Andrew Leach

Tafuri and the Age of Historical Representation

This essay considers how Waller Benjamins Das Kumstwerk informs Manfredo Tafuris thinking on the territory between ‘the past’ and its representation as ‘history’ It argues that in the mid-l960s Tafuri finds support for an argument advanced elsewhere: from 1968 and Teorie estoria dellarchitettura he repositions it in Benjaminian terms. Tafuris Benjamin at this time is the Italian Benjamin, best (though not exclusively) known through translated editions and interpretations found in Massimo Cacciari and Cesare De Micheliss Angelas Novus. From Das Kunstwerk (or more precisely Lopera darte). Tafuri applies Benjamins analog of magician-surgeon. painter-operator to the culture of modern architecture: he offers a second reading, this essay shows, that he renders the analogy available to broader historical phenomena. He implies that just as modem architects might make an operative or mimetic (or undecided) response to the ‘equipment’ of modernity, so too might architects assume a programmatic stance towards the past that is either engaged or passive (or, again, undecided) In this setting, Tafuri frames as the ‘age of historical representation’ a period commencing with Brunelleschi and Alberti, extending into the later twentieth century. In this reconfiguration of Benjamins basic argument, the question of architectures loss of aura in the era of industrial production is replaced (for Tafuri) by one of architectures own artifice in relation to its representation of the past with respect of artificially reinvigorated and codified traditions in the guise of architectural theory (for Tafuri. the classical ‘inheritance’). In tracking Benjamins presence in Tafuris œuvre this essay articulates this translation from the status of the art work in the mechanical era (Benjamin) to the status of historical knowledge in an age wherein architecture draws identity from precisely the abstractions afforded. Tafuri says, by historical fabrication

In and Across the Pacific

The community of scholars served by SAHANZ is quite naturally preoccupied with the Pacific as a region. So many islands are surrounded by its ocean, while its rim is the edge of so many continents. The Pacific presents historians of architecture – defined in the most generous terms – with an incalculable number of subjects of study in its own right, even as it serves as a setting that shapes the kind of scholarship and the kinds of problems towards which scholars who are one way or another defined by the Pacific are drawn. It determines, to varying degrees, the outlook of the architectural history that happens in and around it, be it the study of contemporary South Pacific architecture by Jennifer Taylor and James Connor (reviewed in volume 25 of this journal); or Mike Austin’s decades’ worth of scholarship on the “Pacific” worldview; or, further afield, Reyner Banham’s reflections (in Los Angeles) on the relationship between maritime settlement and westward expansion in shaping the Pacific’s import to the cities of the American West Coast. Naturally, then, almost every issue of this journal contributes to a growing body of research on the Pacific as a setting, theme or problem: the architecture and planning of islands and continents; the soft architecture of the complex geopolitical and trade relationships that nations with a stake in the Pacific at once foster and challenge; and the question of the relationship of this semi-global territory to the world as a whole. The papers that appear in this issue of Fabrications therefore amplify attention to a geography that is rarely overlooked in the pages of this journal, but which is here posed a little more forcibly. What, for architectural history, is the Pacific Basin, encompassing the Pacific Ocean, its borders across the Americas, Australasia and Eastern Asia, and the many dozens of its islands? What does it offer – as a subject, or a territory – to a disciplinary field that has become preoccupied with the global? A field that has absorbed the lessons of post-colonialism? And that has grasped as well as any field might grasp the importance of studying works of architecture alongside modes of intellectual and technical exchange? What is the Pacific as an idea? And how has the idea of the Pacific interacted with the various “realities” towards which it leads? How does the significance of the Pacific change for architecture’s various agents in Russia, Peru or Taiwan? In Norfolk Island, Kiribati or Canada? To what extent is the Pacific a complex field, unified by water, and to what extent a series of discrete cultural settings made complex at the edges? In asking if we can speak of an architectural history of the Pacific Basin, this issue of Fabrications invokes three ways in which the Pacific already figures in architectural history. The first is as an idea, bound to the tradition (Romantic, imperial, colonial) of imagining the Pacific outside of experience. The second: as a setting, in which buildings are needed, architects put to work, technologies developed or applied, or events occur that result in historically noteworthy works of architecture and urbanism. The third of this is in its absence, as a condition to be overcome, an obstacle removed by thinking about the relationship between one part of the world and another in different ways. This latter Pacific embodies distance as a dimension of architectural work that allows for a kind of

Architecture, Evidence, and “Evidentiality”

This issue of ATR focuses on the role of evidence in shaping and maintaining architectural knowledge. How dowe knowwhatwe know?How do we keep that knowledge in check? How and why is architecture, as a field of knowledge, extended into other and possibly multiple domains of “truth”? How is it allowed to contract? How and why does knowledge atrophy? The very possibility that a “we” emerges from the body of knowledge that evidence substantiates suggests a strong bond between what is known, how it is known, and the uses and responsibilities to which that knowledge is put and to which its adherents are subject. These bonds are, by extension, cemented by the instrumentalisation of knowledge—and, again, the evidence that upholds it—to various ends, from the strong force of polemic to the weak forces of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity. And behind these bonds, always, are knowledge and practices that are subject to audit and thereby to a continual process of confirmation and revision.

The bank buildings of Alexander Neumann: Prague, Vienna and Graz, 1906-20

Alexander Neumann was born on October 15, 1861 in the tiny village of Heinzendorf, near Bielitz in the region of Silesia, close to the Polish border in the present-day Czech Republic. Neumanns father owned a factory in nearby Teschen (now Cieszyn, in Poland). Alexander Neumann attended school (Realschule) in Bielitz until the age of 21, when he entered the the Technische Hochschule Wien (Vienna University of Technology) to study architecture. There he attended the lectures of both Heinrich von Ferstel (1828-83) and Carl Konig (1841-1915), two architects widely appreciated for their commitment, to differing degrees, to the eclectic historicism still widely favoured at that time.2 Von Ferstel was appointed Chair of Architecture at the Technische Hochschule in 1866, in which year Konig was named his assistant. Christopher Long has argued that Konig came to assert a major historicist influence over the school when he assumed control of the design studios for advanced architecture students.3 Among his students in this advanced atelier was Neumann.

Mannerism, Baroque, Modern, Avant-Garde: Introduction

The combination of terms proposed in the title of this issue of The Journal of Architecture is almost familiar, or, rather, it addresses a familiar taste for juxtaposition. An unlikely assemblage of terms such as these, where modern artistic comportment clashes with period styles, is itself a kind of trope. The formal corollary of this taste is perhaps even more familiar, as in those pages of Space, Time and Architecture (1941) where Sigfried Giedion puts Vladimir Tatlin’s tower for the Third International alongside Francesco Borromini’s spire for Sant Ivo alla Sapienza. We might be over-familiar with the game of putting the baroque on the table of the avant-garde along with the sewing machine and the umbrella. The papers presented here do not repeat this formula per se but rather look to specific moments in twentieth-century architectural discourse where the baroque has been put on the table. They each ask of the interests that were served in doing so, and of the consequences for understanding the era of architectural development spanning from the mid-sixteenth century to the eighteenth, where the concept of the baroque, as a mobile anchor to this period, has itself developed through the uses to which it has been put by historians, artists and architects. The papers are some of those sketched out at a session of the first meeting of the European Avant-garde Studies Association, held in Ghent in May, 2008. That the session drew something of an audience from the largely literary modernists attests to a degree of familiarity with the ideas underpinning this issue: that a relationship between the baroque and the avant-garde is not a novelty but itself the stuff of history, and that architecture is a pivotal moment for this juxtaposition. There are points in twentieth-century architecture where the relation of time and history seems particularly malleable. This is clearest in the sandpit that the architecture of sixteenthand seventeenth-century Rome has been for various players in twentieth-century modernism. Baroque and avant-garde are perfectly balanced terms around which to consider the rôle of history in modern architecture. Classicism and the gothic are each in their separate ways irreducibly connected in the nineteenthand twentieth-century mind to a call to order, to a demand that the present accords with its history so that the future can unfold in the proper manner. When modernists call on the baroque, by contrast, this has served as a principle of the disorder in which the past and the future combine to denature the present. The baroque is, as Walter Benjamin puts it, the sovereign opponent of classicism, the moment in which the projects for a future can conspire with the concreteness of the past to question the necessity of the present being as it is. Baroque is itself a modern term, already avantgarde in the sense described above in that it proposed a value judgement about the past that was also a prognosis. Jacob Burckhardt regularised the term to describe what he saw as a resilement from the canons of the Renaissance, which were to be re-established in neoclassicism. But for architects 239

Francesco Borromini and the crisis of the Humanist Universe, or Manfredo Tafuri on the baroque origins of modern architecture

Introduction The historical and historiographical study of the life and works of Francesco Borromini (1599–1667) played a crucial part in Manfredo Tafuri’s emergence as a major figure in the field of architectural history of the latter twentieth century. The 1960s was a decade that spanned, for Tafuri, from his graduation from the Scuola Superiore di Architettura in Rome, to his attainment of a position at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia (IUAV). It witnessed his earliest forays into the crowded world of Roman architectural historiography, and it saw him discover, and then articulate, the terms on which historical knowledge could have a new, critical bearing on contemporary architectural culture. He studied architects and historians of architecture alike from an appreciation of their intertwined rôles and complex relationships: a theme he documented in his major theoretical, historiographical and historiological work of that decade, Teorie e storia dell’architettura (1968). Manyhaveobservedabifurcation to thewritingand teaching career he later developed in Venice—first posing questions of the present and of the historical trajectory sketched out in Progetto e utopia (1973), before turning to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in an effort to understand (as he later wrote in Ricerca del rinascimento, 1992) the ‘original sin’ that gave rise to the intellectual, institutional and technical conditions inherited by contemporary architecture. I contend that these seemingly competing interests are dialectical, rather than chronological and sequential in character. This bifurcation is difficult to sustain in the light of the evidence presented by the Tafurian bibliography; it is evenmore difficult tofindpredicated in the first decade of his work as an historian and theoretician of architecture. During these years, contemporary and historical topics sit one alongside the other, and the problems posed by the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries enjoy greater attention during the 1960s than at any other moment in Tafuri’s career as an historian of architecture, with one exception. Tafuri takes Borromini as the subject of his 1978-79 course in the history of architecture in Venice, therein representing some aspects of his earlier studies of Borromini, and revising others. His study of Borromini’s work is an important, and largely overlooked, historiographical territory between the two historical poles—modern and Renaissance—that traditionally organise the image of his bibliography and that have been privileged in commentary on his work. Tafuri’s treatment of Borromini’s œuvre during the mid-1960s, and at the end of the 1970s, therefore presents us with three interconnected problems in the history of architectural historiography. 301

Manfredo Tafuri and the age of historical representation

1. Introduction Gevork Hartoonian 2. Tafuri and the Age of Historical Representation Andrew Leach 3. Looking Backward, Looking Forward: Delightful Delays Gevork Hartoonian 4. Porosity at the Edge: Working through Walter Benjamins Naples Andrew Benjamin 5. From Baldwins Paris to Benjamins: The Architectonics of Race and Sexuality in Giovannis Room Magdalena J. Zaborowska 6. Architecture Under the Gaze of Photography: Benjamins Actuality and Consequences Nadir Lahiji 7. The Art of War: Mario Sironi and the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution Libero Andreotti 8. Mimesis Neil Leach 9. Daniel Among the Philosophers: the Jewish Museum, Berlin, and Architecture after Auschwitz Terry Smith 10. Port Bou and Two Grains of Wheat: In Remembrance of Walter Benjamin Renee Tobe

History, Criticism, Judgment, Project

This paper compares statements by two influential voices in late modern architectural criticism, namely Manfredo Tafuri and Jane Jacobs. It concerns the self-appointed role of the architectural critic in light of a general assessment, made by both these figures, although on different terms and under different motivations, of an intellectual and community poverty in the later stages of architectural modernism. Through their views, the paper reflects on the limitations of critical detachment in light of the larger concerns of architectural publishing to which the critic is inevitably subject. It concludes by reflecting on the editors role in shaping the terms of engagement to which the architectural critic subscribes.

The inconceivable agenda

While the ‘unthinkable doctorate’ conference aimed at forming the ground for an inquiry that is at once legitimate, necessary and important, its premises, as articulated in the call for papers (see above: Introduction), failed to grasp the conceptual (and institutional, and historical) foundations of what its organisers considered to be ‘the current lack’ by posing this question through a rhetoric of ‘inconceivability’. In a direct response to the conference call, this essay argues that the classical separation of architectural science from architectural practice is all but productive as a starting point for rethinking and broadening the scope of the doctorate as a degree and as an academic process. Surpassing discursive and institutional frameworks upholding and consolidating the seemingly immutable division between architectural practice and the intellectualisation of architecture, we propose to position the doctorate as an investigatory ‘project’ implicating in equal measure both the university and the profession. ‘Thinking’ of ‘scientific work in architecture’ as a genuine architectural enterprise, we consider the doctorate as an institutionally authorised challenge to the disciplinary bases and techniques of architecture itself, that mobilises both theory and practice, however specific or traditional the individual project. The role of the doctorate is thus not simply to test the limits of architectural knowledge, but also the academic tools and media addressing that corpus.

Tafuri as theorist

Few writers on architecture have been as important to the introduction of a political perspective on architectural production as Manfredo Tafuri. By historicising Manfredos reception in the English-speaking world, widely shared perceptions of his position on theorys place in architectural culture are challenged