originalmente postado em http://notasurbanas.blogsome.com/2010/04/08/uma-verdade-simples-inconveniente/
[…] assim como não pode haver uma economia política de classe, também não é possível haver uma estética, arte ou arquitetura de classe, mas apenas uma crítica de classe da estética, da arte, da arquitetura, da própria cidade. […]. Tafuri, 1973.
A passagem acima é sempre citada quando se fala de Tafuri, tão citada que já é quase um chavão.
A imagem presente na capa da edição do MIT Press do livro Progetto e utopia (1973, publicado como Architecture and Utopia nos EUA e como Projecto e Utopia em Portugal) é a reprodução de uma famosa água-forte produzida pelo arquiteto Aldo Rossi em homenagem a Tafuri. Rossi deu o sugestivo título de A arquitetura assassinada à imagem, inspirada nos textos do colega veneziano.
Sobre isto, Teresa Stoppani escreve:
Aldo Rossi’s watercolour L’architecture assassinée (1974) dedicated to Manfredo Tafuri is emblematic of the relationship between the two. A response that expresses in figures the reaction of ‘architectural practice’ to the crisis of architecture, its languages and its engagement with the social and the political that Tafuri had denounced in Architecture and Utopia (1973), Rossi’s image shows his own architectures of pure geometric solids, urban typologies and personal memories broken into pieces, fractured and collapsed. The breakings that Rossi represents are in fact at the core of the relationship between Tafuri’s ‘historical project’ and Rossi’s critical ‘architectural practice’. […] They also mark the breaking that such shift produces in Tafuri’s relationship to and critque of Rossi’s research. […]
Tafuri reads Rossi’s (and Samona’s) projects in the city as a form of architectural criticism, that is, criticism performed in and by architecture. This is not a project of history, and it is from this operation that Tafuri wants to establish a clear distance. But while the criticism of the ‘critics’ can only be dismissed, Tafuri remains interested in the alter-ego incarnated by Rossi, that constructs a critical project in architecture initially similar (as long as it lasts), in a way, to Tafuri’s critical project in history: fragmented and partial, its work operates rigorously on its own language, suggesting a method at large for the development of a language to address the past of the discipline but also the present of the city (and the past in it). These are the aspects of Rossi’s work that interest Tafuri: Rossi’s project goes well beyond its suggestive images and evocative memories, offering a critical architectural tool that is always productive of as well as subject to instability. The collapses portrayed in L’architecture assassinée then are not caused by Tafuri’s attacks on Rossi, but are in fact already genetically imprinted in Rossi’s architecture, designed to operate like a surgical instrument on a city that is does not control. It is this critical (and self-critical) element of Rossi’s project that Tafuri respects from the distance of history.
Um tanto quanto superestimada esta análise do suposto poder crítico da obra do Rossi…
arquitetura em notas 