How useful? 111This might seem counter-intuitive: how would not helping
architects to understand history in present-day terms make
them better architects? Tafuri’s answer lay in the unexpected
lessons and resonances of the past, which architects would
fi nd in histories that were meant to be not useful but provoca-
tive, undermining the common values of architecture derived
from historical abstractions such as Zevi advanced. The con-
sequences of architects reading history would be unpredict-
able from the historian’s point of view, but this itself would
be a sign of the profession’s health, and of its ability to iden-
tify and attend to the problems of society. Rather than helping
architects to form useful habits (Zevi), architectural histori-
ans would help to prevent architects from designing out of
habit (Tafuri).
This distinction gives rise to two loosely organized but
persistent schools of thought on how useful architectural
history ought to be for architecture. Zevi considered archi-
tectural history as architectural practice by other means.
Tafuri thought that architectural historians should write
architectural history and architects should know what to do
16 Still from Le mani sulla città, directed by Federico Rosi (1963).