During the Enlightenment Century, the venetian architect, archaeologist and engraver Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) published in Rome the essay Parere su l`architettura (1765) which was elaborated in a context of debates between the defenders of the Greek’s arts and the defenders of the Romans` arts. However, the themes addressed in the Parere transcend this dispute. It was written in a form of dialogue between two fictional characters that represent opposite tendencies: Protopiro - a “rigorist” - and Didascalo - “a friend of Piranesi” who argues for the inventive freedom of the artist. With this dialectical confrontation, Piranesi explains his views about the architectural discipline pairing these issues: 1. the ornament and its relationship with architecture; 2. the pertinence (or not) in establishing norms for architecture - according to the “rigorists”- opposing the freedom in variation - which Piranesi was adept. Dialectically handle with these themes, Piranesi addressed some contemporary scholars whose theories sought to establish a new aesthetic key for architecture. This article aims to analyse some of the interlocutions that can be understood from the dialectic established in the Parere su l`architettura with the ideas of: Carlo Lodoli (1690-1771) with whom Piranesi had contact in his formative years in Venice; Marc-Antoine Laugier (1713-1769) through Essai sur l`architecture (1753), a publication that circulated in the middle of the French Academy in Rome, with which Piranesi maintained investigative ties; and with Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768) who had settled in Rome in 1756 and started to seek the ideal beauty paradigm from Ancient Greece. By this way, we conclude about the relevance of this essay to the critical history of architecture in a context that the late Baroque was contested and the Neoclassicism would be established. And we can contribute to the international celebrations on the three hundred years of Piranesi´s birth.

In this thesis I revisit Manfredo Tafuri’s 1969 article “Per una critica dell’ideologia architettonica” (Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology) within the political context of Italy in the 1960s. I address the research question: what is the contemporary relevance of the essay read in this context? I suggest that testing the arguments in Tafuri’s 1969 essay against his complete oeuvre and his subsequent career as a critic or a historian obfuscates and misconstrues the context and the essay. I argue that the essay was published in a moment when operaisti protagonists were processing the implications of the operaisti discourse they constructed in relation to the intensification of the social conflict in Italy in the late 1960s and the 1970s. This provides a convincing context for Tafuri’s application of this discourse as a total rejection of the possibility of the existence of an architectural profession outside participation in capitalist development. I conclude that, located with precision within the context of the journal Contropiano, where his essay was first published, “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology” is more likely to agitate intellectuals and architects than it has previously. It is important for the generation who has not yet acquired professional autonomy, such as architectural students or interns, to be reminded of Tafuri’s critique within its context as they assume their social vocation. Thus this is my target readership for this thesis. It is particularly important to revisit Tafuri and his 1969 essay at a time when there is a growing discussion around a social vocation or discourse on sustainability, participatory design, radical architecture and such. The social agenda still makes the art and the profession of architecture resilient to transforming political, economic and social structures. In this light, it is not only necessary but also relevant to revisit the nature of the social vocation of architects as it had been criticized in Tafuri’s 1969 essay within the intellectual debates Italian operaisti project initiated.

Similarly with the progressive turn from magic to sciences, architecture underwent a slow transformation starting with the last decades of the 17 th century. Inevitably, the increase in rationality provoked the loss of the mythical component that still infused the Early Modern architectural theory. Carlo Lodoli's thought plays an important part in this process, as it carries forth the questioning of the authority of ancient knowledge, practice and aesthetics, while emphasizing the ethical function of architecture. This paper is an attempt to see Lodoli's theory through the lens of the coeval scientific achievements, while presenting him as an actor of the architectural crisis at the end of classical modernity.

While the beginning of architectural theory in the Renaissance can undisputably be ascribed to Leon Battista Alberti and its further important steps may be seen in the various editions of Vitruvius’ Ten Books on Architecture from the following decades, the most important and influential early modern books on architectural history, theory, and practice are the "Regola delli cinque ordini di architettura" by Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola (c. 1562, reprinted several hundred times!), Andrea Palladio’s "I Quattro libri dell’architettura" (1570) and the richly annotated edition and translation of Vitruvius by Daniele Barbaro (italian translation 1556 and 1567, latin edition 1567), created with Palladio’s help and still often regarded as one of the best commentaries on the only surviving book on architecture from Antiquity. That Palladio and Barbaro worked together is quite well known, but that their work should be seen as a result of a project in which Vignola also was involved, does not seem to have attracted any wider attention. The paper will demonstrate the hints and evidence(s) leading to the conclusion that these major achievements and ‘foundation stones’ of architectural history and theory have their common root in the project described in Claudio Tolomei’s letter to Agostino de’ Landi (mostly, but erroneously regarded as that of the so-called Accademia della Virtù) and that they were – like Tolomei’s project – strongly oriented on architectural practice and the future of architectural in general.