Tafuri’s Architecture and Utopia dismantles the belief that architectural form can stand outside capitalist development and deliver emancipation through design alone. Its iconic proposition is that the avant-garde’s innovations were progressively absorbed into the rationalisation of production, consumption and metropolitan organisation. The theoretical contribution is a severe critique of architectural ideology: utopian form does not simply oppose capital but often prepares new spatial and perceptual conditions for its expansion. Methodologically, Tafuri reads projects, plans and movements through historical materialism, connecting formal experimentation to transformations in labour, property, administration and the city. The conceptual operation is demystification, exposing the economic and institutional functions concealed by claims of autonomy. The wider bridge reaches political economy, historiography, critical theory and urban studies. Tafuri does not render architecture meaningless; he relocates its significance within conflict, forcing criticism to distinguish between symbolic dissent and structural transformation. Architecture becomes legible as an internal moment of development rather than an innocent alternative to it.
