ABSTRACT
Manfredo Tafuri’s 1968 book Teorie e storia dell’architettura (Theories and History of
Architecture) offers a wide-ranging analysis of the historian’s method and responsibilities
in architectural culture. Teorie e storia contains a profound examination of the status and
actuality of historical knowledge in the modern era, from the ‘rise’ of humanism to the
‘fall’ of the modern movement.1 The language and style of this analysis in Teorie e storia
quickly yields – within months of its fi rst publication – to another vocabulary and a new
set of named objectives following Tafuri’s move north from Rome and Palermo to Venice
and his exchange of one political and cultural context for another. As a work preceding
his full integration with the Veneto political discussion conducted by the group that Tafuri
entered upon his assumption of duties in 1968 at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura
di Venezia, in the Istituto di Storia dell’Architettura, it operates as an intellectual bridge: a
refl ection on his intellectual life to date, and a programmatic document against which we
can read the initial trajectory of the research and teaching of Tafuri and his colleagues in
Venice from the end of that decade. Indeed, understanding the bearing of Teorie e storia
upon the Istituto and its activities from 1968 is essential to an appreciation of his conduct
as a historian, not simply at this moment at the end of the 1960s, but in his adherence
to an enduring principle.
