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Death in Venice: Tafuri's Life in the

Project
Andrew Leach
Published online: 28 Jul 2009.

To cite this article: Andrew Leach (2003) Death in Venice: Tafuri's Life in the Project, Architectural
Theory Review, 8:1, 30-43, DOI: 10.1080/13264820309478471

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13264820309478471

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 30
Architectural Theory Review

DEATH IN VENICE:
Tafuri's Life in the Project

ANDREW LEACH
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At that lime, the problem was exodus. I never felt at borne anywhere. It s not by
chance that, even today, I keep vacillating between Rome and Venice. I can
vacillate on anything, yet I need a strong sense of roots. Perhaps this explains
my tendency towards history, which is rooted and uprooted by those who write
it.
Manfredo Tafuri, 1992

1.
This paper advances the idea that Manfredo Tafuri's Roman roots, and his vacillation' between Rome
and Venice from 1968 until his death in 1994, can be theoretically activated in a consideration of his
ceuure. Tafuri is here deliberately subjectified in two senses: in a biographical enquiry dominated by
his own memories; and as one perceiving himself subject to his environment in the broadest sense,
consciously accommodating those forces shaping his world-view and, more specifically, his philosophical
stance on history and research. If, as Valery wrote, being in Paris is like thinking, then what, for Tafuri,
is it to be from Rome? What is it to teach in Venice? The ideas forwarded in this paper are necessarily
provisional, emerging from an ongoing study on the relationship between factors of Tafuri's life and
his thinking.' To 'answer' these questions is to ignore the most serious, and in the end paradoxical,
lesson of his life-work: that of the necessarily 'open' nature of history.

Besides reflecting on the 'ideas' of Rome and of Venice, and on the meaning of history' and 'the past'
in terms specific to each city, this paper closely reads an interview with Tafuri, perhaps the last before
his death, conducted in Rome by Luisa Passerini in February and March of 1992.2 It is clear that Tafuri
knows he will not live much longer; his comments have the clarity of one conscious of his own mortality,
who desires to map out, once and for all, the bagage of his intellectual life. The interview is not here
regarded as 'truthful,' but rather as an index of Tafuri's memories, providing clues for framing a subiect
that eludes precisely such an action. In other words, Tafuri's responses to Passerini allows us to access,
through his terms, afieldin which his intellectual work took place. More than any other published work
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Vol. 8 No. 1, 2003

or interview. Tafuri's comments here are based firmly in a persona] world that is certainly intellectual,
but equally entrenched in the specific mechanisms of memory.-* It is significant that memory becomes
the device for the clearest consideration of the topic posed as the interview's tide, 'History as Project.'
This paper argues that the project' as a conclusive and resolved idea, ultimately residing somewhere
in the future, is foreign to Tafuri; it is present, but resisted as something ultimately irreconcilable.

2.
Tafuri was born in Rome on the 4,h of November 1935 to a Jewish (secular) mother and a Catholic (also
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secular) father, an engineer in the Ministero dei lavoripubblici. His parents were comparatively old,
his mother over forty and his father in his mid-fifties when he was born. Although he was not an only
child, his two brothers died as children from incurable diseases, and his mother miscarried a fourth
child: "So there was solitude in my family, and also isolation from the outside, because mine was a
generation of total ignorance."' Raised on the Via Giovanni Battista de Rossi in Rome, Tafuri witnessed
his neighbourhood suffer serious bomb damage during the War. Once, Tafuri's house was one of a few
untouched when the rest were levelled; he cites his wartime experiences as important in a developing
sense of "deracination or uprootedness."5 As a child, he contended with the death of his brothers, with
the destruction of his neighbourhood, and with hiding from German soldiers who were looking for his
grandmother.6

The particular circumstances of post-War Rome, both in the urban environment and in the university,
were important to Tafuri's intellectual and architectural development. The university, for instance,
remained stocked with fascist professors whom Tafuri opposed; Enrico del Debbio, Ballio Morpurgo,
Vincenza Fasolo. He looked, instead, beyond the university for his education: to Mario Pannunzio and
his journal IIMondo for a philosophical and political education and to Ernesto Nathan Rogers and his
journal Casabella-continuit'a, and to Bruno Zevi and Giulio Carlo Argan for his architectural education.
He associated with a small group of "politically oppositional" students that included Giorgio Piccinato,
Sergio Bracco and Veri Quilici. They "thought of architecture more as urban planning," concerning
themselves with suburban and housing issues as these suffered, in this group's judgement, from an
outlandish architectural approach that set side the 'real' problems; "in the suburbs of Rome, which 1
visited regularly, rats attacked children, there was pain, misery "" Roman architectural debate, Tafuri
recalls, seemed more interested in the Rome Hilton and regulator}' planning.

Following hisgraduation in 1960, Tafuri's own form of architectural practice continued an oppositional
stance, producing, not buildings, but rather counter-proposals to urban schemes realised by the
corrupt' centro-sinistra body Insiituto nazionaledi urbanistica, which worked with developers and
the building industry. Tafuri formed the small.Associazione urbanisti earchitetti, a body that posed,
in urban terms, a political battle that had at its heart "the principal objective of disseminating a message
about. . the regulatory plan for the city." They sought an "uncorrupted voice" in a debate controlled
by capitalist mechanisms, placing direct action and architectural work on equal terms;
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Architectural Theory Review

Forus, architecture was such a relative fact that when we they alerted us that RaimundoD'lnzeo
known as the colonel with his cavalrywas coming, we took to our scooters. I remember sitting
on the back because 1 have never been able to drive a scooter. We rushed to San Paolo to throw
stones at the mounted police. For us it was the same as studying Le Corbusier or Gropius.8

Tafuri's practice of architecture involved a synthesis of an analytical approach towards existing urban
conditions, treating the city as a complex of the present. and a form of action ranging from architectural
proposals to violence against authorities. As an architect, he pursued research into the range of
elemental and systemic factors defining the city as a multiiayered and multifaceted construction of
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contemporary contexts (history, politics, planning, transportation, demographics, etc.); his 'architectural'
actions responded to an analysis of that complex that commenced from the present and looked
towards future solutions to those contemporary problems. This beginning is significant as a precursor
to Tafuri's 'rejection' of architecture in favour of history, a decision he pinpoints to "one tragic night"
in 1964, after visiting the exhibition Michelangelo architetto, organised by Paolo Portoghesi and Zevi,
in which he observed history being used in the service of an architectural programme.9

Tafuri proposed a project for the reorganisation of the various branches of architectural knowledge in
1966 and 1967published in Teorie e storia deU'arcbiiettura^ankufoiing a scenario in which
history is concerned with analysis of the present, including present traces of the past along a
philological model, and the architect is concerned with the future, including future-orientated analyses
of the present, in which the past forms a 'present' context. In this setting, the analytical tools of history
would not be employed in the service of the future, or, by Tafuri's definition, in the service of
architecture, but would rather be deployed within the essentially autonomous discipline of architectural
history. For Tafuri, the tendency to think in future terms clearly belongs to architecture and the essence
of his proposal is the removal from architecture of those historical-analytical tools suited to inoperative'
studies of the past. The necessarily operative analysisprojecting a plan into the futureinherent to
architectural research would then commence from a present complex, again essentially urban, and
from that analysis propose a form of action. History is included as one of those contexts, butand
importantlyrepresented as an accumulation of all pasts that exist through their present remains and
traces. The tendency to confuse the tools of history with the tasks of architecture would therefore be
evaded, and the demarcation line institutionalised." Thus positioned, Tafuri proposes a form of
architectural practice not inherently differentfrom his own practice of studying the city byacknowledging
its complexity, as a place where people live, and as a system subject to forces not necessarily taking the
best interests of those lives to heart. Considering the city as an existing context that must be accounted
for, rather than as afieldin which the tabula rasa can always be invoked, is central to Tafuri's view of
the city, both as an architect and as an historian. It is not surprising, then, that his view of the two
disciplinesarchitecture and its history'seeks specifically architectural tools to analyse the present in
order to plan for the future. Research prefigures the project in these terms, shifting away from a model
in which the results of research are framed as evidence for a pre-determined proposal for the future.
 3D
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3.
Tafuri's position towards the pre-existing city is not simple. Rome, his own city, contains a past that is
perpetually present, but essentially inert. It is full of artefacts that are 'past' in the sense that they already
exist, but continue to do so while being beyond the memory of the present city. Yet these fragments
do have a bearing on the consciousness of the city because their presence is guaranteed by a sense of
necessity; archaeological fragments of a past city are preserved, but never used." In this setting,
archaeology presides over urbanism in a non-negotiable relationship that continually values the
remnants of past lives over the lives of the present. Preservation is essential, but the ruin is valued as
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an object rendered static from the moment of its 'discovery.' In this setting, then, the past is an obstacle
necessarily negotiated in order to conduct life on a daily basis. Rome is not simply old, like a grandfather
one must care for but whose memories one can draw on. It is not capable of having a conversation in
the sense that one's life is conditioned, to an extent, by the needs of the elderly man, but in exchange
for a sense of tradition and belonging. Rome is rather the past, like a ruinous topography overgrown
by foliage and forgotten. There is no possibility of identifying a singular artefact, like a skeleton or a
preserved interior that can be scientifically studied in order to know the city. There are rather thousands
of skeletons; thousands of places presen'ed across thousands of years. There is no possibility of
remembering the city by recovering and freezing its composite pans in time, as in archaeology. The
remains of the past are important for abstract reasons (heritage, for example), but become a burden
of authority that Romans speak to in the simulation of a conversation, but never hear from. Rome is a
field of ancient artefacts that are important as evidence of ancient livesthey cannot simply be
dismissed; yet these fragments will never give over their memories, existing rather as pre-texts,
obstacles that the present must negotiate rather than engage.

These obstacles are far from simply metaphoric: the coliseum, the pantheon, ruins, buried layers of the
city, each take priority over the needs of the present. And yet the paradoxical presence of the past and
absence of tradition is essential to the notion of Rome. Both history and continuity are undermined by
the absence of recollection; for Rome, the past is vital, but beyond memory. It is a place in which things
are forgotten, not intentionally, but rather as one might forget one's book on a cafe table: accidentally,
distracted by the confusion of everyday life. The city as an historical entity is therefore reconfigured as
a constellation of fragments, constituting not a whole, but rather a perpetually disrupted context, the
weight of which bears down on the present. As Bart Verschaffel writes, monumentalising the past
creates "obstacles one stumbles on as one goes about one's daily business."'3 Further. Rome lacks
tradition precisely because of the relationship of its past to history. The city constantly undoes itself:
an idea is introduced, implemented, then broken in a cycle of generation and governance that does not
allow regeneration. Nothing a n start afresh because the past is always kept, and the city becomes an
indiscriminate accumulation of this pasturban, political, religious, individual ideasthat can not
constitute a trajectory but form rather a scatography of remains that index specific, but inherently
contradictory, moments. When, in Rome, the past can be traced archaeologically, the idea of history
is itself at stake; the city can only be researched, never narrated.
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It is no coincidence that Tafuri never really leaves Rome, because this city represents not simply a
geography but rather a position towards the past. The past forms pan of the city's mentality; Romans,
by default, defer to its presence, but employ forgetfulness as a device to cope with this past from day
to day. Researching the past does not have, as an objective, the project of making sense of what has
already happened by building up a complete picture; it rather, as in archaeology, identifies each
fragmentfirston its own terms and then in terms of other fragments. It is understood that a full picture
cannot be constructed, as thefieldof fragments is heterogeneous in the most faithful sense: contained
in one site, but subject to fundamental differences. It is the conflict of vastly different remnants from
Rome's pastartefacts of 100BC versus 600AD versus 1550ADthat reveals the true difficulty of history;
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no story can be constructed that accounts for this span of time and breadth of difference. For Tafuri,
then, to be from Rome is to fundamentally understand the fragmented and internally contradictory
nature of the past; this requires thinking, as in Val'ery's Paris, but thinking rooted in archaeology, in the
recovery of a past that exists only as fragments that can never be reconstructed as a whole.

4.
After completing a series of short-term teaching appointments in Milan (for Rogers), Rome (for
Quaroni) and Palermo from 1963 to 1967, Tafuri became a professor at the Instituto universitario di
architettura di venezia {WAV) in early 1968, a position he held until his death in 1994. The year of his
appointment coincided with the publication ofTeorieestoria deliarcbitettura, and at/(MVTafuri set
about implementing the institutionalisation of architectural history proposed in that text. For the
duration of this twenty-six year period, Tafuri did not live in the city of his work, nor in the city of his
birth, but rather 'on the train' between Rome and Venice. He made a clear geographical demarcation
between research and teaching. The former was done in Rome over eight day periods, the latter in
Venice overfiveday periods. Maintaining this pattern, Tafuri delivered "three lectures every fifteen
days, leaving the intervening weeks for exercises" conducted by assistants. He required "a lot of time
for preparation time in order to give a series of three lectures," each of these two hourlectures designed
for presentation as a 'closed argument' based on research conducted during his stays in Rome. Tafuri
continued to 'refuse' the prospect of having a home until the last decade of his life, when he bought
a house in Rome where his daughter (b. 1966) lived; "and I am a guest there too, somehow." His living
arrangements over this time enforce a sense of homelessness: living with friends in shared apartments,
with Massimo Cacciari in his home, and in "the house of the woman who still welcomes me."13
Nonetheless, a schism operated in Tafuri's life between Rome and Venice that was very specific. Rome
contained both his research and his daughter; Venice contained both his teaching and his lover.

Tafuri reflects: "Rome beckoned me to explore her roots, but not Venice, which doesn't have roots.
There is only mud beneath the city."H If Rome is comprised of its own fragmented past, heterogeneously
composed as a city of obstacles, Venice poses the opposite problem. In Venice the past is neither
heterogeneous nor inert, but homogenous and present. Yet, this past is neither as the aged grandfather
nor as the forgotten ruin or the thousands of skeletons, but rather as a breathing corpse, as one in a
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Vol. 8 No. 1, 2003

coma, who. because signs of life are maintained, is treated as alive, but who is ultimately unresponsive
and therefore exists simply as a given fact. Just as the elderly grandfather requires care and attention,
so does Venice, but unlike living with one's grandfather, Venice has no tradition to pass on, no sense
of belonging to impart through conversation. A family member who is removed from life while still alive
has a more complicated conceptual relationship with the past, with tradition, and with the future.
Preserved in life, in a hospital bed. the \isitor will treat the body that lies there as a responsive individual,
able to hear, feel, and love the person who visits out of a sense of love and responsibility. Despite the
mechanics of preservationevident as nurses and machines care for the bodythe visitor speaks at
length, recounting events of the day, expressing feelings and emotions as if the relative is alive and
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listening. The breathing and the beating of the heart makes this a relationship of the living for those
who are in the relationship, but between the space of life and the space of death, the visitor is ultimately
talking to a figment of memory, and projecting life on to their companion. One can ultimately not live
with the clinically dead, but can only visit. There are those whose lives are intimately connected with
the clinically dead, and whose daily lives occupy the spaces occupied by these people, but they are the
technicians who perpetuate the appearance of life. In the end. life is projected onto the body in a system
in which memory provides permission to continue doing so in perpetuity.

It is not simply life that is projected onto the body, but conversation also. The things said by the visitor
to his or her loved one are conceived neither as monologue nor as dialogue, but rather fall between
these modes of communication in the model of an analytical subject. The subject of analysisthe
visitorspeaks at the analystthe preserved lifewho in turn says nothing in return. Yet rather than
simply talking as though the other party were absent, the subject projects onto the analyst their sense
of what the latter figure wants to hear. And so the subject continues to talk, and the analyst continues
to be present; but the conversation neither reduces to a monologue nor escalates into a dialogue,
because the silent presence of the other figure forces an open model of conversation, impossible to
conclude by mutual understandingand impossible toterminatebythecessationofspeech. Furthermore,
in analysis, the couch acts as a visual barrier, so that the subject can never read the subtle responses of
the analyst; this too is the experience of the one visiting his or her relative in the hospital bed. The couch
is the veil of death covering the body lying there; the analyst is the life projected onto that same body.
Likewise, Venice is a city of visitors. Tourists, who are tended by the technicians of tourism, inhabit the
centre; Venetians visit their own city from outlying towns of the Veneto, out-priced by a city built on
trade and exchange,

In Italo Qalvmo'sLecitta invisibili. the Venetian explorer Marco Polo talks with Kublai Khan of the cities
of his travels.1' In these vivid and evocative depictions, Polo's monologues recall each of the many
places he once visited, but which are recovered from memory as an assemblage of impressions,
conveyed to Khan as stories. These impressions are entirely memorial, fragments conveyed as a form
of entertainment for Khan's edification. A kind of analysis takes place beyond the territory of the stories,
punctuating Polo's impressions so that each city is drawn together through a narrative that forms a
cohesive whole. The significance of each citycities of desire, of the name, of signs, of death, etcdoes
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Architectural Theory Review

not emerge from experience of the cities themselves, as if it were possible to 'recall' by means of
description an accurate' translation of a city into words. Rather. Polo's stories connect Khan to the
outside world, allowing him to travel vicariously by means of Polo's memory. Yet Polo leads Khan to the
same place each time, never revealing the 'true' nature of the experience, choosing rather to identify
this place as a vacuum left by the identification precisely of what is not spoken. The importance of these
stories lies not in their construction as elements of a complete work but rather of their co-existence as
fragments. They are important not as indices of Polo's visits to this city and that, but as the material for
memories that are activated in the present. They are nostalgic, but not narrative. Eventually. Kublai
Khan confronts Polo with the absence, from among the cities of his stories, of Polo's own city, Venice.
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In speaking indirectly of Venice, by identifying all other cities as manifestations of Venice, Polo spoke
of nothing else. These stories have no or little analytical value, existing rather as pure memory,
describing an absence residing between the notion ofVenice and memories of real life drawn together,
but incapable of resolution as a whole. Le citt'a invisibili thus establishes Venice as a lesson in the
dangers of homogeneity inherent in activation of memory. The cities of Polo's stories may be read
separately as individual places imbued with atmospheres at once different from and familiar to each
other. Yet the analytical exchanges between Polo and Khan, sited between the stories, reveals that
Polo's memories are one of two things: either the recollections of different and distance places filtered
through the memory ofVenice and therefore containing Venice; or the recollections ofVenice itself
from all manner of perspectives. It may be described, but it cannot be changed. The method by which
Khan receives his impressions ofVenice thus reinforces the narrative homogeneity implicit in the very
idea ofVenice. For Khan, as for all, Venice no longer exists except as this idea, as a story drawn from
collective memory-, as a 'completed' city still drawing breath. The complicated past is simply forgotten;
as they pass below the ground plane, they are not stored as in Rome, but rather sink irrecoverably into
the mud.

5.
For Tafuri, the practice of architectural history is caught between these two 'places,' between 'Rome'
and the fragment on one hand, 'Venice' and memory on the other. One essential problem for Tafuri
is how to conduct an analysis of fragments without simulating the resolution of those fragments. Posed
in different terms, this issue is one of conducting historical research as an investigation' while resisting
the tendency to construct history as closed arguments. In this, both 'Roman' and 'Venetian' positions
are ultimately at stake: one can draw provisional, but artificial, conclusions from a body of evidence, just
as one can construct a story that is not artificially homogeneous. However, just as the historian must
be diligent with sourcing the greatest breadth of material in conducting a study, and understand the
implications of that material within a form of analysis, he or she must likewise perpetually challenge the
bases of that analysis as an auto-critique, avoiding the homogenisation of the past within an historical
construction that undermines the past itself by rendering it simply as memory. Within this problem,
philology plays an important role: the historical researcher looks at artefactsbuildingsbut also at
documents and drawings. As a scholar he or she considers those artefacts in light of knowledge of the
 37
Vol. 8 No. 1, 2003

institutional contexts of their production, but also of their preservation from that moment to the
present, thus understanding the artefact in terms of an accumulation of perhaps discordant pasts and
knowledge-bases extending from the moment of an artefact's production to the present day. The aim
is not to draw lessons from the past, but rather to demonstrate that history, as a procession of time,
contains contradictions in itself that necessarily shape the present understanding of an artefact,
document, drawing, etc.

In fact, some of the most serious work 1 did was pure philological research on Borromini [in the
state archive in Rome], looking for the documents, the letters, and, ultimately, revising the
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chronology. This was fundamental, because it revealed to me the problem of how to combine
two formerly disparate practices: that of the historian, and that of the palaeographer who is able
to recognise a passage of handwriting and say, "This is the hand of a certain person, and this is
a counterfeit.'16

Tafuri was critical of Argan's and Zevi's practices of generating scholarship from secondary rather than
primary sources, relying on existing publications already framed by historical programmes and
preferences contemporary neither with the historical moment under examination nor with the present
of the examination itself. Fundamentally. Tafuri is drawn to the processes producing Rome over the
millennia and to the invocation made by Rome to recover the contradictions of the past through
research into the past, rather than by the production of history. The Roman' position in Tafuri's
research therefore sought a thorough and broad knowledge of the evidence comprising history; he
perpetually contested the 'Venetian' tendency in order to call into question the very techniques applied
to interpretations of the past.

In Venice I was thinking about other things... I embarked on a series of ferocious auto-critiques
of everything I had done, which were repeated in a violently self-destructive manner. This self-
criticism very often tended to paralyse me. and then I would come out of it and make an L.;ort
to correct myself. I would say, 'Okay, so I have done badly up until now, perhaps I will do some
small thing very well before I die.'"

Sade Marat
To sort out the true from the false We must pull ourselves out of the ditch
we must know ourselves by our boot-straps
I don't know mvself turn inside-out
When I think I have discovered and see everything with new eyes ...""
something
1 begin to doubt
and I reject it
Everything we do is but the larva of our
intentions
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Architectural Theory Review

The distich that precedes Teorie e storia clearly signals the nature of the open dialogue that Tafun saw
as fundamental to the practice of history. Marai-Sade offers no conclusions or certainties, but rather
an imperative to feel uncomfortable with the present bases of historical, and by extension, personal,
knowledge.

Tafuri later acknowledged that this process is far from simple, citing from Nietzsche's Aurora to suggest
that the accumulation of histories pose just as concrete an issue as those fragments of the past
referenced by history: "Today, with every new bit of knowledge, one has to stumble over words that
are petrified and hard as stones, and one will sooner break a leg than a word."'0 The first of Tafuri's own
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experiences of psychoanalysisfrom 1966-1969, at the Societ'a italiana di psicanatisr1 led him to

consider "the idea of history as psychoanalysis of society."" In this setting, words indeed become
historical fragments, not tangible in the sense of a Roman ruin, but having equal strength in the
analytical context. Memory is the device through which the past is accessed,' while words are the
material of that device; the task of the analyst is the disruption, through questioning, that allows the
analytical subject to reveal his or her own processes of meaning and signification-, "by penetrating
deeper and deeper into memory, one can open up new possibilities. ":5 It is no coincidence that
Sigmund Freud deployed Rome as an important metaphor for the unconscious, both personal and
collective, or that he likened its recovery with excavation.-'* (Nor is Tafuri's affinity with Giovanni
Battista Piranesi coincidental, and though more elaboration is required on this point than is possible
here, it is important to remember Piranesi's archaeological sketches of Rome.)-'5 The accumulation of
all past events in an ancient city, in Freud's terms, differs little from the accumulation of memories in
a person's life. The recovery of words through interminable' analysis, seeks relationships and
meanings through a process rendering what is familiar as unfamiliarthe heimlich as unheimlich*
Such analysis disrupts the subject's inclination to render memory homogeneous, rather revealing the
inherent digressions within the multifarious events marking time's procession. Venice, in its coma-like
state, cannot investigate its foundations, but rather stays asleep, capable only of dreaming, and in
dreaming capable only of one line of thought, one story. To apply the lessons of Rome' to historical
research is like waking 'Venice' from its unconscious state. This is perhaps the motivation behind
Tafuri's 'Roman' investigation of the Venetian RenaissanceVenezia e il rinascimento'm which he
denies the city its own inclinations towards homogeneous history; likewise his studies on the Venetian
architecture of Jacopo Sansovino.-'7

The task of historical research, posed in analytical terms, is to follow the process by which the 'signified'
as a fragment of memoryword, image, stone, documentis gradually 'divorced' from the signifier
the history that is conveyed as memory. To this task. Tafuri declares, "there is no other alternative."28
The techniques of psychoanalysis result only in open constructions; likewise Tafuri's historical
project': "The cards can be reshuffled and to them added many that were intentionally left out: the game
is destined to continue."29 The historian can never solve' history, in the same way that psychoanalysis
does not seek to cure' a subject. Rather, in being "able to think from one hallucination to another." the
historian enables a form of action predicated on a freedom from the burden of memory: A
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Vol. 8 No. 1, 2003

homogeneous history, represented by Venice.' is broken by the direct historical analysis of

heterogeneous fragments, represented by' Rome.' It is therefore crucial to distinguish between history
and historical research. Tafuri's demonstration of the 'historical project' in La Sfera e il labarinto
appears as fragmented and inconclusive because the past is fragmented and inconclusive. Analysis has
to account for the presence of primary sources, but must activate them in an interrogation of meaning
both in theirown terms and in terms of the present basis of knowledge from which they are understood.

One consequence of this, for Tafuri, is a conception of history that ultimately and perpetually undoes
itself. Likewise change, and by extension revolution as posed in the 1960s, ultimately defaults to
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continuity. To be a revolutionary is ironically to perpetuate those conditions one fights against; to

research and analyse the past is to understand that history as a smooth progression of events does not
exist, that it is simply a dream in the manner ofVenice, quietly absorbing change in its tendency towards
homogenisation. To know Rome, or to be Roman, is to understand that the present is inherently
unstable, just as the past has always been. The historian, asa figure starting from the present and looking
backwards, in effect provides permission' for the future to perpetuate neither historical myths nor an
undue reverence for the seemingly unalterable past. The tangible artefacts of the past cannot be
changed, but their meaning in analysis is kept open. The figures of action, who Tafuri suggests could
be architects, take the historian's analysis as part of a complex present and proceed with plans for the
future, rather in the manner of subjects of analysis who, by understanding their own 'history', change
their life in the present and their plans for the future. They cannot alter what has taken place already,
but can change the effect of this past on their present life. Through destabilisation of the past, in other
words, the future can be approached with greater confidence. Thus are drawn together Tafuri's
historical and ideological projects, and thus the disciplines of history and architecture may co-exist.

6.
How, though, do the concepts of 'project' and open analysis' work within Tafuri's proposal for
historical research in architecture? Boris Groys has recently considered the project' as a pre-text for
"a socially sanctioned loneliness," in which a withdrawal from "the general flow of world events" is
accommodated in order to accomplish something specifically outside "universal fate."5'- Where the
project is clearly life-long, "what is expected... is that, at least by the final moment of his life, he has
some form of finished product to show for [it)namely a workthat will retrospectively offer social
justification for the life he has spent in isolation."32 Groys reasons that the project occupies a parallel
time that is inherently in the future: "For the project's author, namely, everything in the here and now
is of no consequence since he is already living in the future and views the present as something that
has to be overcome, abolished orat least changed."55 The abolition of the present is clearly at odds with
Tafuri's project,' except insofar as he pursues the institutionalisation of his method. Groys introduces
Sartre's notion of being-a-project-in-process' as an essence of the human experience. In these terms,
the individual is radically alienated and thus free to pursue the project' in privacy. Yet rather than
completely retreat from the 'real world.' "the hero of Sartrean provenance is perennially tempted to
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close the gap between the time of his project and that of the general run of things through a violent
action directe and thereby, if only for a brief moment, synchronise both frames." And so the project
is not concluded, but m\\tr documented zsz representation of the project-in-process: "documentation
grants all unrealised or unrealisable projects a place in the present without forcing them to be a success
ora failure."*' In this circumstance, and to bring Grays' consideration of the artist to bear on Tafuri, 'the
project' is not published in its completion, but documented as evidence that the project is ongoing.
More specifically, Tafuri, whose life is in the project, produces not histories but rather historical
research that functions to document evidence of his project of open historical analysis.
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It is significant that the period of scholarship that followed Tafuris second, seven-year period of
psychoanalysisconcluded around 1983 or 198435 saw himpursuea detailed philological study of the
Renaissance, evidenced, not as a 'history of the renaissance,' but as collaborative studies on specific
architects and buildings: Jacopo Sansovino. Raffaello. Giulio Romano, Francesco di Giorgio.36 The
publications from this time may be read precisely as evidence of a project in progress, just as La Sfera
e illabirinto can be read as an initial demonstration of how the historical project might proceed. What
then, is Tafuris ceuvre? Is it a constellation of heterogeneous fragments, a la Roma, each to be read
on both their own terms and in relation with all the other fragments scattered in the Tafurian milieu?
Or is it a homogenous body of work, a la Venezia, each text another of Polo's stories to the Kublai Khan,
leading us to the same place (but where?) each time, or seeing those elements in terms of a different
(again, where?), or perhaps the same, place? The tendency, as Grays notes, is for us to consider the
evidence of a project-in-progress as a cohesive and conclusive representation of the project. Further,
the mechanisms by which the project is represented to othersbooks, articles, encyclopaedia entries,
exhibition catalogues, lecturesencourages us to consider those elements as resolved in themselves
rather than as evidence of a larger 'project-in-process.' These forums traditionally require arguments
and conclusions, a story, replete with evidence; such formal characteristics in themselves contain the
tools by which the work becomes homogenised, or at least understood as completed' research. The
representation of analytical fragments as concluded elements of an open-ended historical research
programme may therefore be afinalparadox in Tafuri's work. In 'sharing' his analyses, he is himself
open to analysis as an historian with a body of published work. Searching for 'the answer' to 'Tafuri,'
contemporary scholarship holds lengthy conversations with the clinically dead, while, if anything
Tafuri's own lesson' warns readers to be suspicious of answers, that analysis contains only the prospect
of the subject undoing its own identity.

7.
InL'Armoniaeilconflitti, written with Antonio Foscari, Tafuri "tends todemolish" Wittkower's reading
of humanist architecture, "but with affection and great regard for the importance of his work." In
challenging the premises of Wittkower's thinking, Tafuri understood that he was also challenging
Wittkower himself: "for each book he wrote and the moment in which he wrote it carries his
biography."3* Although, as Tafuri claims, "biography... is essentially banal" and the moment of birth
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Vol. 8 No. 1, 2 0 0 3

and death casual.58 it can also be true that an intellectual life as traceable in books is shaped by the
circumstances of birth and firmly concluded at the moment of death. There is always a last book. And
so while these moments are indeed 'casual' in Tafuri's case, they are not insignificant in understanding
the ideas at stake in his work. If they are not 'causal' rather than 'casual.' they are at least ironic,
considering the pattern of loneliness and vacillation present in his life, as represented vividly in his own,
end of life, recollections. For in the conclusion of Tafuri's life, and in the interment of his remains and
the memonalisation of his importance, he continues to occupy a space between Rome and Venice.
Tafuri died in Venice on the 23'" of February in 1994 as the result of a heart attack, following a long period
of illness. Yet he was buried, not on the island of San Michele in Venice, but in Rome, as an outsider,
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in the Cimitero acaitolico pergli stragnieri at the Porto San Paolo. On his tombstone is the simple
inscription 'StoricodeU'arcbitettura:* This is fitting, for just as his remains are quite literally contained
in the ground in Rome, covered by a ruin-like tombstone as one more fragment, his memorialisation
occurs in Venice at IUAV, where the memory of Tafuri is invoked at the threshold of Tolentini, within
Carlo Scarpa's entrance-way to the faculty. To the left, a stone memorial and, to the right, the falien
facade of San Francesco della Vigna convened into a garden mark Tafuri's significance to the history
and identity of IUAV* But more that this, they ensure that significance is never taken for granted, as
students and professors pay perpetual tribute to Tafuri by making his memory an element of their daily
routine. By these means, Tafuri never leaves Venice, but is subsumed by the city and transformed into
a memory kept alive as a familiar presence. And so Tafuri's life concludes but is not resolved, caught,
even in death, between the world of physical remains, as a skeleton in Rome, and the coma-condition,
kept alive institutionally to be talked to, reminisced with and deferred to. This is the paradox of Tafuri's
philosophy of historical research: one must investigate evidence of the past and understand the
profound complexity of the accumulation of lives since passed, but in his memory, this 'life-in-project'
is framed precisely in terms that Tafuri himself rejected: as a story, with a message. Death in Venice is
thus not an end, but a perpetual slumber, in which memory finally presides over artefact.

Footnotes
1 This essay is drawn from doctoral research under Professor Bart Verschaffel in Ghent University's Department
of Architecture and Urbanism. Credit is also due Dr w'outer Davidts, Prof Dirk de Meyer, David Maskill and
Ruth Stewart-Leach for their valuable advice and comments on the text.
2 Luisa Passerini, "History as Project: An Interview with Manfredo Tafuri," Architecture New York. "Being
Manfredo Tafuri," 25-26 (1999): pp. 10-70. The interview, conducted in Italian, is only availablein English; Kurt
Forster and Marco De Michelis supervised the translation.
3 It is important to note that this essay does not attempt a biographical reading,rathergenerating its thesis from
the existing body of texts published by Tafuri and from his own reflections on that aeuvre.
4 Passerini, "History as Project," p. 15.
5 Passerini, "History as Project," p. 12.
6 Passenni, "History as Project," p. 18.
7 Passerini. "History as Project," pp. 16-18.
8 Passerini, "History as Project." p. 25-26.
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Architectural Theory Review

9 Passerini, "History as Project,'' pp. 30-31.

10 Manfredo Tafuri. Teorie estoria dellarchttettura, Bari: Laterza, 1968.
11 See the fou rth chapter of Teorie e storia, "La critica operativa." A fuller consideration of critica operativa,
entided "Inoperative History," is planned for a forthcoming issue of Architectural Theory Review.
12 Ban Verschaffel, "The Monumental: On the Meaning of a Form,'Journaloj'Architecture 4,4 (1999), p. 333.
The present discusison of Rome draws substantially on Verschaffel's argument in this essay
13 Passerini, "History as Project," pp. 57-58.
14 Passerini, "History as Project." p. 58.
15 Turin: Einaudi, 1972.
16 Passerini, "History as Project." pp. 38-39.
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17 Passerini, "History as Project." pp. 58-59.

18 Peter Weiss, The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of
Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, London: Calder and Boyars, 1965.
19 Weiss cited bv Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture, trans. Georgio Verrecchia from Teorie e storia,
4th ed 1976', London: Granada, 1980.
20 Friedrich Nietzsche, cited by Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth Avant-Gardes and Architecture from
Piranesi to the 1970s, trans. Pellegrino D'Aciemo and Robert Connolly from La sfera e il labarinto.
Avanguardie e architettura da Piranesi agli anni '70 (Turin: Einaudi, 1980), Cambridge. Mass, and
London: MIT Press, 1987, p. 7.
21 Passerini, "History as Project." pp. 35-36.
22 Passerini, "History as Project." p. 38.
23 Passerini, "History as Project," p. 45-
24 Peter Gay, Freud- A Lifefor Our Time, London and New York: W W Norton and Co, 1988, pp. 132-133,135-
136,171-172,316,425 (in which Freud invokes "Roman polydimensionality"). Particular instances of Rome's
deployment as a metaphor by Freud occur in The Interpretation ofDreams (1900) and in Civilisation and
Its Discontents (1930), vols. rV-V and XXI in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, trans, and ed. James Strachey, et al., London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-
Analysis, 1953 (vol. IV ent.. vol. Vpp. 339-627) and 1964 (pp. 57-145), resp. Aforthcoming essay titled "Making
Progress" will allow a more sustained consideration of the importance of Freud's psychoanalytic theories
to Tahiti's historiography. It will further argue forPiranesi's importance to Tafuri in terms of archaeology and
the ruinous city.
25 "G B Piranesi: I architettura come Utopia negzuva'," Angelus novus 20 (1971): pp. 89-127; "The Dialectics of
the Avant-Garde: Piranesi and Eisenstein." Oppositions, 11 (Winter 1977): pp. 72-80; cf. Susan M Dixon.
"Piranesi and Francesco Bianchini: Capricci in the Service of Pre-Scientific Archaeology." Art History- 22.2
(June 1999): pp. 184-231.
26 Freud, "Analysis Terminable or Interminable,' (1937), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XXIII, 1964. pp. 209-253- 'Making Progress' will again argue the significance
of this essay to Tafuri's "II Progetto storico': that Tafuri's Pirenesi essays horn Angelus novus and Oppositions
were republished in La sfera e il labirinto, following the lead of the 'progetto storico', is a significant
cumulation of sources and references.
27 Tafuri, Venezia e il rinascimento. Religione, scienza, architettura, Turin: Einaudi, 1985.
28 Tafuri, Sphere and the Labyrinth, p. 6.
29 Tafuri, Sphere and the Labyrinth, p. 21.
30 Passerini, "History as Project," pp. 4748.
31 Boris Groys. The Loneliness of the Project, trans. Matthew Partridge, Antwerp: Museum van Hedendaagse
Kunst Antwerpen. 2002, p. 5-
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32 Grays, Loneliness of the Project, p. 7.

33 Grays, Loneliness of the Project, p. 12,
34 Grays, Loneliness of the Project, p. 14.
35 Passenni, "History as Project," pp. 51-52.
36 For example, with Foscari, L 'Armonia e i conflitti. La Chiesa di San Francesco delta Vigna [by Sansovino]
nellaVeneziadel '500,Tumi:Einaudi. 1983;withfrommehnd fay. Raffealloarcbitetto,Milan:Electa, 1984;
with Bums et al., Giulio Romano. Milan: Electa. 1989: with Adams. Bums and Fiore, Francesco di Giorgio
arcbitetto, Milan: Electa, 1993-
3~ Passenni, "History as Project," p. 54.
38 Passenni, "History as Project," p. 66.
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39 "Manfredo Tafuri (1935-1994)," Zodiac 12 (September 1994-February 1995); 4-7. The full inscription reads
"Manfredo Tafuri / Storico dell'architettura / Roma 14.11.1935 Venezia 23.2.1994."
40 The garden invoking San Francesco della Vigna, by Jacopo Sansovino (early design, c.1534) and Andrea
Palladio (execution of facade. 1562-1570). is an element of Carlo Scarpa's proposal for the entranceway to
IUAV, designed in 1977 and executed in the early 1990s, preceding Tahiti's death. However, it is clear that
this facade has come to assume the memorial function argued for it here, particularly in light of Tahiti's
historical study of SF della Vigna published zsL'Armonia e it conflitti.