The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970's

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, Tafuri 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. "The Sphere and the Labyrinth" charts an extensive itinerary from Piranesi to postmodernism. Piranesi, "the Wicked Architect, " used architectural language in ways that transgressed and destroyed traditional boundaries. The avant-gardes of the twentieth century continue two major Piranesian themes, "the limit of forms and ... the violence done to the forms themselveManfredo Tafuri is the author of 'The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970's' with ISBN 9780262200615 and ISBN 0262200619.