tafuri have raised in Architecture and Utopia; because if for Zizek ideology operates in an unconscious level,

40
“Interview with Manfredo Tafuri” Materiales n°2 (March, 1983). Translated by the author.
41
Slavoj Zizek, “How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?” in Mapping Ideology (London: Verso, 1994)
42
Slavoj Zizek, “How Did Marx …,” 305
 FRANCISCO J. DÍAZ | MAY. 2012 18

for Tafuri –at the beginning of the seventies– ideology operates in a subjective level –which means that there would

be as many ideologies as things to believe in.

Anyway, the restlessness that Tafuri demonstrates in regard of such notion of ideology (still understood as

“false consciousness”), led him, by the end of the seventies, to switch to the Foucaultian concept of representations.

Here, more than the conceptual accuracy (the main focus of Lahiji’s critique on Tafuri) what matters is the

recognition that both ideologies and representations operate in a level below consciousness, which implies that the

task of the intellectual lies in helping the subject to awaken (not change a false consciousness for a true one, but just

help the subject to become conscious).

In this regard, we may understand the re-reading of Freud and Lacan that Tafuri was doing by the end of the

seventies, 43 as a search for a way out of the paradox of ideology –a task that would be successfully achieved by

Zizek at the end of the eighties.

Trying to find a space out of the system of production in which to re-locate the work of the architect as

intellectual, Tafuri realizes that the only possible place to re-locate architecture was outside the ideology; but for

doing so, the price to be paid was to renounce practice and devote to the historical and critical analysis of

architecture.

Zizek by his part, widely recognized as one of the main Marxist thinkers of our age, has missed the

opportunity to continue the path traced by Tafuri. In his article from 2011 “The Architectural Parallax,” 44 Zizek

failed to detect how ideologies are present in architecture; since he looked at architecture as cultural product, he

overlooked its conditions of production. If he wouldn't have done so, now we could be here speaking of a new theory

of the ideological nature of architecture. But by now, we can only find support on the provisional results obtained by

Tafuri more than thirty years ago.

43
Tafuri said in 1981: “…this is linked to the influence that the new studies related to psychoanalysis have had on our work. It is not Lacan himself what interest
us, but his deep content as a return to Freud’s text. By re-reading Freud we have discovered the extraordinary validity that the ideas presented in “Lady Godiva”
have for our work, and especially in the last two theses, “Construction in psychoanalysis” and “Analysis terminable and interminable,” having found in them a
strong affinity with the principles we have followed….” In “Interview with Manfredo Tafuri” Materiales n°2 (March, 1983). Translated by the author.
44
Slavoj Zizek, “The Architectural Parallax,” in The political unconscious of architecture: re-opening Jameson's Narrative edited by Nadir Lahiji (Farnham,
Surrey; Burlington, VT : Ashgate, 2011)
 FRANCISCO J. DÍAZ | MAY. 2012 19

5.- Conclusions: looking for a way out

Throughout this paper, we have seen how some concepts raised by Tafuri in Architecture and Utopia had

been addressed from within and from outside architecture.

While his negative view on the city has turned into a hopeful one in the works of Harvey or Hardt and Negri,

the concept of the city as superstructure remains latent. The same happens with the idea that abstraction is strongly

tied to the logics of capitalism, a view that has had further developments in the field of cultural critique with

Jameson’s works, and also in architecture with Martin. Regarding the architectural understanding of the

programming languages, we have noted that the fact that Tafuri overlooked some architectural achievements at the

end of the sixties, may have allowed a certain misreading of his ideas, mainly in the case of Zaera-Polo, even though

there are other cases in which this topic has had actualizations closer to Tafuri’s standpoint, such as Deleuze, or even

Koolhaas. But in relation to the ideological nature of architecture, and despite the efforts made from cultural critique

–Jameson again– and even from architecture –in Lahiji’s book– there’s a question that remains unanswered, so we

have to make a last stop on it.

After having demonstrated the unconscious nature of ideology, Zizek deepens in his analysis to demonstrate

that, in our contemporary world, we are far from being a post-ideological society. Re-reading the Marxian formula

“they don’t know it, but they are doing it” (that was central to the Marxian understanding of ideology), Zizek

proposes that ideology does not operate on the level of knowledge (as false consciousness), but on the level of

practices:

…the illusion is not on the side of knowledge, it is already on the side of reality itself, of what people

are doing. What they do not know is that their social reality itself, their activity, is guided by an illusion,

by a fetishistic inversion. What they overlook, what they misrecognize, is not the reality but the illusion

which is structuring their reality, their real social activity. They know very well how things really are,

but still they are doing as if they did not know. The illusion is therefore double: it consists in

overlooking the illusion which is structuring our real, effective relationship with reality. And this

overlooked, unconscious illusion is what may be called the ideological fantasy. 45

45
Slavoj Zizek, “How Did Marx…,” 316
 FRANCISCO J. DÍAZ | MAY. 2012 20

At this point, it is hard to escape from the temptation of carrying this question into architecture. How the

ideological fantasy operates in architecture? If the illusion is not on the side of knowledge but on the side of

practices, are the architectural practices operating within an illusion? Does the architectural knowledge remain

immune to ideology? What if the knowledge on architecture is also a form of practice?

Recalling of Tafuri’s standpoint on architecture, we may realize that he was haunted by the same questions,

and hence, his “practice” as historic analyst probably was tending to find a way out of ideology, once he realized of

the “fantastic” nature of architecture. Otherwise it is hard to think of how an architect would have felt compelled to

explain his work according to the following metaphor:

“...On the relationship between the critique and the architect, I have an image: in a room that seems to

have no doors or windows, the architect is. And in a moment the room starts to flood. The operation of

the critique would consist in being willing to drown the architect, not for malice, but for that man

discovers that the room has no walls, no floors, and no roofs. In other words, to realize that the room

does not exist... If the man in the room persists in believing that the room is real, he will drown. But it is

likely that, being desperate, at the last minute he exclaims: “but this room does not exist!” and so he is

saved. Thus, bound by the water to be saved or die, he will have invented a new space...” 46

It is a small matter to know if the metaphor of the "flooded room" refers to ideology or representations. What

really matters is that, in architecture, the question of why we are doing what we are doing remains unanswered. So,

until someone in architecture may invent such a space outside the ideological fantasy of our discipline, it is hard to

question Tafuri’s validity.

46
“Interview with Manfredo Tafuri” Materiales n°2 (March, 1983). Translated by the author.
 FRANCISCO J. DÍAZ | MAY. 2012 21

Bibliography

- P. V. Aurelli, “Intellectual Work and Capitalist Development: Origins and Context of Manfredo Tafuri’s Critique of
Architectural Ideology,” Site Magazine, 26-27, Venetian Views (2009)

- M. Berman, All that is solid melts into air: the experience of modernity (New York, Viking Penguin, 1988)

- M. Cacciari, Architecture and Nihilism: On the Philosophy of Modern Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993)

- G. Deleuze, "Postscript on Control Societies" in Negotiations: 1972-1990 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995)

- D. Harvey, The Limits to Capital (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1982)

- D. Harvey, Rebel Cities: from the right to the city to urban revolution (Brooklyn: Verso, 2012)

- M. Hardt and A. Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000)

- M. Hardt and A. Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009)

- F. Jameson, “The Brick and the Balloon: Architecture, Idealism and Land Speculation.” New Left Review (Mar-Apr, 1998)

- F. Jameson, “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology,” in Architecture, Criticism, Ideology, edited by J. Ockman (New York:
Princeton Architectural Press, 1985)

- F. Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (Brooklyn: Verso, 2009)

- R. Martin, Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011)

- R. Martin, “Atrocities, Or, Curtain Wall as Mass Medium,” Perspecta 32 (2001)

- R. Martin, “Financial Imaginaries: Toward a Philosophy of the City,” Grey Room 42 (Winter 2010)

- R. Koolhaas, “The Generic City,” in R. Koolhaas and B. Mau, S,M,L,XL (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1995)

- R. Koolhaas, “Junkspace,” October 100, Obsolescence (Spring, 2002)

- N. Lahiji, “Reloading Ideology of Architecture,” in The political unconscious of architecture: re-opening Jameson's Narrative,
edited by N. Lahiji (Farnham, Surrey; Burlington, VT : Ashgate, 2011)

- C. Rowe, “Introduction,” in Five Architects (New York: Witternborn & Company, 1972)

- M. Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, Design and Capitalist Development (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1976)

- M. Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant‐Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970's (Cambridge, Mass: The
MIT Press, 1987)

- “Interview with Manfredo Tafuri” (1981) Materiales n°2 (March, 1983). Translated by the author.

- A. Zaera-Polo, “The Politics of the Envelope, A Political Critique of Materialism” Volume 17 (3, 2008)

- S. Zizek, “How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?” in Mapping Ideology edited by S. Zizek (London: Verso, 1994)

- S. Zizek, “The Architectural Parallax,” in The political unconscious of architecture: re-opening Jameson's Narrative, edited by
N. Lahiji (Farnham, Surrey; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011)