2/10/2020 Manfredo Tafuri and the Avant-garde: Close-reading The Sphere and the Labyrinth / Spring 2010 / The

/ Spring 2010 / The Berlage

PHD SEMINAR, 8 APRIL 2010, 15:00–18:00

MANFREDO TAFURI AND THE AVANT-

GARDE: CLOSE-READING THE SPHERE
AND THE LABYRINTH
Joan Ockman

Joan Ockman in debate with PhD candidates, moderated by Pier Vittorio Aureli

A lecture and seminar with Joan Ockman rereading Tafuri's The Sphere and the Labyrinth literally
chapter by chapter, closely examining the design of both its text and illustrations in order to illuminate not
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2/10/2020 Manfredo Tafuri and the Avant-garde: Close-reading The Sphere and the Labyrinth / Spring 2010 / The Berlage

just the author's theory and history of a phenomenon that has always sought to present itself as
ahistorical, but also his literary and metaphorical construction of this history.

From the standpoint of writing the history of the avant-garde in architecture, there is no book more rigorous,
challenging, and poetic than Manfredo Tafuri's The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture
from Piranesi to the 1970s. A magnum opus originally published in Italian in 1980 and translated into English in
1987, it has never received its due in the canon of late-twentieth-century architectural literature. This is partly
owing to its great complexity and subtlety and partly to the historical circumstances of its writing. As far as the
latter are concerned, it is necessary to situate The Sphere and the Labyrinth in relation both to the emergence of
the "neo-avant-gardes" in Italy and elsewhere in the 1960s and '70s and to the significant evolution in the
Marxian historian's thinking a decade after his initial encounter with the School of Venice. The book's opening
chapter, entitled "The Historical 'Project,'" offers an engaged theoretical reflection on the problematics of
architectural historiography while also setting the stage for the subsequent nine chapters. These span from
Piranesi's "wicked" transgressions of the codified limits of architecture and its representation, through the
inevitable compromise between "necessity and freedom" in the practices of the classic avant-gardes of the
1920s, to the denouement of the story in his own time.

The seminar will be followed by a debate with "The City as a Project" PhD candidates, moderated by Pier
Vittorio Aureli.
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