TAFURI, Manfredo, L'architecture dans le Boudoir (parcial)

TAFURI, Manfredo, L'architecture dans le Boudoir: The language of criticism and the criticism of language en HAYS, K. Michael (1998): Oppositions Reader: Selected Essays 1973-1984, Princeton Architectural Press

Today, he who is willing to make architecture speak is forced to rely on materials empty of any and all meaning: he is forced to reduce to degree zero all architectonic ideology, all dreams of social function and any utopian residues. In his hands, the elements of the moderns architectural tradition come suddenly to be reduced to enigmatic fragments, to mute signals of a language whose code has been lost, stuffed away casually in the desert of history.

"(...) asking ourselves which role criticism must take. We will therefore examine: (1) those trends which respond to language as a purely technical neutrality, which set themselves against the destruction of language as it is generated by a bureaucriticized architecture; this will allow us to  reveal the answers offered by the profession an on that research which tries to renew an awareness of linguistic processes and to link up with the experiments of the avant-grade which have been influenced by formalist methodologies; (2) research based on the dissolution of language itself, on the systematic destruction of form that is aimed at the total control of the technological environment; (3) research which interprets architecture as criticism and irony, as well as that which deliberately denies the possibility of an architectonic communication in favor of a neutral system of 'information'; and (4) the emergence of an architecture which aims to redistribute the capitalistic division of labor, which moves towards an understanding of the technician's role in building- that is, as a responsible partner in the economics dynamics and as an organizer directly involved in the production cycle.

Criticism, in other words, sees itself constrained to adopt a "repressive" character if it wishes to free that which is beyond language; if it desires to bring upon itself the cruel autonomy of architectural writing, and if, after all, it wishes the  "mortal silence of the sign" to speak. As has been acutely pointed out, to Nietzsche's question "Who speaks?" Mallarmé has answered, "The word itself". This would apparently exclude any attempt to question the language as a system of meanings whose discourse it is necessary to reveal.

And where contemporary architecture poses, ostentatiously, the problems of its meaning, we must look for the signs of a regressive utopia, even if these signs mime a struggle against the role of language.

The parabola which Stirling has followed has a high degree of consistency. It indeed reveals the consequence of a reduction of the architectural object to pure language, yet it wishes to be compared to the tradition of the Modern movement (...) in an anti linguistic sense. a stirling has "rewritten" the "words" of modern architecture, building a true "archaeology of the present".

At the origins of the critical act are always found the acts of distinguishing, separating and disintegrating a given structure (...) It is self-evident that there does not exist a criticism that does not follow the process which generated the work itself, one which does not redeploy the elements of the work into a different order...