From Publishers Weekly
Instead of transforming reality, modern avant-garde artists, in Tafuri's tough judgment, are merely playing with techniques, their private dialogue a "glass bead game." These difficult, wordy essays throw down a gauntlet to avant-garde movements in architecture, theater, painting, film and literature. This Venetian critic mocks today's New York architects who work in self-defined limbo to entertain a select public. He examines the "total theater" of such architects as Moholy-Nagy and Gropius, who envisioned a "counter-city" as a global alternative to the real. The essays make provocative connections between the arts, showing, for example, why Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein saw Piranesi's drawings as a forerunner of new film language. These wide-ranging essays, moving from the cross-pollination of German and Soviet artists in Berlin of the 1920s, to the designs of architects like Venturi, Graves and Rossi, challenge an avant-garde that has lost its moorings in contemporary life.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
Tafuri ( Architecture and Utopia ) is one of the best-known Italian writers on modern architecture and urban design. Unfortunately, he is also one of the least intelligible to American readers. His method is heavy on poetic and philosophical interpretation. In this book he draws heavily on such intellectual giants as Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as he examines the history of avant gardes in the making of modern architecture over the past 200 years. In discussing the 20th century, he focuses on pivotal periods for the USSR, the United States, and Germany, and he assesses the significance of such contemporaries as Venturi and Graves. For specialized collections. Peter Kaufman, Suffolk Community Coll. Libs., Selden, N.Y.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
