Author Description

A civil history, a political history, and a history of ideas are juxtaposed with a history of architecture in this indispensable reference work by one of today's most important historians and critics of architecture and urbanism. Manfredo Tafuri presents a sophisticated account of the origins and development of the movements and schools that have shaped Italian architecture and urban design since the Liberation.Tafuri takes into account the "father figures, " the importance of autobiography in architectural design, and the relevance of Italy's regional polarities. The work of the major protagonists - including Albini, Gardella, Samona, Ridolfi, Quaroni, the BPR, Scarpa, Rossi, Canella, Grassi, Gabetti and Isola - is set against the roles gradually assigned to the discipline, as well as against planning strategies and structural changes.Tafuri analyzes such recent tendencies in architecture and planning as concepts of place, context, modification, reweaving, the relationship between the invention and its surrounding conditions, and both typological and morphological continuity - used to address the needs created by the competition for economic and social resources in the major cities, including the regulatory programs of Florence and Bologna and the development projects for Rome, Milan, and Naples.Manfredo Tafuri is the Director of the Department of History of architecture at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura in Venice. He is the author of "The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes" and "Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s, Architectura and Utopia and coauthor with Giorgio Ciucci, Francesco Dal Co, and Mario Manieri-Elia of "The American City, all published by The MIT Press.