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

Tafuri, Manfredo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0262700395 ISBN 13: 9780262700399

Publisher: Mit Pr, 1990

Synopsis

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.

Manfredo Tafuri is the Director of the Department of History of Architecture at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura in Venice.

About this title

Language Notes:

Text: English, Italian (translation)

From Publishers Weekly:

Instead of transforming reality, modern avant-garde artists, in Tafuri's tough judgment, are merely playing with techniques, their private dialogue a "glass bead game." These difficult, wordy essays throw down a gauntlet to avant-garde movements in architecture, theater, painting, film and literature. This Venetian critic mocks today's New York architects who work in self-defined limbo to entertain a select public. He examines the "total theater" of such architects as Moholy-Nagy and Gropius, who envisioned a "counter-city" as a global alternative to the real. The essays make provocative connections between the arts, showing, for example, why Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein saw Piranesi's drawings as a forerunner of new film language. These wide-ranging essays, moving from the cross-pollination of German and Soviet artists in Berlin of the 1920s, to the designs of architects like Venturi, Graves and Rossi, challenge an avant-garde that has lost its moorings in contemporary life.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Mit Pr
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0262700395
• ISBN 13: 9780262700399
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 391