Architecture and Modernity : A Critique

these views were formulated more precisely in what has become a major work on the history of modern architecture, with Tafuri an ...

131 “program” of the avant-garde includes the aim of trivializing the shock experience that is typical of the new, rapid tempo o ...

the process of social modernization.^148 This analogy forms the crux of Tafuri’s thesis. Having in his view located the essence ...

133 According to Tafuri, the most pressing question was the reconcilia- tion of these two attitudes. Not only was it a vital pro ...

chaos. Tafuri argues, however, that the tendency toward irony that was an aspect of this movement meant that a need for order wa ...

135 such consequences. What was clear was its ‘political’ role. Architecture (read: pro- gramming and planned reorganization of ...

Furthermore, as Tafuri points out, the intervention model of the Siedlungenformed part of a broad anti-urban ideology that was r ...

137 As for the philosophical infrastructure of this diagnosis, Tafuri refers his read- ers to the work of Massimo Cacciari,^163 ...

3 Reflections in a Mirror Paul Citroën, Metropolis, 1923. (Rijksuniversiteit Leiden.) 68 ...

139 By providing us with the tools for understanding the Metropolis, Simmel paves the way for an analysis of the Metropolis as a ...

with the process of rationalization, and with the feelings of hope and fear that ac- company this process. Benjamin analyzes Bau ...

141 In Cacciari’s opinion, Benjamin uses this comparison with scientific rationality to show to what extent Kafka’s work is impr ...

to a “school of resistance.” Unlike the members of the first group, their resistance is not rooted in a nostalgic longing for co ...

143 would be recaptured in dwelling. Architectural culture has adopted this ideal from the work of Tönnies and Spengler, among o ...

Nonetheless, says Dal Co, modern architecture has failed to grasp this fact; in- deed, it specifically adopts a stance of refusi ...

145 of a critical position of this sort is Sigfried Giedion—who consequently becomes the target of Tafuri’s polemic. Giedion cla ...

plays a kind of materialism based on the primacy of the economic infrastructure— capitalism—which is viewed as the decisive fact ...

147 ilar assumption would seem to underlie the book Architecture and Utopia, which postulates a relatively unambiguous and monol ...

never ends definitively.^191 And yet that does not mean that it is a neutral or arbitrary form of work: the aim continues to be ...

Avant-Garde versus Modernism When in 1949 the Swiss artist Max Bill, a former student at the Bauhaus, was com- missioned by the ...