Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology Manfredo Tafuri Part 1 (premodernism) {Chronology: Laugier Piranesi Antolini lEnfants plan for

for Washington and Penns Philadelphia} Tafuris essay outlines a history of architectural ideology, focused on the genesis of the rational plan as manifested in metropolitan form. Chronologically, the essay begins with the enlightenment, and the urban design theories of Laugier, a proponent of the aesthetics of the picturesque, of naturalism in planning, and of the idea of the city as forest. He writes anyone who knows how to design a park well will draw up a plan according to which a city must be built in relation to its area and situation. There must be squares, intersections, streets. There must be regularity and whimsy, relationships and oppositions, chance elements that lend variety to the tableau, precise order in the details and confusion, chaos and tumult in the whole. From Laugier, Tafuri cites the increasingly political role that enlightenment architects were taking on, in trying to find general solutions to the problems of cities. Durrands pursuit of type and Piranesis fragmentationism represented two directions of architectural ideology. Piranesis Campo Marzio presented an experimental design tackling the problem of balancing opposites in the context of the city. This political role was demonstrated in the urban design of Milan by Antolini, and his desire to inject a totalizing message through unified architectural form. The rise of American cities, built from the ground up in a relatively short time compared to the slow development of European cities presented new techniques of urban planning, employing regular grids which gave the individual parts a degree of flexibility while maintaining the cohesiveness of the whole. Tafuri suggests that the modern architectural movement was born out of an overlap in the end of the romantic eras utopianism and the rise of realism, and that architecture was the first discipline to accept the consequences of itscommodification. Modern architecture was able to create.. an ideological climate for fully integrating designinto a comprehensive project aimed at the reorganization of production , distribution and consumption within the capitalist city. (15)

Part 2 (Modernism) 3 phases 1901 1939 1 formulation of urban ideology as a way of overcoming architectural romanticism 2- the rise of artistic avant-gardes as ideological projects, which then hand those projects over to architecture and urban planning to realize those ideals in concrete form 3 architectural ideology becomes the ideology of the plan

After the last stage, Tafuri suggests that architecture began to appear superfluous and marginal with respect to financial and political forces which took on greater positions of power in the planning and distribution of capitalism. Phase 1 is characterized by the use of artwork by the avant-gardes as a field on which to project the feeling of shock (Munchs the Scream is an image which represents this shock ) typical of the urban experience, of living in a city which functions as a machine whose purpose is to extract value from its citizens, and to provide a place for crowds to gather and to consume on a mass scale. The city is an instrument for coordinating the cycle of production-distribution-consumption.(17) This understanding of the city as an instrument can be seen in the cubism of Picasso and Braque, in the readymades of Duchampe, in the work of the De Stijl and Futurist movements and in the neoplasticism of Mondrian. The ideals of the avant-gardes gradually converged into one vision of the city as a place of chaos and order, and into a single ideal of translating chaos into meaning and value. Tafuri describes the Bauhaus as the decantation chamber of the Avant-gardes, in which their ideals were handed over to architecture and planning to be translated into reality. The first and clearest example of this translation into reality was Corbs Plan Voisin Between world war 1 and 2, the architects and planners associated with the Bauhaus adapted the techniques of design to the assembly line, and began to standardize parts, cells, blocks and cities into mass-produced kits. The city came to be seen as an aggregation of cells within an open plan. Once the city was understood as an instrument of production, the architect was no longer a designer of objects, but an organizer and Taylorizer of processes. Tafuri Suggests that the Berlin Siemensstadt, planned in 1930 by Scharoun was a critical historical moment in which one of the most serious ruptures within the modern movement occurred. the seimenstadt revealed the utopian character of the premise that design in its different dimensional scales could posess methodological unity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gro%C3%9Fsiedlung_Siemensstadt Le Corbusier pronounced that the architect is a an organizer not a producer of objects Tafuri suggests that he gradually tested and developed the most comprehensive system of rational plans at various scales, and implemented them in various projects from Montevideo to Sao Paulo to Algiers. He saw his project as the rationalization of the total organization of the urban machine using a technique of organic unity. Tafuri Suggests that the after 1930, architectural ideology basically entered a stage of regression. It has been battling its own true nature, as an a of the urban machine of production. He argues that `the entire course of modern architecture was born, developed and brought into crisis in a grandiose attemptto resolve the imbalances, contradictions and delays typical of the capitalistic reorganization of the world market.`

Tafuri briefly discusses the events of May 1968, and speaks critically of the idea that art or architecture can once again take up the causes of the original Avante-Garde movements. He argues that to suggest that architecture can have any other role in the context of capitalism is a regressive, utopian illusion. These illusions which propose ``an architecture for a liberated society,`` must be dispelled and dismissed. Tafuri is unapologetic in his condemnation of ``leftist architects, and he suggests that there is no salvation to the commodification of modern art to be found by wandering restlessly through Labyrinths of images so polyvalent they remain mute, nor by shutting oneself up in the sullen silence of geometries content with their own perfection.

In summary: Tafuri formulates the entire cycle of modernism as a unitary development in which the avante-gardes visions of utopia came to be recognized as an idealization of capitalism, a transfiguration of the latters rationality into the rationality of autonomous form architectures plan, its ideology. IE the modernist rational plan was the ideological expression of capitalism Tafuri understands the modern metropolis as the general form assumed by the process of technical rationalization brought about by the monetary economy. This process dissolves individuality into a flow of weightless impressions, abstracts and levels down all particularity and quality, and restructures subjectivity as reason and calculation.

This relates to koolhaas: The first stage of incarceration was accompanied by an inspired state of political inventiveness, which is echoed by the architecture. The senses, posited the architects are overwhelmed by thought. But despite this nod to the political, exodus offered a parodic revision of utopian and political ideals; it pointed to the impossible nature of such escape attempts and to the inevitable return of the disciplines normative function. To escape the inequalities of the capitalist metropolis, the postindustrial subject had entered architecture, seen as both a mediating and incarcerating, yet not fully disciplinary, structure. Dystopic aspects were soon revealed as inhabitants filtered through a programmed sequence of spaces to find themselves participating in another logic of subjectification. Whether in the subjects relations to industry, art, eroticism, administration, medicine, leisure or dwelling, a disturbing repetition of the institutional logics and spectacular milieu of the outside occurred. The intense collectivism, recalling the architecture of soviet Social Condensers, was revealed to be a foil to bring hidden motivations, desires and impulses to the surface to be refined for recognition, provocation and development. Questions: How does Architectural form Represent Power?

Is the idea that architecture can escape from being an expression of capitalist ideology a utopian fantasy? In what ways does late capitalism continue to influence architectural technique? Modernism used glass and steel to express a capitalist ideology of mechanical production, and structural transparency. What contemporary ideologies are expressed in contemporary architectural practices? IF the technique of expressing modernist ideology through architecture is no longer valid, than what forms should architecture take, and what are examples in contemporary practice?