The Sphere And The Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes And Architecture From Piranesi To The 1970s

Cambridge, Massachusetts: M.I.T. Press, 1987. Softcover. Near Fine (small bump & curl to upper corners of opening pgs). glossy illustrated white wraps w/ grey spine. 383 pgs w/ 365 bw illustrations. This major work by Manfredo Tafuri, one of today's most important theoretical historians and critics of architecture and urbanism, presents his critique of traditional approaches to historical investigation and criticism in a penetrating analysis of the avant-gardes and discourses of architecture. Tafuri probes the lines between reality and ideology, the gap that avant-garde ideology places between its own demands and its translation into techniques, the ways in which the avant-garde reaches compromises with the world, and the conditions that permit its existence. Interweaving intellectual models and modes of production and consumption, constructs an elaborate network of references, comparisons, and analogies that leads to an interpretation of history as an archaeology of fragments and interpretations rather than a linear progression or compact block. In his methodological introduction, he states that the historiographic work should set into crisis not only its subjects and their plurality but also the historical project itself and the critical operations and languages of history it employs. --WorldCat.