Manfredo Tafuri and autonomous architecture: A disciplinary discussion of the 1970s

In the 1970s, architecture criticized the utopian legacy of modern avant-gardes and promoted a return to the world of art and hedonism, and aesthetic pleasure. This return, propagated by architectural phenomenology and postmodernism, was strongly criticized by the Italian historian and critic Manfredo Tafuri, heir to the Critical Theory tradition developed by the Frankfurt School, whose historiographical work most influenced the development of architectural theory in the last decades of the 20th century. This paper revisits this controversy that in the 1970s fueled disciplinary debates on architecture in Europe and the U.S.A, significantly contributing to the emergence of poststructuralist currents in the transition to the 21st century.