Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development

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Manfredo Tafuri

The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1979, 1976, English; originally published 1973 in Italian

Nonfiction, Architecture

ISBN: 9780262200332

From the Publisher. Written from a neo-Marxist point of view by a prominent Italian architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri (1935–94), 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.

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Mohsen Mostafavi

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Tafuri was as adept at architectural and urban history as he was with the architecture of the recent past. This small volume—a manifesto of sorts—demonstrates the power of the ideas of the author as much as it does of the architecture that is the subject of its analysis.

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