Architecture as the Ideology of the Plan: Revisiting Manfredo Tafuri's Critique of Ideology

The paper revisits Manfredo Tafuri's "Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology" (1969). In the essay Tafuri analyses the integration of architectural ideology - 'project' and 'utopia' - into state ideology, its move from superstructure to base. For him "Architecture as the ideology of the Plan is swept away by the reality of the Plan at the moment the plan came down from the utopian level and became an operant mechanism." Tafuri's essay was a comment on Antonio Negri's "Keynes and the Capitalist Theory of the State post-1929" (1968). According to Negri the economic crisis of 1929 had destroyed confidence in the future. As a consequence the state was "to remove fear of the future", to eliminate its risk and uncertainty. The cure was to project the future according to present expectations, "the state as the plan". For Tafuri though, "It is significant that almost all the economic objectives formulated by Keynes in his General Theory can be found, in purely ideological form, at the basis of the poetics of modern architecture." It was architecture that aimed at the reorganization of production, distribution and consumption in the capitalist city. While his 'critique of ideology' is often discussed, the specific notion of 'architecture as the ideology of the Plan' remains largely overlooked. The paper clarifies Tafuri's critique of ideology, drawing attention to the 'plan' as specific form of representation, organization and administration. It situates the essay within the political context of Italian Workerism and their slogan "contro il piano", against the plan.