Manfredo Tafuri
Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development.
The MIT Press, 1976. First US edition. Translation by Barbara Luigia La Penta of "Progetto e Utopia" (Guis. Laterza & Figli, 1973). 0262200333 xi/184 pages.
Volume, measuring approximately 5" x 7.5", is bound in light blue cloth, with stamped gilt lettering to spine. Book displays moderate shelfwear, with fading visible on spine and at edges of top/bottom covers. Binding is firm. Interior is clean and bright. Dust jacket shows light shelfwear. Jacket is preserved in mylar cover.
"Written from a neo-Marxist point of view by a prominent Italian architectural historian, "Architecture and Utopia" leads the reader beyond architectural form into a broader understanding of the relation of architecture to society and the architect to the workforce and the marketplace. It discusses the Garden Cities movement and the suburban developments it generated, the German-Russian architectural experiments of the 1920s, the place of the avant-garde in the plastic arts, and the uses and pitfalls of seismological approaches to architecture, and assesses the prospects of socialist alternatives."