Contrapiano: architecture, politics and radicality in the Italian neo-avant-garde

Manfredo Tafuri occupies a significant and problematic position in architectural history and theory of the Twentieth Century, as an orthodox Marxist and radical that resituated debates within the discipline in the 1970s through a series of polemical and authoritative texts. What is significant in Tafuri’s critique is his
insistence on the inefficacy of the neoavant-garde projects in architecture that purport to be, and are frequently associated with, radicality. Mounting a dialectical critique of contemporary architecture in the Italian context from its foundations, Tafuri effectively questioned the basis of architectural practice in all its forms in a way that has proven to be both enduring and formidable to future scholarly attempts to link Marxism and architectural discourse.
This paper explores the notion of radicality in the postmodern Italian context, and specifically through exhibited and unbuilt work which aspires to radicality in both its form and ideology. Looking specifically at the discursive architectural exhibitions of Giancarlo di Carlo in the 1950s and 60s, which promoted vernacular forms of Industrial architecture with an explicit advocacy of the rights of workers, di Carlo was an influential voice in unsettling dominant discourses of modernism, and using the architectural exhibition, and “participation” as critical tools to question the dominant hegemonies of mainstream architectural production in the period.

This paper responds to the theme of radicality through an investigation of these two positions within the Italian context: the scholarly, academic position of Tafuri, and the grounded and participatory position of di Carlo. Both represent substantial and sustained critiques of modernism and capitalism, but the paper aims to explore the deeper ideological foundations of radicality in each praxis, and their influence on a generation of institutional radicality in Italy throughout the 1970s. This concluded with the effective institutionalisation of radicality in the Venice Biennale, as a commodified incubator of radicality. The paper looks at these two positions within this context, and the inherent contradictions and synergies that are implied for radically within an architectural and aesthetic context.