Two projects: the formative years of Manfredo Tafuri

Abstract

Manfredo Tafuri’s (1935-1994) wide contribution to History of Architecture may offuscate the fact he had a brief activity as a practicing architect in the first five years of the sixties. Then, the young intellectual conciliated theory and practice as it would be unthinkable in the following years, resulting in a symptomatic episode of political and professional decision that lead him to renounce not only of his studio, but also to an entire historical substrate. Far from being a complimentary activity in the young Tafuri’s studies, designing was a political front, a decantation chamber of his historical and philosophical premises still in constitution. The article starts from Tafuri’s first publications as a student in Rome in 1960 until the book “Theories and history of architecture”, from 1968, when it is definitely finished any possibility of practice as an architect historian. The main focus of the text is to understand a theoretical transformation through which Tafuri’s work goes through in the sixties, seeking to reveal a movement between two political projects and two interpretations on the uses of history in architecture, by revisiting his drawings and initial researches to see how they have echoed in his forthcoming trajectory.