The death and life of “operative history”

This summarized argument will be presented at the 6th meeting of the European Architectural History Network in Edinburgh, 2–5 June, 2021, in the session Split cultures — New dialogues: Research in architectural history and theory, chaired by Brigitte Sölch and Carsten Ruhl.

The struggle for rigour in architectural scholarship in post-war Italy resulted in an engaging and diverse body of argumentative and exemplary writings by well-known authors such as Saverio Muratori (1910–1973), Aldo Rossi (1931–1997), and Manfredo Tafuri (1935–1994). Their often conflicting positions on the craft of architectural history, its relationship to design practice, and the establishment of disciplinary parameters for either history or design, set the foundational arguments for much of the international debate around these themes.

The validity of extracting ‘operative’ knowledge from history for use in architectural and urban practice is one among many debates in which these architects engaged.¹ This controversy is expressed most clearly in their differing attitudes towards typology as either an art historical device or a theory of the architectural planning process.

The Italian universe of typological studies is probably best known through Aldo Rossi’s idiosyncratic definition of the concept, in The Architecture of the City, as the study of ‘constants’ underlying urban and architectural ‘facts’ and discernible in them.² Saverio Muratori’s contribution, on the other hand, is restricted to the technical domain of urban morphology,³ to a great extent due to his ostracism from the mainstream critical panorama, brought about by his ideological condemnation at the hands of Bruno Zevi and Manfredo Tafuri.⁴ Tafuri himself towers tall as one of the most acclaimed architectural historians of the post–1968 era, not the least for his combative—though at times inconsistent—argument for the critical autonomy of architectural history outside the professional scope of the architectural discipline.⁵

Nowadays, however, and especially outside Italy, the critical perspectives around these three architects are mostly cut off from one another, being concerned with specific subfields in research and practice, the scopes of which have been increasingly delimited to reflect their respective methodological and ideological partis pris. This segmentation of theories and scholarship influenced by Muratori, Rossi, and Tafuri is not only a misrepresentation of their frequent engagement with one another’s theories;⁶ it also obscures the claim put forward by each one of them to a systematic representation of and agency on the urban environment.

The confrontation of Tafuri’s critical underpinnings for an autonomous and critical history of architecture⁷ with Muratori’s and Rossi’s methods for the operative appropriation of historical research in design exposes the overarching conflicts in world view among them, of course, but beneath these differences certain fundamental affinities show through, evidencing how they partake in the major intellectual and political themes of their age. These affinities have not, however, been carried on by their disciples and interpreters as clearly as their differences. This has caused Muratori’s, Rossi’s, and Tafuri’s work to become somewhat abstract and disconnected from the role they all expected their critique to play in the transformation of urban planning.⁸ In other words, what they have in common is they intended not so much to propose a general theory of architectural form—for Muratori was sceptical of formal rules, Rossi was sceptical of generalisations, and Tafuri was sceptical of theorising—, but rather to look at the contemporary city as a process to be acted upon politically and technically.⁹

In light of their common goal of contributing critically to processes rather than objects, one can begin to draw a clearer picture of their affinities and conflicts, putting the acrid debates of the 1960s and 70s in the long-term perspective of how their legacies have been, and could be, carried on throughout the evolving ideological configurations of the architectural profession. To this end, the study of the direct ‘lineage’ of the second and third generation of Muratori’s disciples,¹⁰ as well as of other practitioners and scholars influenced by Rossi’s poetics of the city and by Tafuri’s critical historiography, offers an overview of what rigorous architectural scholarship can look like in the present day. This loosely defined group of architects may be, for starters, grouped in an ‘Italian school of typology’ of sorts.

This ‘school’ shall be defined, initially, by the shared scope of objects and methods pertaining to the architectural discipline, reaching back to the superimposition of idealist philosophy and socialist politics that was pervasive in post-war Italian architectural circles.¹¹ This disciplinary framing understands architecture to be not a specific set of objects, real or potential, but a process of bringing about change in the urban fabric; conversely, history is not envisaged as a coherent narrative to be ‘found’, but as a collection of fragments of which to make sense in a piecemeal fashion.¹²

On top of this common ground, providing a shared understanding of the profession’s role in the contemporary world, a second level of analysis reveals an implicit awareness of the conflicts between historiographical critique, ever bent on scattering and reassembling the fragments in infinite ways,¹³ and operative synthesis, demanding agreement, if limited and provisional, on reconstructed ‘memories’ of the urban process to be acted upon critically.¹⁴

The cracks developing from these conflicts become rifts, on a third level, between the ‘modernist’ disciples of Muratori¹⁵—among them Gianfranco Caniggia, Gian Luigi Maffei, Giancarlo Cataldi, and Giuseppe Strappa—and the ‘traditionalists’¹⁶ or ‘new classicists’¹⁷—such as Pier Carlo Bontempi, Gabriele Tagliaventi, and Cristiano Rosponi—loosely inspired by the figurative character of Rossi’s later work. This cleaving of the ‘Italian school’ hinges on the decomposition of the urban ‘organism’, in the work of living practitioners, according to diverging hierarchies of abstract and figurative elements.¹⁸ This conflict exposes conceptual weaknesses in the theories supporting typological design, in terms of the choices practitioners make when appropriating and making sense of urban fragments.

Thus, the analysis turns back for a final look at how critical historiography addresses the shortcomings of operativity. By looking at the interaction of historical scholarship and design practice in the work of architects who combine both activities,¹⁹ the theoretical assumptions linking both fields become clear. The typological contradictions between the ‘historic city’ strictly defined—preindustrial urbanism²⁰—and the urban fabric of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries appears as an unresolved conflict in the methods and judgements of ‘modernists’ from the Muratorian school²¹ and of traditionalists alike.²²

Notes