"Keeping anguish at bay by absorbing its causes..." In the famous phrase that opens Architecture and Utopia, Manfredo Tafuri captured the debilitating contradiction of the avant-garde: its secret, tormented complicity with the progress of capitalism. But achieving a complicity with external circumstances and assimilating all the conditions of the problem in the broadest possible sense, then refracting these conditions through a solution that leads to a new state, a new stage of conceptual development, is precisely the architect's primary task. It could be argued that the key to the practice of any art lies in this effort, in the tension between the finished work and the reserves of knowledge, experience, and reflection necessary to bring it to life...[+]