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Browsing by Author "NUNES, Jorge"

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  • Early years. Manfredo Tafuri and Rem Koolhaas´s first reflections on the Metropolis
    Publication . NUNES, Jorge
    The end of World War II and the cultural transformations of the 1960s define a disenchanted age marked by the awareness that architecture cannot meet the challenges of that time after the younger members of the CIAM rejected the doctrine of the Athens Charter. This sense of ‘crisis’, also shared by other disciplines beyond architecture, is not new; it integrates modernity as a critical trend of resistance. However, the pessimism associated with the revelation of the Holocaust and the advent of the nuclear threat accelerates the criticism of the rationalist approaches of the Modern Movement that dominated the previous decades. In these years, which in retrospect define the interregnum between modernism and postmodernism, it is urgent to rethink the theoretical foundations of modernity, seeking a more effective political, social and economic project capable of recovering the potential for the emancipation of humanity. In this context, it is argued that the discipline of architecture has to be reformulated from its base. It is in this revisionist milieu that Manfredo Tafuri and Rem Koolhaas begin to act. Tafuri will resort to Adorno and Horkeimer's ‘negative dialectics’ to diagnose the ‘crisis’ of contemporary architecture and begin a critical reading of the ideological foundations of the discipline since the Enlightenment. Koolhaas, in the midst of the aftermath of the 1968 riots, finds in the city of New York the seeds of a new culture that promises to overcome the ‘crisis’ by using a ‘superlative modernity’ and is, therefore, more true in his view. Based on readings of Manfredo Tafuri's Progetto e Utopia and Rem Koolhaas's Delirious New York, this paper provides a comparative perspective of the thinking of two of the most influential authors of our time in the early years of their affirmation in the context of contemporary architectural culture.
    2019-04-11Conference object Open access Show more