Manfredo Tafuri, or, Humanism Revisited

Author(s): Alberto Asor Rosa, Ruth Taylor, Daniele Pisani and Manuel Orazi
Source: Log , Winter/Spring 2007, No. 9 (Winter/Spring 2007), pp. 29-38
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Alberto Asor Rosa
Translated from the Italian by
Ruth Taylor ; with Daniele
Pisani and Manuel Orazi
Editor's Note: This essay
draws from the author's lecture
"Manfredo Tafuri o dell'
umanesimo rivisitato given
April 2], 2004 , at the Univer-
sità degli Studi " Mediterranea " The origins of Manfredo Tafuri 's Progetto e utopia. Architet-
in Reggio Calabria .
1. Manfredo Tafuri, Progetto e utopia.
Architettura e sviluppo capitalistico (Bari:
Laterza, 1973). Translated by Barbara
Luigia Penta as Architecture and Utopia:
Design and Capitalist Development
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press,
1976). The Italian word progetto , usually
translated as design, has a broader mean-
ing than the English term: it also impli-
cates a "projection" into the future - in
this case, a political one.
2. Manfredo Tafuri, "Per una critica del-
l'ideologia architettonica," Contropiano ,
n. I (1 969): 31-7 9. Translated by Stephen
Sartarelli as "Toward a Critique of
Architectural Ideology," in Architecture
Theorj since 1968, ed. Michael Hayes
(Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press,
1998), 6-35.
3. Mario Tronti, Operai e capitale
(Workers and Capital) (Turin: Einaudi,
1966).
4. Alberto Asor Rosa, Scrittori e popolo. Il
Populismo nella letteratura italiana contem-
poranea (Writers and the People.
Populism in contemporary Italian litera-
ture) (Rome: Samonà e Savelli, 1965).
Republished by Einaudi in 1988.
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Manfredo Tafuri, or,
Humanism Revisited
I would like to start by explaining why a nonspecialist such
as myself would contribute thoughts regarding a work on
subjects and issues with which I am not usually concerned:
namely, the history and ideology of architecture.
The first reason for doing this is of a personal nature.
tura e sviluppo capitalistico 1 can be attributed to a period of
intense collaboration between us. A shorter version, an essay
called "Per una critica dell'ideologia architettonica"
(Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology) was published
several years earlier, in 1969, in Contropiano ,2 the magazine I
then edited with Massimo Cacciari. It was the beginning of a
scientific, disciplinary discourse that evolved through
numerous exchanges in subsequent issues.
The second reason follows from the first, albeit in a way
that I will touch upon only briefly. During this period, there
was amazing vitality in the exchanges between different cul-
tural fields, which is almost unimaginable today, when each
discipline has slipped neatly back into its own little box.
Architecture, the history of architecture, and architectural
ideology played a greater cultural role, due in part to the
teaching of great masters such as Ludovico Quaroni, Giulio
Carlo Argan, and Bruno Zevi. Was it interdisciplinary? No; it
was more an attempt to construct upon the same ideological
foundations a shared interpretative grid in which to fit dif-
ferent cultural objects.
Herein lies one of the principal motives for "revisiting"
Tafuri today. At the time, none of us had any doubts that a
fundamental role in this project would be played by Marxist
"political theory," of which there had been more than one
instance in the previous years - the first edition of Mario
Tronti's Operai e capitale had appeared in 1 966? and my
Scrittori e popolo in 1965.4 This was all happening in the cli-
mate leading up to 1968 and in its immediate aftermath.
Literature, culture, historiography, history of architecture,
and history of art all revolved around this focal point; in
other words, around the utopia of a homogenous universal
knowledge, linked in turn to a project that was equally global,
and equally Utopian (the word was not chosen casually), of
29
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5. Manfredo Tafuri, Progetto e utopia, 1.
Teorie e storia dell'architettura had
appeared just before, in 1968; this was
followed in 1969 by L'architettura
dell'Umanesimo [The Architecture of
Humanism]. It is interesting to recall
that Tafuri's article "Per una critica del-
l'ideologia architettonica" appeared in
the same issue of Contropiano (n. 1, 1969)
in which Massimo Cacciari published his
"Sulla genesi del pensiero negativo" [On
the Birth of Negative Thought], the basis
for Krisis. Saggio sulla crisi del pensiero
negativo da Nietzsche a Wittgenstein ,
[Crisis. Essay on the crisis of negative
thought from Nietzsche to Wittgenstein]
(Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976).
6. The relationship between the two lev-
els and phases of the debate was clearly
laid out (and emphasized with the usual
assertive clarity) by Tafuri in his Fore-
word to the fourth edition of Teorie e sto-
ria dell'architettura (Bari: Laterza, 1986),
vii: "The link between Teorie e storia and
the more recent Progetto e utopia is never-
theless direct: the first is merely the 'pro-
logue in the sky' of the second." Tafuri
was aware of all the risks in this affirma-
tion: "With this, we supply our most
spiteful critics with the opportunity to
aim their barbs at our intellectual itiner-
ary: but we consider it necessary - espe-
cially with regard to ourselves - to pre-
sent this interpretation, so that the naive
remarks that may emerge from this book
might assume the value of an unmistake-
able historical document."
Ì0
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changing the world. Don't expect me to point out here what
part of that project turned out to be wrong or short-lived;
we only have to look around us now to find the distressing
answer to this question. Rather, through this reappraisal I
am trying to restore for the present-day reader the unrepeat-
able headiness of that project, which, for better or worse,
holds a fascination for us that we have not experienced for
anything since. It was the notion - to express it in very
schematic terms - that anything was possible, if we simply
wanted it to be.
Let us go deeper into this notion by cross-referencing
this history. It was Tafuri who put us on the trail of this
complex line of reasoning. In his introduction to Progetto e
utopia he wrote: "The essay published in Contropiano ["Per
una critica dell'ideologia architettonica"] carried - in the
form of an intentionally brief outline - the hypotheses
already expressed in Teorie e storia dell'architettura to their
ultimate consequences."* Teorie e storia is characterized by a
rigorous disciplinary structure, however full of critical and
self-critical moments, with a coeval investigation of the
"architecture of humanism." This demonstrated that the
"critique of architectural ideology," carried out in terms
inspired by Marxism, could not be dissociated from the fer-
ment of critical revisionism, which stemmed from the very
heart of disciplinary issues and their increasingly obvious
aporias and inadequacies.
This is a particularly important point. In the 1960s, at
least two structural crises reached maturity at the same time:
one was the Italian political system, which had emerged from
the Resistance and the struggle against Fascism, and the
other concerned traditional systems of thought, which were
being called upon to confront radically altered realities. My
theory is that the most radical ruptures occurred precisely
where there were clearer points of contact between these
two moments of meltdown. This called for a high level of
professionalism to keep the debate from remaining confined
to purely ideological struggles (the third-rate dilettanti
would emerge later).6
In situations of this kind, the accuracy and depth of dis-
ciplinary knowledge (which in Tafuri's case was extremely
high) filled the framework of ideological criticism with real
content, just as the framework of ideological criticism intro-
duced a revitalizing ferment into the then paralyzed struc-
tures of each discipline. These processes constituted two sides
of the same coin; it was not possible to separate them,
though at times it seemed that this might have been best.
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CONTR OPIANO COVER, 1969.
7. 1 refer here to Tafuri's thinking, in
Teorie e storia dell'architettura, about the
so-called "critica operativa": in Tafuri's
opinion, the task of the critic is not to
speak in support of a certain architec-
ture, but to criticize it in order to create
new possibilities.
8. "There is no criticism, only history.
Richard Ingersoll interviews Manfredo
Tafuri," Design Book Review (Spring
1986). Reprinted in English and Italian
in Casabella , 619-620, a monographic
issue on "The Historical Project of
Manfredo Tafuri." (January-February
1995): 97.
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In order to get to Progetto e utopia , let us follow a more
circuitous route. In the entire oeuvre of Tafuri we come
across two major problems that reoccur, even if not with the
same frequency, and are often intertwined. These are de-
fined by two key words, which appear in alternating phases
and, at the end, even appear to be separate and opposite:
criticism and history. To schematize: initially, criticism pre-
vails; later, history. This becomes more apparent through the
comparison of some of Tafuri's texts.
In Teorie e storia dell* architettura , Tafuri signals the
detachment of the critic from what had been the most ad-
vanced innovative movement in the field of architecture: the
so-called Modern Movement. A growing rift between the
critic and the Modern Movement in its operational form,
once allies with the same values and struggles, had opened
up, making way for a new alliance that came to govern the
strategy of the critic: a relationship with the revolutionary
class movement that would change the world.
Here we should note a paradox. Insofar as the critic
detaches himself from the Modern Movement and is predis-
posed to consider it from the perspective of an autonomous
historical context, the "militant critic," working in defense
of the Modern Movement, is inevitably replaced by the
"pure critic" who takes no stand, since he maintains that his
role is to understand, to discover contradictions, and eventu-
ally to deconstruct. Thus, it could be said that in order to
place himself at the service of a movement that changes not
only architecture but also the world, the critic must detach
himself as much as possible from the game of cultural and
disciplinary trends in order to sharpen his own cognitive
position. Thus, while the pure critic might aspire to the
overall transformation of the world by criticizing, demysti-
fying, and denouncing, on the other hand, by analyzing and
furthering knowledge, he takes up the cause of the historian
and tends to identify with that role. Tafuri (though he was
not alone) traveled this road in both directions several times
in the course of his research, without ever arriving at defini-
tive, fixed conclusions.7
It was perhaps only much later that this knotty problem
was solved, once again in Tafuri's peremptory manner. In a
late interview, when asked "How important to the develop-
ment of architectural discourse is the role of criticism?"
Tafuri replied, "There is no such thing as criticism, there is
only history." He added, "What is usually passed off as criti-
cism, the things you find in architectural magazines, is pro-
duced by architects, who, frankly, are bad historians."8
n
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 What lies between these two extreme positions? In the
middle is Tafuri's personal history, but also an important
piece of architectural and cultural historical thought, both
Italian and European, in the period between the triumph
and the decline of the idea of the mass-worker and its strong
political and ideological connections.
To understand Progetto e utopia we have to go back at
least 30 years, and provisionally put history aside in order to
reflect on criticism. The question is, criticism of what!
There are two aspects to Tafuri's criticism. The first is
directed toward both the utopias and aporias of the Modern
Movement; to the illusions that the guild of architects, like
almost any other group of intellectuals, had constructed in
order to meet the needs and problems of a city inexorably
modeled by capitalist development. To adopt Tafuri' s own
words, it was a "critique of architectural ideology" as a
démystification of the false bourgeois consciousness hidden
beneath this particular intellectual attitude, and as a denuncia-
tion of form as a condition of a "regressive utopia."
Starting from this general formulation, Tafuri clearly
sees the speculative nature of the many different stages that
constitute the Modern Movement. For example, de Stijl and
Dada; the height of rationalistic formalism and the height of
(seemingly) irrational chaos. But Tafuri, within his epistem-
ologica! framework, saw these opposites as two sides of the
same coin, each essential to the survival of the other and,
above all, together essential to the survival of the comprehen-
sive balance of the system. Order and transgression, form and
chaos, the two faces, indeed inseparable, of a capitalist-
bourgeois society heading toward its maturity.
This path of the "critique of architectural ideology"
leads in every case to the discovery of nihilism as the true
driving force of bourgeois intellectual research in the 20th
century. In fact: the other pairing of words constantly pres-
ent in Tafuri' s thought (and also inseparable), are project and
utopia ( following the title of his 1973 book), or project and
destiny (^similar, in operative terms, to the pairing of order
and chaos). Tafuri's research attempts to shape disorder and
chance into order and form Çin this pairing the Modern
Movement had put its greatest energy and achieved its most
brilliant results), but this process is so endless that it con-
stantly results in the omission of one of the two concepts.
The conclusion of Tafuri's analysis is gloomy: "Order and
disorder, in this sense, do not oppose each other anymore.
Read in their true historical significance, there is no contra-
diction between constructivism and 'the art of protest,'
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A 1966 LUNCH AT COLOMBO IN
Venice included (facing camera,
from left) Massimo Scolari,
THEN A STUDENT, AND IUAV PROFES-
SORS Manfredo Tafuri, Aldo
Rossi, Alberto Samona, and
Luciano Semerani. Photo cour-
tesy Massimo Scolari.

between rationalization of the building trades and inf

9. Tafuri, Progetto e utopia , 167-68.
10. Manfredo Tafuri, "Austromarxismo e
città. 'Das rote Wien,'" Contropiano , n. 2
(1971): 259-311. On the more general
question on this theory, see also
Manfredo Tafuri, "Lavoro intelletuale e
sviluppo capitalistico," Contropiano , n. 2
(1970): 241-81.
11. Tafuri wrote many things on this
theme. For example, see Manfredo
Tafuri, "Il socialismo realizzato e la crisi
àcììe avanguardie," in Socia} ìsmoy àttà>
architettura. URSS 1917-1917. Il contributo
degli architetti europei (Rome: Officina,
1971), 41-87. See also chapters four and
five of Manfredo Tafuri, La sfera e il
labirinto. Avanguardie e architettura da
Piranesi agli anni Settanta (Turin:
Einaudi, 1980). The Sphere and the
Labjrinth. Avant-Gardes and Architecture
from Piranesi to the 1970s , trans.
Pellegrino d'Acierno and Robert
Connolly (Cambridge, Massachusetts:
MIT Press, 1987).
12. Tafuri, "Austromarxismo e città," 311.
subjectivism or the irony of pop art; between capitali
and urban chaos; between the ideology of planning an
poetics of the object."9 In other words, project and ut
continuously flow into each other, while simultaneou
canceling each other out. According to Tafuri, the Mo
Movement, in its secular path, ends up looking at its
conclusive failure, which seems to have coincided with
very same crisis in architectural and urban design tha
occurred following the ebullience of the postwar peri
The second aspect of the critique, only hinted at in
Progetto e utopia (which nevertheless constitutes a clea
introduction of the problem), is directed toward the
tectural-urban planning project of European social dem
racies, in the Austro-Marxist version in particular,10 a
Soviet "real socialism."11
On these points Tafuri's discourse is reversed, but it
mirrors the first. Tafuri asks, is it really possible to maintain
the argument that an architecture politically oriented
toward socialism will escape the aporias described above?
Evidently not. Indeed, in this second case the ideological
mystification is double that of the first. Tafuri follows his
magnificent and meticulously stylistic interpretation of the
Karl-Marx-Hof in Vienna with a denunciation of the social-

democratic illusion of integrating class conflict into

"ordered" urban development. In this case, the "regressive
utopia" consisted of the attempt to substitute "an ethic of
'residential democracy* for the development of the class
struggle on the one hand, and that of the overall urban struc-
ture on the other."12 The contradiction proved even more
33

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 striking on Soviet soil, where the form of socialism "absorbed,"
one after the other, all of the progressive architectural ide-
ologies that had come to its aid from various parts of Europe,
reducing and neutralizing them in the totalizing "ideology
of the plan" (which was truly decisive, since it was guided
by the unquestionable authority of the Party).
It could be said, therefore, that Tafuri's "two" critiques
- of the Modern Movement and of "socialist architecture" -

arrived at the same result: namely, the destruction of the

object represented and the insurmountability of the very
problem being proposed. As project denies utopia, utopia
corrodes and reveals the limits of project. Paradoxically, in
the cultural realm, working-class thought and bourgeois
nihilism produce the same effect. While they are decisively
opposed to each other (or at least they should be) in terms
of practice, each exhibits its own extremes against the other.
But, when discussing ideas, forms, and words, the two ex-
tremes, rather than canceling each other out, add to one
another. This experience, according to Tafuri, was both
exhilarating and tragic.
History, therefore, emerges and establishes itself as an
empirical, highly problematic, and slightly desperate re-
sponse to the vacuum created by the "crisis of criticism." It
is important to understand that this response does not just
follow but also precedes this critique (L} architettura
dell'Umanesimo, for example, was written in 1969). This is
both one of the strengths of Tafuri's reasoning and his
uniqueness. However, it is clear that from a certain moment
onward, history prevails right up to the extreme conclusions
of Tafuri's 1986 interview with Richard Ingersoll. On this
difficult path Tafuri also recalls a certain notion of human-
ism, which becomes another dominant theme in his thought.
In tackling the issue of Tafuri's historical thought, we
should first ask, is there a relationship between criticism and
history? The relationship does exist (despite the explicit
denial by the author himself) and it profoundly influences
the very notion of historical research for Tafuri. It is as if
in following the bold direction of criticism, Tafuri had
destroyed his own vision of history, rendering it pure and
essential; a "history," therefore, totally without ideology, and
largely linguistic; in this context, the persuasive and norma-
tive power of the "document" prevails to a greater extent
over the less certain and more questionable one of the "idea."
Does this lead back to a specialization that, while of a high
level, is sectarian? I would say no. In its absolute, impeccable
linguistic basis, the "history of architecture" remained for
3+

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Manfredo Tafuri, i960.
13. Manfredo Tafuri, Venezia e il
Rinascimento (Turin: Einaudi, 1985). See
Venice and the Renaissance , trans. Jessica
Levine (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT
Press, 1995).
14. Tafuri, Introduction to Venice and the
Renaissance , xi.
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Tafuri a fragment of a total history ; and within that fragment
there has to be - and there is - an entire history: social his-
tory, cultural history, the history of the ruling class. One
only has to read some of the chapters of what probably
remains his historiographical masterpiece, Venezia e il
Rinascimento , to realize this: '"Memoria et prudentia'. Men-
talità patrizie e 'res aedificatoria'"; "'Pietas* repubblicana,
neobizantinismo e umanesimo"; "Scienza, politica e
architettura"; among others.1^ The history of cultures and
ideas, fitting into what Tafuri calls a "constellation of
events," or a "history of interactions,"14 becomes anthropol-
ogy, lived life, or Erlebnis , and, in a very concrete and exis-
tential sense, a Weltanschauung, or worldview.
The discourse on project and utopia, in their dialectic
and in their tragic, reciprocal elision, might very well end
here. Nevertheless, perhaps we should not miss the opportu-
nity to try and verify something "residual" in that relation-
ship. In Tafuri's historical research, once the problem of that
conflict had been definitively resolved, there remained a sort
of "reappraisal" of humanism: a naked, intermittent, and
problematic reappraisal of humanism. Let us examine how.
This requires a necessary abstraction, for in Tafuri's
historical writings there are two parts. In the first, one
would place the principal personalities and figures in archi-
tecture between humanism and the Renaissance, up to man-
nerism and beyond: Brunelleschi, Bramante, Michelangelo,
Raphael, Leonardo, Sansovino, Palladio, and concluding
with Borromini. In the second part are the principal person-
alities and figures from the avant-garde to the Modern Move-
ment, arranged along a central axis (Mies van der Rohe,
Gropius, Wright), then one parallel but also important (Adolf
Loos, Karl Ehn), some figurative alliances (Mondrian), and
even some more recent, and important, Italian developments
(Aldo Rossi, Carlo Scarpa), all of whom shared a common
point of departure: the ideology and political theory of the
Enlightenment, which was considered, not merely by chance,
the second beginning of modernity.
What constituted these two groups that in Tafuri's view
made them the culmination of modern architecture? What
do they have in common? I can see some deep affinities. The
two are, I believe, the most extraordinary moments in the
formation and organization of the modern city, moments of
what, in linguistic terms, we would describe as th e form and
structure of the modern . The difference is that, while in philo-
sophical terms the modern has a form and structure that are
purely "conceptual," and to a great extent abstract , in
35
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Tafuri's Teorie e storia dell'ar-
chitettura WAS FIRST PUBLISHED IN
Italy in 1968, followed by
L 'ar chitettura dell 'umanesimi o
in 1969. Theories and History of
Architecture was published in
English in 1980.
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architectural and urban planning terms the form and struc-
ture of the modern take on contents that are entirely
concrete. These tend to coincide with the essence of social life
and at the same time to influence and manipulate it, becom-
ing, with the spontaneity of great realized projects, an
unavoidable component of the web of communications.
Rather than remaining confined within the abstract heavens,
project and utopia descend into the world of real conflicts,
interacting and clashing with them.
Herein lies the connection between criticism and history.
In both cases, the utopia of the modern, which consists in
believing it is possible to adapt reality to project and disorder
to order, is appropriated and sustained with its own strength
by the two great phases of growth of the European bourgeoisie
(m particular, the Italian). The first phase goes from the
breakdown of the medieval theological-theocratic order up
to the processes of refeudalization that occurred in the
course of the 17th century. The second phase goes from the
revolutionary breakdown at the end of the 18th century
(with the exception of individual continuities and brilliant
disciples) to the 1940s and 1950s, after which the crisis of the
Modern Movement intervenes. I propose to consider this
articulation of modern architecture not as two different his-
torical interpretations that are distinct from each other chron-
ologically, but as two real logical-historical models, which have
repeated themselves throughout time and, due to their very
nature, could repeat themselves again, assuming that history
is still in progress.
With enormous insight and endless knowledge, Tafuri
follows these two models from their germination and pre-
monitory symptoms, through their development and tri-
umphant achievements, to their crises, their decline, their
creative waning, until their final melancholy exit from the
stage. Bearing all of this in mind, the exact title of Progetto e
utopia , the work chosen as the departure point of my argu-
ment, should perhaps have been II progetto, l'utopia e lo scacco
(project, utopia, and impasse). Moreover, as I have tried to
explain earlier, the impasse does not represent the inevitable
conclusion of only the bourgeois project and utopia, founded
organically on the division between intellectual work and
manual work, and on the specialization of roles. It also rep-
resents the conclusion of the working-class project and its
proposed utopia, driven by an attempt to recompose intellec-
tual work and manual work, and by the subordination of
specialized roles to the overall revolutionary project (the
plan!). In the second case, the impasse is reached even more
36
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 catastrophically than in the first, however more ambitious
and extreme this project was by comparison. Every human-
ism, therefore, if it is authentic , produces an impasse.
Tafuri's historical investigation therefore achieves the
same effect as his critical one. This, I think, is the objective
historical diagram of his research on the various forms of
architecture at decisive moments in the construction of a

European cultural identity.

The question remains as to whether this conclusion has
a significance of a more general kind, one which still affects
forms and models of "cultural acts" today, and which our
own studies should take into account a little more consciously.
In essence, even today, the division between project and utopia
has not changed, it has only widened, perhaps becoming
definitive. Tafuri, and others alongside him, thus revealed
the start of a process which has now unraveled completely.
(This is not a discourse on cultural ontology, rather, I am
referring to the concrete forms and the strategic objectives
of research.)
If we reunite the two parts of Tafuri's critical-historical
discourse, at its center lies the very "revisiting of humanism"
that I have already mentioned. The essence of this "revisit,"
and perhaps of my own revisiting of the revisit, could be
reduced to three questions:
1. How could we go back to conceiving a modern humanism,
other than within the crisis of the moderni
2. How, then, could we conceive a modern humanism without
interjecting it with nihilism , which is an essential, even deci-
sive, component of the crisis of the modern?
3. How can we conceive a modern humanism (project +
utopia) without the awareness that project and utopia are
always joined by impasse, which does not merely represent its
negation but also its final and unrenounceable destiny, that is
to say, something beyond negative appearances, as the fulfill-
ment of that-which-cannot-not-bei
Let us go back to the two blocks of Tafuri's historical
work, modern-antique and modern-contemporary , and simplify
the picture still further. The central figure in the first block
is Leon Battista Alberti (more specifically, in my opinion, as
author of Momus, rather than of De re aedificatoria ); in the
second is Le Corbusier. They are the two extremes of their
respective humanistic positions; that is, the two people who
expressed the most coherent and universal tendencies: one,
the height of formalism, and the other, the height of abstrac-
tion both the limits of utopia (to the extent of reaching her-
metic horizons) and the limits of the project, striving to
V

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15. Tafuri, "Per una critica dell'ideologia
architettonica," 71.
Alberto Asor Rosa is professor
of Italian literature at "La
Sapienza" University in Rome. He
HAS WRITTEN WIDELY ON ITALIAN
writers. During the 1970s he col-
laborated with Manfredo Tafuri
on the collective book,
Socialismo, citta, architettura:
URSS 1917-1917. Il contributo
DEGLI ARCHITETTI EUROPEI CROME:
Officina, 1971). Asor Rosa made
HIS DEBUT AS A NOVELIST WITH
All'alba di un mondo nuovo
CTurin: Einaudi, 2002).
65.88.89.49 on Thu, 26 Oct 2023 13:28:54 +00:00
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establish architecture and urban planning as a means, a
mechanism, and a living framework capable of reducing and
resolving social conflict. It was no coincidence that Le
Corbusier's attempt was placed at a level no less than that of
Keynes in his General Theory. Tafuri writes: "Keynes con-
fronts the 'party of catastrophe' and tries to neutralize and
use its threat, absorbing it at increasingly new levels; Le
Corbusier acknowledges the reality of class in the modern
city and shifts its conflicts to a higher level, introducing a
proposal to integrate the public as an operator and active
consumer into the urban mechanism of development, now
rendered comprehensively 'human.'
If we too go back to these two great masters of architec-
tural thought, Alberti and Le Corbusier, and to the overall
argument up to this point, we could say that for the creator
of forms, for the builder of cities, or for any other type of
intellectual worker, the greatest project inevitably corre-
sponds to the greatest impasse. But if this is true, perhaps we
could also say that the greatest impasse inevitably corresponds
to the greatest project, finally reversing the formula after
having been tormented by it for so long. From project to
impasse: but also from impasse - if by impasse we mean the
painfully preliminary perception of the failure of any human
effort - to project - that is, the attempt to halt rationally,
albeit for just a few moments, the inevitable descent toward
nothingness. Not a humanism, therefore, that consists of
certainties and tranquil results, but a humanism of research
and risk. A humanism, Tafuri would have said, in a perenni-
ally unsteady equilibrium between reason and destiny: an
equilibrium the uncertainty and precariousness of which do
not prevent - and should not prevent - us from continuing
to search for it as the ultimate goal of our common research.
38
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