Back to the Sources. Manfredo Tafuri’s Teorie e storia dell’architettura (1968) between Project and Work in Progress

A rigorous study of Manfredo Tafuri (1935-1994) must inevitably find compensatory strategies to overcome the main difficulty posed by the object of study: that of the sources. A challenge, we might say, made even more difficult by the fact that Tafuri, with rare exceptions, never included bibliographies in his books. This contribution intends to present the first results of a philological analysis on one of the most important books in the historian’s œuvre and the debate of the time, Teorie e storia dell’architettura (1968), closely compared with its second Italian edition (1970). This first step and the significant discovery of the letters exchanged in 1967-69 between Tafuri and the publishing house let to detect the extent to which Tafuri originally modified the book’s project and intervened in its re-editions. This leads to the conclusion that he refashioned himself and politicised his work retroactively, probably to approach the new Venetian intellectual context. Moreover, the systematic filing of 1968 book’s bibliography, together with the critical bibliographies and recordings from his mid-1960s lectures, allow to give due weight to references hitherto unknown. They help us to enter into the historiographic framework in which the main problem – the relationship with history – is to be situated, and to identify a number of knots on which Tafuri will focus in the following years. The analysis situates Teorie e storia in 1960s artistic and architectural discourse and brings to light, in particular, the underlying conversation with Emilio Garroni’book La crisi semantica delle arti (1964), a source that fits precisely a generational urgency, that of architecture and its meaning, to which Tafuri will constantly return. The reading is intertwined with a parallel narration through the illustrations replaced by Tafuri for the second edition of Teorie e storia.