ABSTRACT
The cultural action of Bruno Zevi from the middle of the 1950s brought to maturity the premises of his trilogy of Verso un’architettura organica (1945), Saper vedere l'architettura (1948) and Storia dell'architettura moderna (1950), which Manfredo Tafuri in 1994 defined as being of immense historiographical significance. 1 A fundamental contribution to modern architectural historiography, this action also points in a properly disciplinary sense to Zevi’s declarative vocation: the operative role. In order to affect the work of architects, as operativity implies, the complex threads of history need to be ordered according to a construction that is intelligible in terms of the architectural project. The so-called operative criticism constitutes, in this light, an element mediating between history and architectural design.
