Review Articles / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 219236 219

Te Project of Autonomy: Politics and Architecture Within and Against Capitalism, Pier
Vittorio Aureli, New York: Te Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American
Architecture at Columbia University and Princeton Architectural Press, 2008
Abstract
Aureli advances a fresh, spirited and combative account of the idea of autonomy, connecting
Italian architectural debates from the 1960s with the politics of class-autonomy that was being
developed and advanced by workerist theorists such as Raniero Panzieri, Mario Tronti and Toni
Negri. Aurelis account focuses on Aldo Rossis architectural ideas (his Tendenza and his book Te
Architecture of the City) and the project of the No-Stop City proposed by the young avant-garde
group Archizoom. Te Project of Autonomy is not simply envisaged as an historical exploration of
the 1960s; primarily, it is conceived as an intervention in current architectural theory (and
cultural politics), drawing on the authors interest in Trontis politics to challenge the
contemporary popularity of a broadly post-Negrian autonomism. Tis review questions aspects
of Aurelis reading of Rossi and Manfredo Tafuri. Furthermore, although Aurelis discussion of
Red Vienna opens up onto vital questions of strategies for social change, which remain pertinent
to contemporary arguments over enclaves or zones of resistance, his antagonism towards Tafuri
prevents his argument from either exploring or advancing the debate which he has initiated.
Keywords
Autonomy, architecture, Pier Vittorio Aureli, Manfredo Tafuri, Aldo Rossi, Archizoom,
Mario Tronti, Contropiano, operaismo, workerism, autonomism, Red Vienna, modernism,
postmodernism, housing, Venice-school, IUAV, enclave-theory.
Introduction: architecture and modernism
Tose with a passing familiarity with the cultural debates that took place in the latter part
of the twentieth century over the politics of modernism will be aware that architecture has
provided one of its key-sites of contestation. At a populist level, built form was often
deemed culpable for the symptoms of social crisis. Te legacies of the Modern Movement
especially the postwar-rle of CIAM-inuenced practices became congured as one of
the negative outcomes of Enlightenment-rationalism. Many railed against Corbusian and
Miesian models, but the larger picture was not primarily dominated by objections to high-
end exempla such as the Villa Savoye or Farnsworth House; above all, the ideological battle
was motivated by, and fought over, the corpus of social housing. Te contrast or, to be
more precise, the perceived slippage between the initial visions and the progeny of cheap
developments that followed provided a powerful image for a wider crisis in social condence;
tangible manifestations, constructed in brick, concrete and reinforced steel, of a dialectic
of enlightenment or the crisis of the welfare-state. Te St Louis estate of Pruitt Igoe,
dynamited in 1972, became famous when the architectural historian Charles Jencks made
the exact time of its destruction symbolise the transition to postmodernity. You can witness
the explosion if not necessarily experience the metaphysical claims on YouTube. (Te
blasting of postwar high-rises continues to serve its rhetorical work. In the opening prelude
to season three of Te Wire, the young drug-dealers watch another Pruitt Igoe moment,
resonant with its own allegories: a world after the Twin Towers another high-modernist
architectural icon the incursion of urban redevelopment, and the emergence of a
monopoly-consortium/co-operative business-model for narcotics-distribution.) Te question
Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/156920610X550677
220 Review Articles / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 219236
of urban development has been an important topic for writers of the Left such as Mike
Davis and David Harvey exploring how the city-environment provided a visible
connection between capital-expansion, expropriation, and modern enclosure. Fredric
Jamesons writing has put more emphasis on exploring how architectural form itself can be
seen as expressing changes in capital. In his consideration of the culture of late capitalism,
his analysis of postmodernism addresses, not only the philosophical confrontation between
Jean-Franois Lyotards Te Postmodern Condition and Jrgen Habermass riposte in his
Adorno-Prize lecture, but also prominently features accounts of architecture: from Tom
Wolfes populist polemic against the Modern Movement in From Bauhaus to Our House,
via the articulation of a distinctive postmodern architecture by Jencks (ever a Jameson-
favourite in all things architectural) and the pop-vernacular of Robert Venturi and Denise
Scott Brown, through to and, arguably, above all the writings of Manfredo Tafuri.
1

Extending to his writing on the architecture of nance-capital, Jameson has continued to
wonder how form might be mapped as a social question.
2
Aureli refuses
Te politics of form is also of central concern to Pier Vittorio Aurelis Te Project of
Autonomy. However, despite its polemical and interventionist quality, Aurelis study is not
located at the level of architectures deployment within a wider politics of culture. He is not
inclined, for example, to sublimate debates on form into homological diagnoses of the state
or stages of capitalism. Te question of capitalism is to the fore, but, instead, he approaches
the question of form in terms of the specialist-discussions of architectural theory and
historiography. A professor at the Berlage Institute, Rotterdam, and co-founder of the
architectural collective DOGMA (with Martino Tattara), Aureli is a rising star on the
international circuit of critical-architectural and urban theory. He has set out his vision for
architecture through a reinterpretation of Ad Reinhardts famous denials.
3
Architecture
Refuses tells us what Alberti, Boulle, Durand and Mies were against, before enlightening
us on Aurelis negations for today:
. . . no avant-garde, no neo-avant-garde, no new-neo-avant-garde, no anti-avant-
garde, no think-tanks, no biennale-activism, no fake-bottom-up-we-work-for-
the-people, no architects-as-social-entrepreneur, no architect-as-social-opinionist,
1. Jamesons discussion of the Bonaventure Hotel is in Jameson 1984a, and Jameson 1991.
Jameson has returned to architecture, especially to Tafuris arguments, on a number of occasions:
Jameson 1985 (also Jameson 1988); Jameson 1984b (republished in Jameson 1991 and Jameson
1998b); Jameson 1994 (republished Jameson 1998b); Jameson 1998a (republished in Jameson
1998b). Most recently, Jameson has armed the inuence of Tafuris account of how temporality
itself is invested with capital, colonising not only the present and the past, but also the future
(Jameson 2007, p. 228).
2. Jameson 1998a (and Jameson 1998b), Jameson 1998d. Interestingly, Jamesons focus has
sidestepped the debates on mass-housing, responding, instead, to types such as the hotel, the
oce and business-accommodation.
3. Ad Reinhardts Abstract Art Refuses originally appeared in the 1952 catalogue to the
exhibition Contemporary American Painting. See Reinhardt 1991, pp. 501.
Review Articles / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 219236 221
no-architect-as-cultural-opinionist, no architects-as-biennale-monkeys, . . . no
utopia, . . . no fake-interactivity, . . . no confusing architecture with everything that
is not architecture; no confusing life with everything that is not LIFE.
4
Tat he presented this as part of Hans Ulrich Obrists Manifesto-Marathon at the
Serpentine Gallery in 2008, along with the likes of Nicolas Bourriaud, does rather suggest
that, despite himself, Aureli is well on his way to occupying the role of a biennale-monkey.
5

Not that this should be reason to dismiss him. On the contrary, one cannot but warm to
his verve and uncompromising positions, his commitment to exposing the social and
cultural power architecture possesses, and his combination of art-radicalism with hard-line
political critique of all that is (merely) radical.
6
Aureli combines this left avant-gardist
approach (the denial of avant-gardism being one of its most established gambits) with his
commitment to form. Te concept of the formal and the concept of the political, he has
argued, constitute architectures double theoretical ground zero, but instead of seeing these
as in opposition, which he takes as banal, Aureli aspires to explore the deep relationship
between formal techniques and political aspirations in architecture.
7
Tese same qualities
and aspirations are well on display in Te Politics of Autonomy, which is perhaps best
understood as an extended elaboration of the themes expressed in the manifesto and as a
rationale for his approach to architectural practice.
In Te Project of Autonomy, Aureli wants to dispel the centrality of a number of myths
prevalent within architectural history. Firstly, he wishes to challenge the identication of
the Scuola di Venezia of architectural theory with Manfredo Tafuri (pp. 1314).
8
(An
irritation with Tafuri simmers throughout the course of the book.) Tat Tafuri arrived at
Venices Instituto Universitario di Architettura in 1968, and that a distinctive approach had
gestated earlier under Giuseppe Samon and the teaching of Carlo Aymonino, with Aldo
Rossi as assistant from 1963 to 1965 is widely acknowledged, if little studied. Secondly,
Aureli argues against the delineation of postwar-architectural history into the two tracks of
4. DOGMA 2008.
5. Te Manifesto Marathon was held over two days (1819 October) during the nal week
of the 2008 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion (designed by Frank Gehry). Previous years had seen a
24-Hour Interview Marathon with the architect Rem Koolhaas in 2006 and 2007s Experiment
Marathon with the artist Olafur Eliasson. Te 2008 event was intended to provide a platform for
new and established practitioners from art, design, literature, music, science, history, and
architecture all of whom had returned to the idea of the manifesto. Among the many
participants were: Rem Koolhaas, Nicolas Bourriaud, Vivienne Westwood, Yoko Ono, Agns
Varda, Jonas Mekas, Raqs Media Collective, Stewart Home, Brian Eno, Marina Abramovi,
Charles Jencks, and Eric Hobsbawm. Te event claimed to respond to the gallerys location in
Londons Hyde Park and its proximity to Speakers Corner, which has been used as a platform
by Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, George Orwell and William Morris, among many others. Unlike
its model, however, a two-day ticket to hear the Serpentines manifestos cost 35, and public
access to the pavilion was curtailed. See Serpentine Gallery 2008.
6. Aureli 2007. Referring to the groups of autonomia, the criticism of the word radical,
derived from Mario Tronti, runs as follows: the adjective radical before the word politics meant
that the politics could no longer stand alone (Aureli 2008, p. 81).
7. Aureli 2007.
8. Aureli distinguishes the later Venice-school from the earlier Venice-group.
222 Review Articles / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 219236
autonomous and radical architecture associated respectively with Rossis Tendenza
(neorationalism) and the avant-garde architectural groups (such as Superstudio and
Archizoom) (p. 21). More especially, he detects problems arising from the international
dissemination of left-Italian theory of the time. Te art-critic Germano Celant coined
radical architecture to describe the work of Archizoom and Superstudio, and the term was
taken up in the 1972 exhibition Italy: Te New Domestic Landscape, curated by Emilio
Ambasz for New Yorks Museum of Modern Art. (Te latters associated publication
included an essay by Tafuri.) Te following year, Rossi himself curated the fteenth Triennial
in Milan, where his notion of autonomous architecture was widened to embrace a range
of practices that lacked the political context from which his own emphasis on autonomy
had drawn its force (p. 81). However, the substantial damage was done, Aureli believes, by
the translation of the politics and poetics of autonomy into postmodernism and by the
postmodern appropriation of radicalism (p. 83).
Political autonomy: operaismo versus autonomia
Aurelis account of how autonomous architecture and radical architecture became
branded as international design-movements in the early 1970s, and how their initial
projects declined into an indeterminate-postmodern soup, is animated by his understanding
of the political conjuncture. Te Politics of Autonomy is set rmly against the politics of
autonomia, by which Aureli has in mind both the turn within the Italian extra-parliamentary
Left from the early 1970s to the areas of autonomy and the organisational manifestations
as Autonomia Operaia, on the one hand, and, on the other, the more generic and
internationalised dissemination of autonomism of the recent period (associated, for
example, with the writings on multitude and Empire by Antonio Negri and Michael
Hardt, Paolo Virno, and others). Aureli is certainly committed to a politics of autonomy,
but he is also interested in how this was developed within the earlier framework of operaismo
during the 60s.
9
In particular, he addresses the ramications of emerging workerist ideas for
9. Operaismo (Italian workerism) grew as left outshoots and, in some cases, rejection of
the PCI and PSI, specically opposing their compliance with the state and implicit attachment
to capitalist ideology (which, in the view of the operaisti, treated labour as a passive and reactive
component in the labour-capital relation). Tey advocated a more trenchant class-opposition,
which placed labour as the central dynamic for social change to which capital, in turn, reacts.
Te autonomy, then, was the autonomy of labours class-interests with respect to capital.
Successfully translating this approach into shop-oor action against speed-ups and the like, and
into separating wage-increases from productivity-deals, the workerist groupings gained a
signicant presence in the chemical industries of the Veneto and Turin motor- and engineering
works. While initially crystallising around political journals like Quaderni Rossi and Classe
Operaia, workerism expressed itself as a political organisation with Potere Operaio and found
important echoes in other formations, like Lotta Continua and Il manifesto. Panzieris argument
for the non-neutrality of technology (and the forces of production) was also signicant. Te
autonomist groups and networks of the 70s, towards which Negri (and other important gures
such as Franco Piperno and Franco Beradi) gravitated generally took a more anti-party and anti-
centralist direction, advocating diuse, decentralised social movements. Autonomia was a
complex formation, embracing extra-parliamentary communists (including many former
operaisti) through to more anarchist or libertarian outlooks. Tey were prominent in Bologna,
Review Articles / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 219236 223
the architectural debates of the time (pp. 811). His motivation becomes clearer towards
the close of the book. As a practising architect with a perspective on the international
reception of Italian architectural theory, Aureli has become increasingly aware of and
frustrated by the gaps between the history that interests him and its treatment in English-
speaking countries (p. 82). His book, then, is largely conceived as an attempt to correct the
misunderstandings of the Italian debates on autonomy and to confront the one-sided
interest in autonomia. Te latter, especially as mediated via Negri and Hardt, is rejected by
Aureli as a depoliticised and, at worst, as an anti-communist post-politics, which, he
believes, has become overly exalted and romanticised by anglophone cultural radicals (pp.
811, 83). Te authors stated aim for his study is modestly posed as an initial contribution
to a historical reconstruction of the intense season of political and poetical imagination that
unfolded in Italy over the course of the 1960s (p. 21). Aurelis central endeavour, however,
is not so much to recover and reconstruct a particular period, but rather to explore what he
sees as one of the most rigorous eorts ever attempted to theorize a grand narrative of the
political, challenging the very premises of capitalism (as well as its contemporary avatar,
Empire) (p. 83). He rails against academic lip-service to activism and practice, and
emphasises instead and this may seem surprising at rst sight Teory (capital T used
intentionally) as a means to establish long-term responsibilities and solid categories to
challenge the notion of development as evolutionary progress (p. 83). If the call to anti-
academic Teory might seem a little curious (given the publication-context for the book),
it is certainly much easier to grasp Te Project of Autonomy as an intervention in discussions
of how a new political subject might be materially constructed from within, but ideologically
against, the very constraints of our civilization a civilization that, in spite of its ongoing
transformations, remains a civilization of labor (p. 83). Tis theme of within and
against brought to fore in the books subtitle is central to Aurelis argument.
Aurelis account centres on the claims to class-autonomy formulated in Quaderni rossi in
the early 1960s as part of an increasingly organised political response to neocapitalism
(understood as a stage of capitalism shaped by Keynesian policies in the US in the 30s
and in Italy in the 60s that, compared to its earlier forms, was seen as more organised and
planned, more oligarchic and monopolistic, whilst simultaneously being more diuse in its
modalities of power). Tree short sections addressing the principle of autonomy
Autonomy and History, Autonomy and the Left, Autonomy and the Intellectuals serve
as an extended introduction to autonomy as a form of communist political positioning,
followed by three further chapters devoted to Raniero Panzieris arguments on the non-
neutrality of technological innovation, Mario Trontis account of the social factory, and,
thirdly, the autonomy of the political and the project of negative thought (Tronti and
Massimo Cacciari). For readers with an overview of operaismo, Aurelis book might seem to
belabour a history that has become more widely known, although, admittedly, this situation
has changed only in recent years and thus, perhaps, over the course of bringing Aurelis
Milan, Rome, and Padua. Some autonomists turned to armed struggle, the states reaction to
which eectively brought to a close Italys decade-and-a-half of radical struggle, with mass-arrests
and the political exile of a large number of activists from across the extra-parliamentary Left.
For a comprehensive account of Italian workerism and autonomism in the 60s and 70s, see
Wright 2002.
224 Review Articles / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 219236
study to press.
10
But it is unfortunate, nevertheless, that we are over half-way through the
volume before the author commences his main discussion of architectural theory, reaching
the material where his substantive contribution to this history might best be made. Te
weighting of his attention more to an elaboration of the core-concepts of workerism,
while the architectural discussion speaks from inside the disciplinary discourse is indicative
of the books intended readership of architectural students, underlined by the fact of its
inclusion as of a specialist academic series.
Aureli believes workerism to have been overlooked. It is not that the ideas of operaismo
are ignored in comparison to autonomia quite the contrary, they are taken as foundational
but they are usually presented as part of a trajectory that nds its telos in a position congruent
with Negri or, if not that, then with perspectives that counter Negri from within
autonomism. Te canonical texts of workerist theorists are almost always deployed to
initiate autonomist lineages. Marching forth directly, the histories of autonomism proceed
via the big names: Panzieri, Tronti, Negri . . . Tat Panzieri soon balked at the directions
being taken by Tronti, or that Tronti stepped back from Negris a few years later, are certainly
facts to be noted, but they are not explored for the complexity of their political implications
or the other directions suggested. Te evolutionary tree of the politics of autonomy is
covered with truncated sideshoots, lopped o just as they depart from the main trunk.
What makes Aurelis history of workerism especially intriguing to encounter besides his
attention to architecture is his political sympathy for one of these cropped branches.
Although much of the material he discusses is from the early to mid 60s, he does so from
the perspective of the position adopted by Tronti and his allies later in the decade.
11
Aureli
follows Tronti (1967), Cacciari (1968), post-Negri Contropiano, and the political decision
to operate through the culture of the Italian Communist Party. Autonomy, for Aureli, is
understood as a subjectivisation of proletarian power; it is part of a culture of conict (a
Trontian strategy of refusal) and a technique to be deployed in labours negotiations with
capital (pp. 19, 379). Autonomy involves making demands for institutional control,
which for Aureli includes the struggle for hegemony within the organisations of the Left.
Understood, above all, as within and against capitalism, the question of autonomy is also
taken as a struggle that would be within and against the party (or, as he puts it, political
action within the institution, and eventually against it as the party made compromises . . .)
(p. 45).
Autonomy as architecture: Aureli on Aldo Rossi and Archizoom
Addressing the politics of autonomy as politics would arguably present enough diculties
one only has to imagine the range of political assessments, past and present, that might be
made from within operaismo, from dierent moments of operaismo, from autonomia or
from the PCI, let alone by left perspectives external to all of these. Further problems still
10. Most signicant here has probably been Wright 2002. In addition, there has been a urry
of publications and essays, many posted online, spurred by the anniversary of Sessantotto.
11. Aurelis criticism of radical paraphrases Tronti. Aureli notes: In my view, it is precisely
the argument of the autonomy of the political from economic determination as presented by
Tronti in 1972 [in Lautonomia del politico] that is the core and essence of Operaism, Aureli
2008, p. 84, n. 8.
Review Articles / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 219236 225
arise in respect of the politics of autonomy as architecture. Autonomous architecture, in
Aurelis approach, is not to be confused with the type of aesthetic autonomy associated with
the traditions of formalism (the English-speaking version traced from Clive Bell and Roger
Fry to Clement Greenberg) or late-nineteenth-century aestheticism (analysed by Peter
Brger in his inuential Teory of the Avant-Garde as the apogee of the bourgeois art-
institution that was negated by the historical avant-gardes in an eort to reintegrate poiesis
into life-praxis). In contrast with the approaches to autonomy rooted in a (narrow) reading
of Kants Critique of Judgement, there is little that is disinterested about the autonomy at
stake for Aurelis subjects, which concerns, as he reminds us, autonomy for, not autonomy
from (p. 12). To pursue the discussion of autonomy as architectural practice, Aurelis focus
is on the work of Aldo Rossi and Archizoom, each an example from either side of the
double lineage noted above (autonomous and radical architecture, and broadly coextensive
with the more formal and avant-garde heritages respectively). He sees both as strongly
inuenced by workerisms emphasis on the political subjects autonomy. Aureli marshals a
number of comparisons: both Andrea Branzi of Archizoom (who was also a contributor to
the Manifesto Marathon) and Rossi rejected the reformist perspective of Italys prominent
architectural theorists in the postwar-period Bruno Zevi, Ernesto Rogers, Giulio Carlo
Argan who had sought to recover the critical ambitions of the Modern Movement. Both
Archizoom and Rossi sought to resist the ideologies of the bourgeois city, and considered
the category of architecture, not through the traditional history of masterpieces, but as a
practice to be situated within wider urban processes. However, as Aureli shows, Rossi and
Branzi also recognised that the project of left architects could not simply mirror the
formative paths of the autonomous political subject; while the latter could become
autonomous, architecture an expression of the dominant class could not.
12
From this
perspective, the eorts of left reformers to construct a working-class metropolis were seen
as nave. Responding to comments by Engels in Te Housing Question, some architects
argued that political autonomy could be pursued, not by attempting to build an alternative
urban environment, but only by developing, rstly, their critique, and then their theory, of
the city (p. 70).
13
Autonomy, then, was rearmed as pertaining at the level of the subjects
political recognition with the break from ideological mystication, and with the
development of a working-class critique.
Aureli locates Archizoom in this line of thought, noting that the group had been educated
at the same Florentine architectural school as Claudio Greppi, an active associate of Tronti
and contributor to Quaderni rossi, who had circulated Engelss text among his fellow
students. Greppi had also presented a diploma project in 19645 that encapsulated, Aureli
argues, the idea of the social factory (and what would become known as negative thought).
By extending the factory-model to the metropolitan scale and abandoning humanist
aspirations, this project, it is claimed, proposed that the reduction of the city to its
12. Rossi cited in Aureli 2008, p. 68.
13. In Te Formal and the Political, Aureli himself advocates a closely related position: even
if there is no political architecture, there is certainly a particular way of making, and reading,
architectural form (Aureli 2007). Tafuri too argued that there was no class-architecture, only a
class-critique of architecture echoing also Voloinov on class-language, Pashukanis on class-
law, and Lenin and Trotskys criticisms of Proletkult. See also the comments on Trotskys class
point of view in Ciucci, Dal Co, Manieri-Elia and Tafuri 1979, p. xi.
226 Review Articles / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 219236
infrastructure would make visible capitalisms urban conditions.
14
With No-Stop City
(196870) a project that was presented on the pages of design-magazines Archizoom
developed the ideas in Greppis scheme and presented the metropolis through the eyes of
cynical realism, again bringing to the fore the forces of capital to reveal the city as a
phenomenon without qualities; through wild realities, they sought to exacerbate those
forces to breaking point. Teir homogenous habitat was presented as an extension of
Ludwig Hilberseimers Vertical City (1924), as repetitive units organised around
infrastructural functions, reduced to stripped-down forms and the most generic architectural
signs (aspiring to a-guration), in which [t]he city no longer represents the system but
becomes the system itself, programmed and isotropic.
15
Te supermarket was treated as the
architectural archetype of neocapitalism, and Branzi described Archizoom as a combination
of Mario Tronti and Andy Warhol: opposite worlds but not so remote . . . both obeyed the
materialist logic of more money and less work.
16
Rossi, too, discussed Te Housing Question.
17
Rejecting both the regressive forms
associated with the rural nostalgias of the garden-city and the technophilic design that was
then popular, Rossi also advocated a confrontation with, rather than retreat from, the
nature of the modern capitalist city. Te method through which he sought to amplify the
citys expressions of class-power, however, diered from Archizooms. Rossis emphasis was
on making formal proposals that would serve to clarify the question of political decision
and which, despite drawing on similar intellectual resources, avoided the more virulent
strains of avant-gardist anti-humanism and the political ambivalences attendant upon left
nihilism. Aurelis chapter on Aldo Rossi provides an intimate analysis of the architects
philosophy, especially as laid out in his 1966 treatise Te Architecture of the City. Constructed
from a wide range of sources, Rossi evolved a distinctive and idiosyncratic approach,
inuenced by (to name but a small sample) Maurice Halbwachs work on collective memory
and urban expropriation; Hans Bernoullis on the relation of architecture to land-ownership;
Steen Eiler Rasmussens study of London; theories of collective psychology; the writings of
Marcel Mauss, Kevin Lynch, Karl Kernyi, and Engels. Tis dense amalgam of ideas
contrasts with the (deceptive) simplicity, or hieratic poetics, typical of Rossis designs.
Characterised by the use of elemental forms (Rossi explicitly acknowledges the buildings
found in the backgrounds of de Chirico paintings), his ossuary at the Cemetery of San
Cataldo in Modena (1971) might be seen as exemplary. Nevertheless, the autonomous
character of his architecture does not refer per se to the formal starkness of his designs.
18

Rossis work may look the way many would expect autonomous architecture to appear
pared-down, geometric but it should not be understood ideally or Platonically, a mistake
14. Aureli points us to Trontis appropriation of Paul Klees demand to make visible or
sichtbar machen (Aureli 2008, p. 55).
15. Archizoom cited in Aureli 2008 in the caption to Figure 38 (a diagrammatic section of
No-Stop City which appeared in Domus in 1971).
16. Andrea Branzi cited in Aureli 2008 in the caption to Figure 39 (a drawing of a residential
area both as layout of a parking lot and as supermarket-aisles).
17. Rossi 1982, pp. 155, 161.
18. Tis is a view that would make the common, but mistaken, assumption that visual
austerity signals the rejection of heteronomy and representation, an assumption in which Rossi
and Archizoom both appear to partake.
Review Articles / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 219236 227
that is easily exacerbated by common perceptions of the legacy of rationalism within which
Rossi located his work. He aspired, however, to a more complex rationalism.
19
Te work
of Etienne-Louis Boulle or Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, Rossi believed, provided the
quintessential bourgeois-architectural language from out of which the new revolutionary
class would construct its own tradition, and he admired the work of the twentieth-century
successors to this approach (especially the socialists Adolf Behne, Ludwig Hilbersheimer
and Hans Schmidt). Rationalism did not mean returning to classical types, Rossi argued,
because each period reproposed its sources. His buildings acquire their form, not through
an external imposition of abstract models, but by way of mediating the arch with the
architects responses to particular material, environmental and historical conditions
(necessities). For Rossi, rational design meant that the broadest adaptability to a
multiplicity of functions corresponds to an extreme precision of form.
20
Opposed to the
model of unilinear causation suggested by the mantra form follows function, Rossi argued
that architectural form should be understood as a complexly-situated and rigorous response
to the city.
21
Topography, typology, and history, he explained, come to be measures of the
mutations of reality, together dening a system of architecture wherein gratuitous invention
is impossible.
22
Rossi, then, aimed to deploy rationalism, not so much in terms of the
claims that it oered generic applicability (based on an appeal to abstract qualities), but,
rather, as a civic form, which provided a frame against which the events of social life could
be played out and which, through its precise mutations of reality, helped to enunciate
specic social-political proposals.
What makes Rossis work especially fascinating is the way that the array of ideas
underpinning his architectural philosophy become congured by the context of Italian
politics in the 1960s. Tis is what Aurelis book attempts to draw out. Rossi had joined the
PCI in 1956 (the ironies of which are not lost on Aureli), but came to share the disillusion
with progress and urban development that shaped the New Left in general. Aureli argues
that, like Panzieri, Rossi developed a critique of technocratic categories; common at the
time within the elds of architecture and planning were city-territory, network, and
mobility (pp. 5865). (Rossi also advocated shifting from an economic analysis of the city
to a consideration of its rle in political choices.)
23
To the top-down scientic planning
and the then-current aesthetic ideology of open form, Rossi countered what could be
described as an architectural philosophy of site-specic determinate negation. Rigorously
derived and particular articulations closed and dened forms founded upon the locus,
Rossi thought, would best enable new forms to emerge. In similar vein, countering the
19. Preface to the second Italian edition (1969), Rossi 1982, p. 166.
20. Comment on the German edition (1973), Rossi 1982, p. 179. (He was citing Adolf
Behne: the broadest adaptability to the greatest number of necessities.)
21. Rossi objected to a narrow understanding of functionalism, not because he objected to
function he challenged those who had misread his critique but because he thought it just one
of the factors at work.
22. Comment on the German edition (1973), Rossi 1982, p. 179. Cf. Te urban
conguration is a system where questions of topography and land ownership, of regulations,
class struggles, and the idea of architecture tend slowly toward a single, precise construction, and
every general theory must always be measured against this (Preface to the second Italian edition
(1969), Rossi 1982, p. 167).
23. Rossi 1982, p. 141.
228 Review Articles / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 219236
schematic models of urban theory advanced by Homer Hoyt and Robert E. Park, he praised
detailed studies of urban artefacts [faite urbaine or fatto urbano], which sought to
understand the relationships between a particular city and the singularity of its architecture
(the type of object that is Florence, as he would put it).
24
Problems with Aurelis account
Encountered some half a century later, the details of Rossis theoretical positioning are not
easy to grasp, so much do they rest on engaging or rejecting the commonplace-technics of
the day.
25
Ultimately, Aureli insists, it is not the content of Rossis thought which is of
primary interest, but, rather, the modality of his method. Tis creates some interesting
tensions for the books argument, since it is here that Aureli who draws from Rossi a
commitment to a politicised praxis of specicity must himself let go of the specic. Aureli
is correct to return us to the political frame of Italy in the 60s for the category of autonomy,
but, in doing so, he has to downplay some other aspects of Rossis thought. As early as
1973, Rossi complained that his account had been taken up one-sidedly, with readers
isolating and exaggerating dierent aspects of his argument not least his account of the
autonomy of forms. Tese interpretations, Rossi continued, are erroneous because they
obscure the complex nature of architecture.
26
Aureli certainly helps us to recognise the
additional valences of autonomy at play, which pose a crucial challenge to the depoliticised
and formalistic versions that came to prevail in architectural theory. Nevertheless, his
commitment to the politics of autonomy does lead him into a trap that, ironically, parallels
the one against which Rossi had warned: isolating the category (just as did architectures
advocates of autonomy) and attening the Rossian complexity. We even lose sight of the
extent to which Rossis autonomy itself appealed to, and was formed by, an intellectual
culture of semiotic logics or language-games. Rossis inuential American fans, such as
Peter Eisenman, might have impoverished Rossis notion of autonomy, as Aureli suggests,
but their reading was not altogether wrong.
27
Aureli picks up on features that Rossis approach shares with workerism, but, except
insofar as they partake in the mutations within Marxist cultural thought in the mid-
twentieth century, quite how directly they relate remains unclear. By all accounts,
disenchantment with the achievements of reform especially among architects and
architectural students schooled in the experiences of Italys numerous postwar housing
24. Rossi 1982, p. 21. Urban artefact is an imprecise translation, which attempts to capture
not just a physical thing in the city, but all of its history, geography, structure, and connection to
the general life of the city (editorial note in Rossi 1982, p. 22).
25. We might note in passing how some of these terms mobility, network, open form
have since been re-functioned for other language-domains.
26. Comment on the German edition (1973), Rossi 1982, p. 179.
27. Eisenmanian as it is with its opening epigraph from Jacques Derridas Writing and
Dierence, Eisenmans introduction to the English translation of Rossis book is remarkably
subtle and perceptive. Peter Eisenman, Te Houses of Memory: Te Texts of Analogy, in Rossi
1982, pp. 211.
Review Articles / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 219236 229
plans became widespread in the early 60s.
28
Rossi was certainly a left intellectual who saw
himself as part of a wider communist culture, repeatedly insisting, as Aureli notes, on the
importance of the collectivity and his Tendenza deriving from Gramscis term to describe
how a cultural movement might express class-hegemony (p. 86, n. 78). His writing can also
be interpreted as advancing arguments for relative autonomy and for a dialectic of making
and made, which situates his thinking within a more classical-Marxist vein than Aureli
does. It is not that Aureli is incorrect to detect in Rossi an understanding of space as the
dialectical conict between constituent and constituted forces, but his formulation does
swing Rossi somewhat too neatly into one particular frame (p. 64)
29
and there is enough
in Te Architecture of the City to lead one to doubt this. Rossis approach was coded as a
scientic claim, a feature that Aureli must avoid. Furthermore, it typically advocates
shifting from categorical oppositions to an emphasis on the relationship between, the
loosely Hegelian nature of which would be a red rag to much workerist theory, all too
inclined to read dialectical relations and Aufhebungen in all contexts as synonyms for
political compromise and the attempt to abolish conict. Rossi does not propose an
architectural equivalent of the Trontian we do without mediation.
30
Ultimately, however, the real disappointment of Aurelis book is that it fails to do justice
to the very advantages that should have been brought to the subject by the authors
distinctive outlook. It fails to do justice, both in terms of its analysis of history and of the
present, and in terms of both its approach to questions of architectural historiography and
to debates relevant to the emancipatory project. Aureli speaks from a political perspective
that potentially oers important insights into a key-point in the history of modern
architectural theory. Te decision by a number of prominent operaisti to enter the PCI, and
the split in Contropiano, is central, not only to the political history of workerism/
autonomism, but also to the history of the Venice-school. Te journal was a key-forum for
the publication of architectural writings by Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co, and for
Cacciaris essays on current politics and negative thought that would come to inform the
critical debates on architecture.
31
Te history of IUAV is closely entwined with the history
28. See Robert Lumleys account (Lumley 1990). Interestingly, despite having a chapter
entitled Te Revolt in the Schools of Architecture, Vittorio Gregottis book on the contemporary
architecture of the time scarcely addresses the history (Gregotti 1968).
29. In addition, the political ambivalences in both Rossi and Archizoom are alluded to by
Aureli on a couple of occasions, but not developed.
30. Tronti 1971; English translation in Tronti 1973, p. 121.
31. Contropiano: materiali marxisti, published quarterly from 1968 to 1971 by La Nuova
Italia, Firenze, in which was published Tafuris essays Per una critica dellideologia architettonica
(Tafuri 1969, the basis of his book Architecture and Utopia, Tafuri 1979); Lavoro intelletuale e
sviluppo capitalistico (Tafuri 1970); Austromarxismo e citt: Das rote Wein (Tafuri 1971b);
Socialdemocrazia e citt nella Repubblica di Weimar (Tafuri 1971a); Socialdemocrazia e citt
nella Repubblica di Weimar (book review) (Tafuri 1971c). Cacciaris early essays were also
published in this journal, including Dialettica e tradizione (Cacciari 1968a) Sviluppo
capitalistico e ciclo delle lotte. La Montecatini-Edison di Porto Marghera (Cacciari 1968b);
Teoria e organizzazione in Francia, dopo il maggio (Cacciari and Longobardi 1969); Sulla
genesi del pensiero negativo (Cacciari 1969); Utopia e socialismo (Cacciari 1970b); see also
Vita Cartesii est simplicissima (Cacciari 1970a). Cacciaris essay on negative thought became
the basis for his inuential book, Architecture and Nihilism: On the Philosophy of Modern
230 Review Articles / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 219236
of workerist politics (the cross-fertilisation of student- and worker-politics, the actions
against the Venice Biennale and Mostra, and support by students and sta for the struggles,
occupations and blockades in Porto Marghera and Mestre).
32
Once Negri left Contropiano
his departure prompted by disagreements over a submission by Tronti
33
it represented a
broadly Trontian axis. As head of architectural history at IUAV, Tafuri brought together
prominent gures associated with this same position; Rita di Leo and Alberto Asor Rosa
contributed to a symposium in 1970 devoted to analysing the decisions by Central-
European architects and designers to participate in the USSRs Five-Year Plans.
34
Cacciari
was appointed to teach philosophy at IUAV. Inuential as the essays of this phase (or their
subsequent book-length elaborations) became for architectural history, and, despite a
general recognition of their explicit political character, they nevertheless occupy a site of
political disappearance, being subsumed under the general labels Marxist or communist.
Even given Aurelis impatience with the mythologisation of the post-68 Venice-school, the
absence of any discussion of this episode and the associated period is remarkable: the
moment is the apogee of the within and against the PCI that Aureli himself advocates, and
it is an instalment in which architectural theory was implicated.
For those readers unaware of the history of architectural theory, it cannot be underlined
enough just how signicant is the output of the Venice-school. Te arguments associated
with these writers transformed the very concept of architectural history, pioneering critical
reections on materialist history and its methodologies.
35
Given the dire state of its own
literature, the anglophone world was rightly impressed. It should come as no surprise that
IUAV-writers became staples of the pages of the New York innovative architectural journal
Oppositions.
36
Developing an architectural theory inuenced by European critical theory
Architecture (Cacciari 1993). See also Francesco Dal Co, Note per la critica dellideologia della
architettura moderna: da Weimar a Dessau (Dal Co 1968a), Riscoperta del marxismo e
problematica di classe nel movimento studentesco europeo. Rudi Dutschke (Dal Co 1968b);
Architettura e piano in Unione Sovietica: stalinismo e destino dellavanguardia (Dal Co
1968c); Citt senza piani, piani senza citt: note a margine della pianicazione urbana negli
Stati Uniti (Dal Co 1970). Note also Rita di Leo, I bolscevichi e Il Capitale (di Leo 1969);
Alberto Asor Rosa, Rivoluzione e letteratura (Rosa 1968b) and Il giovane Lukcs, teorico
dellarte borghese (Rosa 1968a).
32. See, for example, Chinello 1998. Chinello traces the conections back to Venices antifascist
demonstrations of 1960 and to the industrial struggle of Sirma in Marghera in the Spring of
1965; both were characterised by joint actions and inter-communication between a new
generation of workers and architectural students which were to be features of the late 60s. Unrest
in architectural colleges around the country had erupted in 1964, not only in reaction to the
stiing traditions and hierarchies of professional training and education, but also to the growing
sense of disappointment in the limited achievements of postwar urban planning. See Lumley
1990.
33. Te dispute was over Trontis article Estremismo e riformismo (Tronti 1968), which
appeared in the rst edition of Contropiano.
34. Te symposium resulted in a volume of essays (Tafuri (ed.) 1971).
35. I have in mind here, not only the monographs by Tafuri himself, but also the collaborative
ventures, such as, Ciucci, Dal Co, Manieri-Elia and Tafuri 1979; Tafuri (ed.) 1971; Dal Co and
Tafuri 1980.
36. Oppositions was founded in 1973 by Peter Eisenman, Mario Gandelsonas and Kenneth
Frampton, folding in 1984.
Review Articles / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 219236 231
(ranging from structuralism to the Frankfurt-school), Oppositions was both the primary
conduit for Italian architectural theory into American debates and a major player in the
depoliticisation, postmodernisation, and in the hypostatisation of autonomy that Aureli
targets. However, despite being at the sharp end of his polemic, at no point does he address
this transition using anything but the most general of allusions. Indeed, the appearance of
Aurelis volume itself represents an interesting footnote to this history. Te publication is
part of the FORuM project to study the relationship of architectural form to politics and
urban life and backed by Joan Ockman. Long associated with the intersection of Italian
and American architectural theory, Ockman was co-translator of Rossis Te Architecture of
the City (published as part of an Oppositions-imprint in 1982), and served as associate editor
of and editorial consultant to the journal.
37
As a key-member of the Revisions-group, she
was part of an attempt in the early 1980s to reassert a more political approach to the study
of architecture, specically deploying Italian theory to counter both the dominant formalism
of American writing and the emerging conservatism of postmodern historicism.
38
Te
Politics of Autonomy, then, can be seen as returning to this terrain: the question of trans-
national transmission of cultural politics and the eorts to revive some of the original
political dynamics in the face of their theoretical appropriation. Although he never
elaborates, Aurelis correctives to the English-speaking reception of Italian architectural
theory are located at the heart of an especially inuential institutional formation.
Te question of Red Vienna
It is understandable that Aureli wishes to sidestep the discorso tafuriano or burgeoning
academic industry of Tafuriana; it is easy to imagine that he is sick of the same obsessions
coming up in graduate-seminars (and knowing that he is an alumnus of IUAV underscores
the weight from under which he is trying to escape). But he allows his irritation to obstruct
the very project he sets himself.
39
To understand this, we must rst return to the discussion
of Rossi. Locus which, like urban artefact, is one of Rossis key-concepts conceives of
place as a political category and as an agglomeration of collective memories; locus should be
grasped as a geographical singularity, but, as Aureli describes it, where singularity is not
merely empirical but a universal condition. Rossis own discussion of the relation of singular
and universal uses the examples of the idea of the Renaissance-piazza and the (world-
wide) space of Catholicism;
40
Aureli, however, allies locus with Trontis notion of the state
37. See also her important essay on the American reception of the Venice-school: Ockman
1995.
38. Te Revisions study-group was convened between 1981 and 1988, and based, as was
Oppositions, at the Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies in New York. In addition to
responding to the dual conservatism of formalism and postmodernism, the group can also be
seen as responding to the way Oppositionss project had lost steam and as an eort to revive the
political urgency of the European ideas. Te group organised a symposium on Architecture and
Ideology in March 1982, which resulted in a publication (Ockman, Berke and McLeod (eds.)
1985).
39. Discorso tafuriano comes from Daniel Sherer (Sherer 1996, p. 42); Tafuriana we owe to
Alberto Toscano.
40. Rossi 1982, pp. 103, 106.
232 Review Articles / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 219236
of exception (the moment of crisis drawn from Carl Schmitt) (pp. 401, 52). Tronti takes
Red Vienna the period of Social-Democratic rule in the 1920s as a classic example of
a state of exception, where municipal control was at odds with Austrias conservative
national politics. As Aureli extends the point, the large-scale programmes to construct
working-class housing in Vienna in the 1920s represented an example of building socialism
from within but against the forms of the bourgeois city; they had the potential, he argues,
to become forms representing the autonomous power of the workers (pp. 52, 53). Te
famous residential fortresses of the working class, such as Karl Ehns Karl-Marx-Hof
which became famous as the site of the violent stand-o with fascists are read by Aureli
and Tronti as examples of a proletarian will-to-form. At stake here is Tafuris critique of the
Viennese Hfe. Tis is a fascinating and crucial dierence to explore, but Aurelis main
purpose seems to be to prove Rossis locus more authentically workerist than Tafuris
approach. Tafuris writings from the 60s form a key-element of the architectural subject-
matter of Aurelis book and, given their importance in debates, really deserved fuller
development, rather than appearing, as they do, as brief interjections throughout the course
of the study (and always playing the rle of stalking horse). Exasperation with Tafuri or
his ghost develops into one of the forces motivating Aureli, but it means that he misses
an important opportunity to explore a substantive debate within workerism (or, if one
wants to be pedantic, among ex-workerist PCI-based workerist-communists). Aureli invites
us to the threshold of an important political assessment, across which, regrettably, we do
not proceed.
For Tafuri, the Hfe replicated the urban politics associated with the garden-citys fantasy
of an artisanal village, albeit scaled-up for the city of the mass-worker. He read the
experiences of Red Vienna alongside (and in contrast to) those of the Siedlungen of Ernst
Mays Social-Democratic Frankfurt, Cornelis van Eesterens Amsterdam, Martin Wagners
work in Berlin, and then next to those of the Weimar architects and planners (Social
Democrats as well as Communists) who, once the economic situation in Europe became
less favourable for building, emigrated to the USSR to work as foreign technical specialists
on major construction-projects such as Magnitogorsk.
41
Aureli alights on certain aspects of
Tafuris critique: his criticisms of the compromises made by the Viennese administration,
of the retrogressive style (with which the modernity of Mays Frankfurt contrasts), and of
the failure to confront the problems of the totality. In particular, this last point is taken by
Aureli as an example of Tafuris xation with scientic systems and programs and with the
abstraction of the general plan, to which, accordingly, he favourably contrasts Rossis
exceptions and singularities (pp. 52, 53). (Here Aureli draws on Trontis recent assertion,
attributed to a conversation with the author, that Tafuris analysis was too mechanical and
beholden to the model of planning.) Interesting as this is and Aureli usefully draws our
attention to aspects of Tafuris early writings that are usually overlooked I am not
convinced by the argument. Tafuris critiques do not rest at the political level (which is
rather hypostatised by the Tronti-Schmitt focus), but point to the limitations of left-wing
political control under conditions where social rule remains with its opponents not just
41. Tafuri (ed.) 1971 and Tafuri 1980a. Te discussion is also important in a number of
chapters in Dal Co and Tafuri 1980, especially Te Attempts at Urban Reform in Europe
Between the Wars. See also Sozialpolitik and the City in Weimar Germany, in Tafuri 1987,
pp. 197233.
Review Articles / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 219236 233
the contrast between municipal and national politics, but the tension between the powers
of political oce and economic power. Tafuris point seems less an obsession with, and
inability to break from, scientistic ideologies of planning, and more to do with grasping the
contradictions of a social totality (and we would have to qualify the type of incomplete and
fractured totality Tafuris workerist philosophy conceived). By way of Greppi and Alberto
Pedrollis criticisms, as published in Quaderni rossi, of the city-territory as a technocratic
policy, Aureli brings out some of the ambivalences in the arguments presented by Tafuri
and Giorgio Piccinato in an article from 1962, where they argued for a left appropriation
of this same notion (pp. 5963). But this technocratic moment if that is how we are to
take it is then treated as the gravitational point towards which all of Tafuris subsequent
enunciations must be pulled, losing sight of the changing nature of Tafuris own formation
as a political subject through the period. Collapsing the Tafuri of, say, 1969 and the 70s
with the one of 1962 is rather unspecic, to say the least. Moreover, it also requires us to
ignore Tafuris own challenges to the scientistic mode. In his 1969 essay for Contropiano,
for example, Tafuri is critical of the Taylorism implicit in Hilberseimers and Gropiuss
approaches and their attempt to adapt their designs to changes in the building-trade.
42
He
takes his distance from the model of the city as an industrial machine, the Siedlung as
assembly-line, the house conceived as a part of the industrial system organised around the
service nucleus (the Frankfurter Kche). (And here, surely, one can detect some additional
reasons for Tafuris suspicion of Archizoom, which he dismissed for being one of the avant-
gardes who, in irresponsible fashion, deduced intellectual playfulness from a hasty reading
of new left reviews such as Quaderni rossi, Classe operaia, and Contropiano.
43
He went on
to add that they were intent on hauling a mythical proletariat onto the stage of psychedelic
action. Tafuris perspective, then, would have Archizoom as more beholden to a liberating
psychophysical therapy devoid of codes [which] called upon its audience to participate in a
destructive and cathartic orgy than as inheritors to Greppi or Tronti a dismissal that may
be a tad unfair on a group of young designers, but which needs to be put in play with
Aurelis eort to wed them so directly to operaismo.)
Moreover, there is an important issue embedded in this debate over Red Vienna, which
would have been considerably more productive to explore: an architectural debate over the
processes of social change, and the pressure-points of strategies of reform and the rle of a
progressive state-apparatus. Aureli (via Tronti) advocates a perspective on Vienna as a clear
manifestation of the autonomy of political action (p. 53); Tafuri, in contrast, points to the
limitations in this social project of progressive reforms. Having picked up on such an
important internal debate, Aureli rather squanders the opportunity before him. A properly
political debate and one less obsessed with keeping Tafuri at bay would have to consider
the weight of specic arguments at particular historical conjunctions, the calibration of
tactics. (To dismiss Tafuri as mechanical requires us to lose sight of his history; his points
on Vienna involved a debate over postwar-Italy: from the disappointments of Ludovico
Quaroni, one of the major postwar-architects with whom both Tafuri and Rossi worked in
the early 60s, and an engagement with the ambitions of PCI-controlled city-authorities.)
Te potential discussion here is not just of historical interest and it takes us beyond niggling
over the views of Tafuri. Te examples and situations of the early twenty-rst century are
42. Tafuri 1998, especially pp. 215.
43. Tafuri 1989, p. 99.
234 Review Articles / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 219236
dierent from those that had informed the Vienna-debate (and Italy in the 60s and 70s),
but within the terms of Aurelis ambition to intervene in the current moment we are
brought to touch upon the question of the state; to rekindled interest in Rosa Luxemburg;
to the debates that took place around John Holloway and power prompted by developments
in places such as Venezuela and Bolivia; to the autonomist-inspired arguments for micro-
politics and temporary autonomous zones that dominate the current landscape of cultural
politics. Te interest in zones of resistance returns us to the debates of the early 80s.
Derived from an Anglo-American appropriation of Gramscis counterhegemony, the
theory of the enclave tried to counter the perceived harshness of Tafuris assessment, and to
suggest that resistance to capitalism could be built by separating o islands or archipelagos,
as is lately preferred of alternative social relations. In architectural circles, enclave-theory
was articulated most famously by Fredric Jameson at a Revisions-symposium in 1982.
44

Becoming one of the themes of the conference, it has ever since been the favourite resort of
left-leaning radicals unable either to stomach Tafuris conclusions or, paradoxically, to nd
much of an enclave from within which to act (a classic source of paralysis for the post-New
Left).
45
Aurelis reading of Red Vienna as a state of exception oers another inection on
this debate, whilst sidestepping the central political problems that the debate raises;
polemicising against discourses associated with the American reception whilst evading a
confrontation with probably one of its central legacies (all the more odd because Aureli so
actively returns us to the question of Viennese Social Democracy). Tis is probably less a
question of deliberate political evasion than of the books lack of resolution, compounded
by the authors simultaneous xation on and dislike of Tafuri. Nevertheless, as a statement-
piece by one of the fresh voices in architectural theory, Te Politics of Autonomy represents
a fascinating contribution, invoking if never quite pursuing the debates over social
change and its potential means.
Reviewed by Gail Day
University of Leeds
G.A.Day@leeds.ac.uk
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