Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

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.

Reviews

In Architecture and Utopia... [Tafuri] explores the socio-philosophical impasse in which architects have been floundering since the 18th century. He is not interested in their day-to-day working problems as much as in their relationship to social and philosophical matters... This demanding essay belongs in academic libraries at the graduate and undergraduate levels, where it will offer new insights and subjects of debate to scholars in the fields of architectural criticism and history.

Author Bio

Manfredo Tafuri is the Director of the Department of History of Architecture at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura in Venice.