these views were formulated more precisely in what has become a major work on
the history of modern architecture, with Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co as authors. Af-
ter the publication in 1980 of La sfera e il labirinto,Tafuri turned his back on the ar-
chitecture of the modern period, reverting once more to his first love—the
Renaissance. Nonetheless, he continued to serve as a catalyst in the detailed his-
torical research that has been carried out in Venice on the history of architecture and
urban planning in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.^142
The philosopher Massimo Cacciari, who holds the chair in aesthetics in Venice,
has played an exceptional role in all this activity. Cacciari is a particularly productive
author who is also active in politics and in the trade union movement. His philosoph-
ical studies, which initially focused on German urban sociology at the beginning of
the century, bear witness to an increasing fascination with the work of Heidegger
and Benjamin.^143 His analyses have been of crucial significance to the work of his col-
leagues in architectural history, most particularly through his concept of “negative
thought.” Like Cacciari, Francesco Dal Co also has carried out detailed research into
the study of German architecture culture at the turn of the century, the period during
which it “elaborated the most theoretically compact and significant ideas and un-
derwent perhaps the most symptomatic experiences of ‘modernity.’”^144 I will pay
special attention to the contribution of these two authors because in my view they
have come up with perceptions and working hypotheses that are of exceptional im-
portance for the whole discussion around dwelling and modernity.
Architecture and Utopia
Tafuri’s book Progetto e utopia, the first version of which dates from 1969, attempts
to provide a “rereading [of] the history of modern architecture in the light of methods
offered by an ideological criticism, understood in the strictest Marxist acceptance of
the term.”^145 With this end in view, Tafuri traces the development of architecture in
relation to capitalist modernization since the Enlightenment. His central thesis is that
the course of modern architecture cannot be understood independently of the eco-
nomic infrastructure of capitalism and that its entire development occurs within
these parameters. The whole aim of the book, then, is to demonstrate that this (ide-
ological) subservience is present, even in situations that on the surface seem like ex-
plicit rejections of the model of bourgeois and capitalist civilization. The book
discusses a number of moments in two centuries of architectural history, beginning
with Laugier and ending with the role of structuralism and semiology. I will deal here
mainly with the chapters on the avant-garde, because these are the ones that relate
most closely to the material that is discussed elsewhere in this book.
Tafuri views the process of modernization as a social development that is char-
acterized by an ever-expanding rationalization and a more and more far-reaching ac-
tivity of planning. Within this process, he argues, the avant-garde movements
perform a number of tasks that in fact further this modernization. For instance the
3
Reflections in a Mirror