Architecture and Modernity : A Critique

chaos. Tafuri argues, however, that the tendency toward irony that was an aspect of
this movement meant that a need for order was felt here too. “Dada instead plunged
into chaos. By representing chaos, it confirmed its reality; by treating it with irony, it
exposed a necessity that had been lacking.” 154 Tafuri points, therefore, to an inner relationship
between the constructive and destructive moments within the avantgarde.
For this reason, he argues, it was no surprise that dadaism and constructivism
merged after 1922. 155
According to Tafuri, then, the whole concern of the avant-garde movements
was to recognize and assimilate the dialectic of chaos and order that is fundamental
to modern mechanized civilization: the dialectic between the apparent chaos of the
constantly changing dynamic image of the city on the one hand and the underlying
order of the de facto rationality of the system of production on the other—a rationality
that in every case was deemed to be the decisive factor. The artistic labor of
the avant-garde movements involved an assimilation of the new conditions of life
that prevail in the modern city. This process of assimilation was a necessary precondition
for a more thoroughgoing interiorization of these conditions by the people who
were subjected to them. In Tafuri’s scheme of things, the avant-garde movements
are assigned the task of paving the way for a further proliferation and evolution of
mechanistic civilization. They are, however, incapable of extending their assignment
any further than this “vanguard” task: “The necessity of a programmed control of the
new forces released by technology was very clearly pointed out by the avant-garde
movements, who immediately afterwards discovered that they were not capable of
giving concrete form to this entreaty of Reason.” 156
The avant-garde movements were incapable of genuinely influencing the
course of capitalist evolution or of giving concrete form to the rationalization inherent
in it. This task, Tafuri argues, was the work of architecture: “The Bauhaus, as the decantation
chamber of the avant-garde, fulfilled the historic task of selecting from all
the contributions of the avant-garde by testing them in terms of the needs of productive
reality.” 157 Architecture should be the mediator between the “progressive”
demands in the work of avant-garde movements (including the demand for the
planned control of the means of production) and the concrete reality of this production.
According to Tafuri’s diagnosis, however, architecture gets bogged down in this
contradiction, because it is not prepared to accept its logical implication—that the
contradiction can be solved only by a form of planning instituted outside of architecture,
that would involve “a restructuring of production and consumption in general;
in other words, the planned coordination of production.” 158
The fully planned control of production can be implemented only when there
is a general socioeconomic form of planning that embraces all the sectors of social
life and that is not confined to architecture. For architects to accept the consequences
of this would mean disqualifying themselves: architecture would no longer
be the subject of the plan but its object—and that is something that architects could
not possibly accept: “Architecture between 1920 and 1930 was not ready to accept
3 Reflections in a Mirror