ABSTRACT

Today’s debate on the critical dimensions of architecture tends to advance one of two

basic claims: that all practices in architectural culture either can be or are critical; or that

we have entered a moment spurning critical theory’s explicit contribution to architectural

knowledge. This tendency is informed by critical theory itself, yet dubbed the ‘post-

critical’ in order to make clear its claim to return the architectural work to centre-stage as

the object of theory.1 With this largely intergenerational, principally North American ‘con-

versation’, Manfredo Tafuri (1935-4) has returned to the discursive centre with renewed

importance. Conducted over three decades, his relentless interrogation of the depart-

ments of architectural culture comprises one of the most sustained investigations ever

of the ‘problems’ facing architecture’s institutional composition. These problems have

returned to the forefront as Grey Room confronts its Assemblage parents and Opposi-

tions grandparents, as academics trade blows across generations in the pages of Harvard

Design Magazine and Perspecta, and as a ‘new pragmatics’ publicly refines the terms of

an architectural theory for architecture’s sake. Although Tafuri’s writing potentially

thwarts a wide readership with its cloying Marxism, his earliest international audiences

grasped with both hands the possibilities offered by his work to the architectural theory

genre emerging in the 1960s. His thoughts on criticism, theory, history, and research are

embedded in our current conceptualisation of architectural culture and the specific fields

with which his work is preoccupied.