ABSTRACT
In a well-known passage in Architecture and Utopia, Manfredo Tafuri posits what he
calls ‘a simple truth’: ‘just as there cannot exist a class political economy, so too
there cannot be founded a class aesthetic, art, or architecture, but only a class cri-
tique of the aesthetic, of art, of architecture, of the city itself.’1 The ‘negative’
aspects of this argument have been widely remarked upon, and have often been
taken to indicate an underlying ‘structural pessimism’ present throughout Tafuri’s
work. As the author himself acknowledged, his ‘simple truth’ would appear, to
many, as the mere pretext for a thoroughly despairing articulation of ‘apocalyptic
prophecy’, an ‘expression of renunciation’.2 Yet, while Tafuri’s detailed response to
such a reading may hardly be comforting in itself, this does not efface the need to
engage what he identifies as its fundamental error – an ‘isolation’ of the ‘architec-
tural problems treated’ from the ‘theoretical context’ that originally defined them.
