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.