Manfredo Tafuri an Italian architect, historian, theoretician, critic and academic, was arguably the world's most important architectural historian of the past fifty years. He is noted for his pointed critiques of the partisan "operative criticism" of previous architectural historians and critics like Bruno Zevi

Bruno Zevi

Bruno Zevi was an Italian architect, historian, professor, curator, author and editor. Zevi was a vocal critic of 'classicising' modern architecture and postmodernism.-University years:...

 and Siegfried Giedion and for challenging and overturning the idea that the Renaissance was a "golden age" as it had been characterised in the work of earlier authorities like Heinrich Wolfflin and Rudolf Wittkower

Rudolf Wittkower

Rudolf Wittkower was a German art historian.-Biography:He was born in Berlin and moved to London in 1934. He taught at the Warburg Institute, University of London from 1934 to 1956 and then at Columbia University from 1956 to 1969 where he was chairman of the Department of Art History and...

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For Tafuri, architectural history does not follow a teleological scheme in which one language succeeds another in linear sequence. Instead, it is continuous struggle played out on critical, theoretical and ideological levels as well as through the multiple constraints placed on practice. Since this struggle continues in the present, architectural history is not a dead academic subject, but an open arena for debate. In his view, like other cultural domains, but even more so, due to the tension between its autonomous, artistic character and its technical and functional dimensions, architecture is a field defined and constituted by crisis.

During the 1970s, Tafuri published important essays in Oppositions, the journal directed by Peter Eisenman

Peter Eisenman

Peter Eisenman is an American architect. Eisenman's professional work is often referred to as formalist, deconstructive, late avant-garde, late or high modernist, etc...

. Although he always had a strong interest in this area of research, in the last decade of his career he undertook a comprehensive reassessment of the theory and practice of Renaissance architecture, exploring its various social, intellectual and cultural contexts, while providing a broad understanding of uses of representation that shaped the entire era. His final work, Interpreting the Renaissance: Princes, Cities, Architects, published in 1992, synthesizes the history of architectural ideas and projects through discussions of the great centres of architectural innovation in Italy (Florence, Rome, and Venice), key patrons from the middle of the fifteenth century to the early sixteenth century, and crucial figures such as Leon Battista Alberti, Filippo Brunelleschi

Filippo Brunelleschi

Filippo Brunelleschi was one of the foremost architects and engineers of the Italian Renaissance. He is perhaps most famous for inventing linear perspective and designing the dome of the Florence Cathedral, but his accomplishments also included bronze artwork, architecture , mathematics,...

, Francesco di Giorgio

Francesco di Giorgio

Francesco di Giorgio Martini was an Italian painter of the Sienese School and a sculptor, as well as being, in Nikolaus Pevsner's terms, "one of the most interesting later Quattrocento architects'" and a visionary architectural theorist; as a military engineer he executed architectural designs and...

, Lorenzo de’ Medici, Bramante, Raphael

Raphael

Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino , better known simply as Raphael, was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. His work is admired for its clarity of form and ease of composition and for its visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur...

, Baldassare Castiglione

Baldassare Castiglione

Baldassare Castiglione, count of was an Italian courtier, diplomat, soldier and a prominent Renaissance author.-Biography:Castiglione was born into an illustrious Lombard family at Casatico, near Mantua, where his family had constructed an impressive palazzo...

 and Giulio Romano

Giulio Romano

Giulio Romano was an Italian painter and architect. A pupil of Raphael, his stylistic deviations from high Renaissance classicism help define the 16th-century style known as Mannerism...

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Tafuri held the position of chair of architectural history

Architectural History

Architectural History is the main journal of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain .The journal is published each autumn. The architecture of the British Isles is a major theme of the journal, although it includes more general papers on the history of architecture. Member of...

 at the University Iuav of Venice

University Iuav of Venice

Iuav University of Venice is a university located in Venice, northern Italy. It was founded in 1926 and is organized in 3 faculties....

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Books and articles by Tafuri

• Teoria e storia dell’architettura. Bari, Laterza, 1968.
• Theories and History of Architecture. Translated by Giorgio Verrecchia. London, 1980.
• « Per una critica dell’ideologia architettonica ». Contropiano, Materiali Marxisti, no. 1 (1969).
• Progetto e utopia: Architettura e sviluppo capitalistico. Bari, Laterza, 1973.
• Architecture and Utopia. Design and Capitalist Development. Translated by Barbara Luigia La Penta. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976.
• w/ Francesco Dal Co. Architettura contemporanea. Milan, Electa, 1976.
• La Sfera e il labirinto : Avanguardia e architettura da Piranesi agli anni ’70. Turin, Einaudi, 1980.
• The Sphere and the Labyrinth. Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970's. Translated by Pellegrino d'Acierno and Robert Connolly. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987.
• Venezia e il Rinascimento. Turin, Einaudi, 1985.
• Venice and the Renaissance. Translated by Jessica Levine. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985.
• History of Italian Architecture, 1944-1985. Translated by Jessica Levine. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 1989.
• Ricerca del Rinscimento. Principi, Citta, Architetti. Torino, Einaudi: 1992.
• Interpreting the Renaissance: Princes, Cities, Architects. Translated with an introduction by Daniel Sherer. New Haven, Cambridge. MA:

Yale University Press/Harvard GSD Publications, 2006

Secondary sources on Tafuri and the "Venice School"

• CACCIARI, Massimo. Architecture and nihilism: on the philosophy of modern architecture. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1993.
• COHEN, Jean-Louis. « La coupure entre architectes et intellectuels, ou les enseignements de l’italophilie ». Extenso, no. 1 (1984), pp. 182-223.
• DAY, Gail. Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory. New York, Columbia University Press, 2010.
• DE SOLÀ-MORALES, Ignasi (editor). « Being Manfredo Tafuri: Wickedness, Anxiety, Disenchantment ». ANY, no. 25-26 (février 2000).
• Special issue of Casabella, no. 619-620 (jan.-feb. 1995).
• HEYNEN, Hilde. « The Venice School, or the Diagnosis of Negative Thought ». Architecture and Modernity: a critique. Cambridge, Ma., MIT Press, 1999, pp. 128-148.
• HOEKSTRA, Titia Rixt. « Building versus Bildung. Manfredo Tafuri and the construction of a historical discipline ». Ph.d. dissertation, Groningen, University of Groningen, 2005. Online : http://dissertations.ub.rug.nl/faculties/arts/2005/t.r.hoekstra/
• KEYVANIAN, Carla. « Manfredo Tafuri's Notion of History and its Methodological Sources: From Walter Benjamin to Roland Barthes ». MArch dissertation, Cambridge, Ma., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1992.
• LEACH, Andrew. « Choosing History: A Study of Manfredo Tafuri’s Theorisation of Architectural History and Architectural History Research ». Ph.d. dissertation, Gent, Universiteit Gent, 2006. Online : http://eprint.uq.edu.au/archive/00003989/
• LEACH, Andrew. Manfredo Tafuri: Choosing History. Ghent, A&S Books, 2007.
• BIRAGHI, Marco. Progetto di crisi. Manfredo Tafuri e l'architettura contemporanea. Milan, Marinotti ed., 2005.
• TOURNIKIOTIS, Panayotis. « History as the Critique of Architecture ». The Historiography of Modern Architecture. Cambridge, Ma., MIT Press, 1999.
• SHERER, Daniel. "Progetto and Ricerca. Manfredo Tafuri as Critic and Historian," Zodiac 15 (1996), 32-56.
• SHERER, Daniel. "Translator's Introduction," to Manfredo TAFURI, Interpreting the Renaissance: Princes, Cities, Architects (New Haven/Cambridge, MA: Yale University Press/Harvard GSD Publications, 2006), trans. by D. SHERER with a Foreword by K. Michael HAYS, pp. xv-xxvi.
• SHERER, Daniel. “Un Colloquio Inquietante. Manfredo Tafuri e la critica operativa 1968-1980,” in L. Monica, ed. La Critica Operativa e l’architettura (Milan: Unicopli, 2002), 108-20.
• SHERER, Daniel. “Architecture in the Labyrinth: Theory and Criticism in the United States, Oppositions, Assemblage, Any, 1973-1999,” Zodiac 20 (1999), 36-43.
• SHERER, Daniel. "Review of Andrew LEACH, Manfredo Tafuri: Choosing History," Journal of Architecture 14, 6 (2009), 731-741.