Manfredo Tafuri’s scientific contributions

... Writing a critical analysis of futuring ambitions of the early and mid-twentieth century, Tafuri recognised that architects envisioning futuristic and utopian designs often remained constrained by capitalist tenets of development and growth. 48 With the climate crisis worsening, such tenets impinge on planetary boundaries with catastrophic consequences. The question remains as to how artists, architects, and other spatial practitioners might design critical and imaginative futures in a manner that avoids both fantastical invention and replicating the status quo via technical tweaks. ...

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For a World to Come: designing the future amidst climate crisis

... In facing the interlocked co-presence of fantasy and economic efficiency in 1920s American skyscrapers, Manfredo Tafuri (1979) stressed their commercial and highly capitalistic nature, and their intrinsic usefulness for advertising reasons, to provoke astonishment and wonder. Concentrating on Manhattan, Rem Koolhaas (1994Koolhaas ( [1978) recognized its "delirious" character and connected it with the psyche of the architects, who had been 'disturbed' by capitalist hysteria and enamored with congestion. ...

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In Search of a Cultural Background: The Recommended Reading Lists of Alfred Lawrence Kocher and the Beauty of Utility in 1920s America

... Rethinking the relations and connections between architecture, the vernacular, and technology in Europe within the historical context of the oil crisis, the 1970s can be identified as a moment of recalibration between architecture and its integration with these different lines. An analysis of this period is needed because the major histories of modern architecture (e.g., Curtis' Modern Architecture Since 1900 (Curtis, 1996), Frampton's Modern Architecture: A Critical History (Frampton, 2007), Colquhoun's Modern Architecture (Colquhoun, 2002), and Tafuri and Dal Co's Modern Architecture (Tafuri & Dal Co, 1987) have not thoroughly addressed the experimental ecological design of the 1970s (Stickells, 2015). According to architectural historians Sarah Bonnemaison and Christine Macy, a "whole generation of ecological architecture has not been critically analysed within the architectural mainstream (Bonnemaison & Macy, 2003)". ...

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The Trombe Wall during the 1970s: technological device or architectural space? Critical inquiry on the Trombe Wall in Europe and the role of architectural magazines

... Los modelos de Hilberseimer están relacionados con el concepto de metrópoli establecido por Georg Simmel en su ensayo Las metrópolis y la vida del espíritu (1903) (Cacciari 1972). La naturaleza de la metrópoli de Simmel tiene un carácter material, ya que es la sede de la economía monetaria y esta acumulación de capital es la causa de una transformación de la ciudad, no sólo en su morfología urbana, sino específicamente en su naturaleza social y en la condiciones de vida de sus habitantes. ...

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Hilberseimer: de la Hochhausstadt a la New City. Cambio social, vivienda y metrópoli