The Sphere and the Labyrinth

May 1990
391 pp., 365 illus.
(PAPER)
Trade

ISBN-10:
0-262-70039-5
ISBN-13:
978-0-262-70039-9

Out Of Print

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The Sphere and the Labyrinth
Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s
Manfredo Tafuri
Translated by Pellegrino d'Acierno and Robert Connolly

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.

"As it traces the derailings and mistranslations of utopian intentions, (The Sphere and the Labyrinth) offers a powerful corrective to conventional histories emphasizing the heroism of the avant-garde. It... also forces the question of whether an ethical architecture is possible."
—Christina Spellman, Telos

"Tafuri's work is probably the most innovative and exciting new form of European theory since French poststructuralism and this book is probably the best introduction to it for the newcomer. His diagnosis of the dilemmas of modernity and of late capitalism extends the Frankfurt School in new ways, and is bleak implacable, and for that very reason therapeutic and painfully stimulating."
—Fredric Jameson

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