quondam @ archinect/79/7913q.htm
lebbeus woods and Piranesi
db 2005.04.17 11:09
I'm not sure you can say Tafuri is "plain wrong" considering his is a particular interpretation relating Piranesi's work to the shaping of space by later avant-garde movements. It is only one perspective on that issue, and obviously one you don't agree with. To invalidate it out of hand to someone who was looking for a wide berth of info seems all too heavy-handed.
I don't think Tafuri ever claims to be a Piranesi scholar (as surely Rita is), but someone who (in this and other works) is interested in tracing premodern avant-garde concepts through their early 20th century manifestations. His is a project of larger trajectories (as is a comparison of Piranesi/Woods) rather than the specificity of research on a single isolated figure.
Now, I would never suggest Tafuri is the end-all-be-all of architectural history and theory (far from it) but he should not be dismissed outright. He should be read and considerd as one would any other source. So, read Tafuri then also do what Rita says. Synthesize the two and you've got your thesis.
lebbeus woods and Piranesi
Rita Novel 2005.04.17 11:29
db, please indicate where Tafuri is right about the Ichnographia Campus Martius. Of course, Tafuri didn't even know Piranesi printed two different versions of the Ichnographia Campus Martius, but why should that mean anything?
At the very beginning of The Sphere and the Labyrinth, Tafuri quotes from a text by Carlo Ginzburg and Adriano Prosperi:
"There comes a moment (though not always) in research when all the pieces begin to fall into place, as in a jig-saw puzzle, where all the pieces are near at hand and only one figure can be assembled (and thus the correctness of each move be determined immediately), in research only some of the pieces are available, and theoretically more than one figure can be made from them. In fact, there is always the risk of using, more or less consciously, the pieces of the jig-saw puzzle as blocks in a construction game. For this reason, the fact that everything falls into place is an ambiguous sign: either one is completely right or completely wrong. When wrong, we mistake for objective verification the selection and solicitation (more or less deliberate) of the evidence, which is forced to confirm the presuppositions (more or less explicit) of the research itself. The dog thinks it is biting the bone and is instead biting its own tail."
HOW IRONIC!
"So where is Tafuri now?"
"Why he's in the ether playground, just where he's always been."
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