![]() ![]() 19 Then, outlining the ideological issues determining Enlightenment architecture’s relationship with the emergent approach to the city as an object of design, he writes: In the first chapter of Architecture and Utopia, Manfredo Tafuri deploys his complete methodological apparatus as well as his political outlook with a succinctness characteristic of the “dense writing” his critics seldom forget to mention. By unpacking specific aspects of Architecture and Utopia’s first chapter “Reason’s Adventures” in the light of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, this essay elaborates on the intricate tissue of relations between of both critiques of modernity. As Tafuri’s legacy has stubbornly endured within architectural academia and practice, and Adorno’s has mostly been archived within discussions on high art against mass culture, the dependency of “negative dialectics” on the Venice School’s disenchanted “negative thought” has to be proven valuable outside those elaborations. The substantial distinction Heynen’s work admits is still essential to an evaluation that allows both to limit and contextualize Tafuri’s legacy against a specific historical and intellectual background, and to gauge Adorno’s influence in his “critique of architectural ideology.” At the same time, it renews the possibility of operating with the cultural tools of Critical Theory within architectural discourse detaching them from Tafuri’s well known conclusions. ![]() Conversely, Hilde Heynen in her seminal Architecture and Modernity: A Critique, deals within the same work with both intellectual traditions, Critical Theory and the Venice School, providing the grounds for significant analysis - one she briefly outlines at the end of her account on Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory ( Heynen, 1999). While comprehensive works like Andrew Leach’s Choosing History and Carla Keyvanian’s “Manfredo Tafuri’s Notion of History and its Methodological Sources: From Walter Benjamin to Roland Barthes” hardly mention Adorno’s influence, if at all, Fredric Jameson in his 1982 “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology” described Tafuri’s Architecture and Utopia and Adorno’s 1949 Philosophy of Modern Music (along Roland Barthes’ Le degré zéro de l’écriture), both as producing a sense of “the impossibility of the future, which cannot have failed to oppress any reader of this texts” ( Jameson, 2000:444). On the other, shallow associations have too hastily equated both critiques, relinquishing the need for proper distinction. On the one hand, Tafuri’s criticism towards Adorno’s cultural model appears to have prevented any possibility for deep analysis, 17 even though he has a record for criticizing his influences and distancing himself from them ( Cacciari et al., 1977) 18. And even though Adorno’s fate in philosophical contexts hasn’t been that different, it appears a double bind process has blurred the possibility of establishing concretely the connections between both. Thus, the fate of such intellectual project has been perhaps too tightly tied to Tafuri, whose influence has been felt widespread around architecture’s circles as disheartening - his allegations to the contrary notwithstanding. The reception of critical theory and the Frankfurt School have been in academia and professional practice, until fairly recently, has been inextricably connected to Tafuri’s work.
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