L'histoire assassinée. Manfredo Tafuri and the architecture of the present

In recent years the work of Italian architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri has attracted a lot of interest in the world of architectural theory and practice. After the publications that celebrated Tafuri’s work immediately after his demise in 1994 - most notably, Casabella’s ‘The Historical Project of Manfredo Tafuri’ (1995)i - or produced a first collective critical reconsideration of his legacy shortly thereafter - seminal, ANY’s ‘Being Manfredo Tafuri’ (2000)ii -, the last few years have seen the publication of the English translation of Tafuri’s last book on the Renaissanceiii and of new studies on Tafuri’s works,iv which in different ways have returned Tafuri’s legacy to the forefront of the architectural debate. The interest in Tafuri’s work had never entirely died off. Beyond the immediate applications of Tafuri’s historiographical method by his colleagues and students at the Department of Architectural History at the Institute of Architecture of the University of Venice (IUAV),v who continued his investigations in certain areas of research (for instance, the vast series of studies produced on the architecture of the Renaissance) and beyond the embracing of his critical ‘historical project’ in the ambit of recent architectural theory,vi Tafuri’s work on history as an open project and on the crisis of the architectural discipline has remained a constant point of reference for architectural practice as well

Material lines: apocalypse, capricci, war and other disasters

Albrecht Dürer’s woodcuts Apocalypsis cum figuris (c.1498) present images in which space is almost entirely defined and structured by human bodies. In the engraved Capricci by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (c.1744-47) and by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (c.1740–2) the proliferation in space of architectural debris and the figures that coexist with them collaborate in the definition of space as a seamless clump of matter. Architecture has altogether disappeared from Francisco Goya’s The Disasters of War (1810-20), where an incommensurable space is at onece shallow and endlessly deep – matter solidified by horror. In Jake and Dinos Chapman’s reworkings of Goya’s Disasters of War (1999-2005) figures re-emerge from this solid space and are returned to the foreground, ready to spring out of the image. Through these and other examples, this essay explores forms of representation that challenge the integrity of the body, both architectural and human, in an explosive crescendo in which the technical materiality of the drawn line gradually dissolves to return to three-dimensional space. It argues that violence here is not only pertinent to the contents of the images – apocalypse, destruction, war, disaster, martyrdom – but is intrinsic to the technical medium of the representation

Relational architecture: dense voids and violent laughters

Starting from an analysis of Georges Bataille’s text ‘The Labyrinth’ (1935-6), this paper addresses the always changing relationship between architecture and the city, considering in particular the architectural ‘void’, as both a physical space and a disciplinary domain. In the city, architecture operates in a ‘void’ that is dense of tensions, unevenness, singularities, stratifications and movements, and must devise strategies for addressing and inhabiting these networks of relations. Focusing in particular on Peter Eisenman’s definition of the ‘interstitial’ as a spacing condition of form-form relation, and on Rem Koolhaas’s ‘strategy of the void’ and its congestion with architectural ‘junk’, this text argues that different postmodern positions on architecture in the city have addressed the ‘void’ as a space that is not feared – and therefore ‘designed’ by the architectural project – but tensioned with the potentiality of Bataille’s convulsive laughter: that destabilizing and de-compositional force that transverses relations of structured organizational contiguity, and challenges them with a force that travels across the (architectural) ‘void’

The Fasnacht Fold. Notes on Heide Fasnacht’s New Frontier (2015)

The article discusses the multifarious work of the journal's featured artist, Heide Fasnacht, which, through an impressive range of techniques, consists in ‘deforming and reforming’ in order to ‘reveal fissures’ (Fasnacht) in all sorts of materials and stories. The article explicates Heide Fasnacht’s artistic operation as one of ‘folding, unfolding and refolding of an event’ – an explosive slowness’ which Stoppani had tackled in a previous contribution to lo Squaderno (no. 26). One of the artist’s latest works, New Frontier (2015) draws its name from a demolished Las Vegas casino-hotel. Fasnacht’s project tracks the aftermath of the implosion of the casino by collecting its disassembled materials and representing the scenery of ruins that followed its planned demolition

Indulgent consumption: Exploring its role on consumers’ regret and well-being

Marketing research on indulgent consumption: Exploring its faces and role on well-being. Indulgence in everyday lives: Exploring how consumers and media narrate about indulgent consumption. How Handmade Becomes Tempting: The influence of Production Mode on Consumers’ Regret and Tendency to Indulge

’Budowanie napi\k ecia ? dziedzictwo Manfreda Tafuriego. Mi\k edzy praktykami krytycznymi a praktykami materialnymi w architekturze’, Recykling Idei. Media, Spolecznie, Zaangazowane

W połowie lat siedemdziesiątych włoski historyk architektury Manfredo Tafuri wychodzi z pomysłem „projektu” historycznego jako otwartego dyskursywnego konstruktu, który interpretuje teraźniejszość poprzez reaktywację minionych zdarzeń. Historia zostaje zdefiniowana od nowa, jako zmieniająca się i złożona wielość, w opozycji do jej rozumienie w kategoriach monolitycznej i wszechstronnej całości, oraz jako autonomiczny projekt niezależny od praktyki architektonicznej. Poniższy tekst analizuje wpływ i znaczenie „projektu” Tafuriego we współczesnej teorii architektury, począwszy od zjawiska kryzysu języków i roli reprezentacji, poprzez wpływ dyskursu feministycznego i politycznego, aż po ożywione na nowo zainteresowanie swoistością i możliwościami materialności w architekturze. Artykuł wykracza poza naglące kwestie polityczne, które charakteryzowały twórczość Tafuriego w latach 60-tych i 70- tych, aby skoncentrować się na istotności historii „materialnej” w procesie tworzenia „projektu” historycznego, i udowodnić, że takie czytanie Tafuriego może wskazać kierunek krytycznego badania współczesnych praktyk materialnych w architekturze

Suspended Time

Suspect Terrain nests on the street side of Socrates Sculpture Park, as far as possible from the waters of the East River. Yet the threat it evokes does not come from the water, even if the park itself is a very fragile site, floating on infill land subtracted from the river and subject to floods, and straddling the man-defined boundaries between Astoria and Long Island City, Queens

Demolition: The Afterdrawing of Architecture

When does a building become a building? And when does a building cease to be a building? Is the drawing of its ruin an architectural drawing—that is, can an architectural drawing release rather than determine form

Post-scriptum: 'But that is not enough'

This text argues that practicing theory within architecture means to continuously activate a project, and relentlessly performing a (re)positioning. Attempting a definition of architectural theory is not what matters here. What is at stake instead is the delineation of a few facets of (this thing called) theory, and the mapping of its changing