Autonomia movement that emerged in Italy in the 1960s from workerist (operaismo) communism gives historical and discursive context to Manfredo Tafuri’s famous criticism of ideology. His thesis on the death of architecture was a radical criticism of Keynesian intervention which was a strategy to cope with the Great Depression. For him, this capitalist development had taken away ideological prefiguration from architecture. At least Tafuri’s this early intellectual phase was formed in the wake of magazine Contrapiano and Antonio Negri’s influence. Tafuri almost entirely adapted Negri’s thought on the importance of capitalist innovation that was uncovered by Keynes, Schumpeter, and Manheim and the periodization in modern history. When we read Tafuri’s text with this concrete context, we can avoid being plunged into his abstruseness. On the other hand, 1980’s Korea cannot understand Tafuri comprehensibly. 1980’s situation to struggle to acquire democracy prescribed only one mode of reception of Tafuri’s historiography in Korea. Tafuri’s so-called pessimist view point could not satisfy student activists. They want to take intellectual means to sustain student movement and to secure political dynamics of protest. But at the same time they have anxiety to understand tafuri’s thesis that they consider ad a critical theory for Korean Architecture. Double contexts of Tafuri’s criticism of ideology bring to light to historicize both Tafuri’s historiography itself and reception of his text in Korea.

This study tries to compare the architectural thought of Michel Foucault with that of Manfredo Tafuri in order to make clear the architectural identity as a social institution. In Michel Foucault's case, the archeology of discourse and the geneology of power were central method to understand the history of occidental society since the Renaissance. Four him, architecture is assumed as a mechanism of operation which make the power effectively radiate in th space. He thinks that a new discursive space was arranged since the 18th century in Europe, the architecture played a role to coordinate divers powers. Mafredo Tafuri, architetural historian, depends on the criticism of ideology in search of the relation between the economic system of capitalism and modern architecture and urbanism. He thinks that all architecture is an institution. And any attempt to overthrow the institution, is bound to see itself turned into a positive contribution and into an ideology, So all architectural attempts to conceal the contradiction of capitalism are negated. This different perspective on architecture exposes many points of dispute: historical periodization, disciplinary limit of architecture, understanding of Enlightenment architecture, utopia and heterotopia, etc.