The MIT Press

2 total works

Architecture and Utopia

by Manfredo Tafuri

Published September 1976

Architecture and Utopia leads the reader beyond architectural form into a broader understanding of the relation of architecture to society and the architect to the workforce and the marketplace.

Written from a neo-Marxist point of view by a prominent Italian architectural historian, Architecture and Utopia leads the reader beyond architectural form into a broader understanding of the relation of architecture to society and the architect to the workforce and the marketplace. It discusses the Garden Cities movement and the suburban developments it generated, the German-Russian architectural experiments of the 1920s, the place of the avant-garde in the plastic arts, and the uses and pitfalls of seismological approaches to architecture, and assesses the prospects of socialist alternatives.

Venice and the Renaissance

by Manfredo Tafuri

Published 1 January 1990

In this study of the process of decision-making about building and urban planning in Venice, the author examines the intersections of Venetian culture from the beginning of the 16th century to the first decades of the 17th to show how that process affected the choice of designers and styles. Influential doges, such as Andrea Gritt and Leonardo Dona, architects and artists like Sansavino, Serlio, Palladio and Scamozzi, and scientists Francesco Barozzi and Galileo, all figure in this account of the development of an architecture understood as metaphor for absolute truth and good government.