Tafuri's Chance

Tafuri's writing is extremely thick. I find it difficult to read more than a short passage at a time in order to absorb and understand exactly what he is talking about. A section that I came across today, though, struck me as rather clear and interesting.
"The Crisis of Utopia: Le Corbusier at Algiers""To absorb that multiplicity, to temper the improbable with the certainty of the plan, to reconcile organic structure and disorganized by exacerbating the dialectical relationship between them, to demonstrate that the highest level of productive planning coincides with the maximum "productivity of spirit": such were the objectives that Le Corbusier delineated, with a lucidity unparalleled within progressive European architectural culture at the time, ever aware of the triple front on which modern architecture had to fight. If architecture was now anonymous with organization of production, it was also true that distribution and use were also determinate factors of the cycle, in addition to production itself. The architect as organizer, not a designer of objects. This statement of Le Corbusier's was not a slogan, but an imperative linking intellectual initiative and la civilisation machiniste" (Hays 1998, 25).
"To encompass Le Corbusier and Breton," as Benjamin once wrote, would be to string a bow that could shoot an arrow into the heart of contemporary France. My paraphrase of this quote is laziness, but I think the essence remains. Le Corbusier was the most illusive of the "modernists" because his work defies strict classification and his theory is not embedded in reason alone. The artist values that Corb maintained in his work allow it to still communicate and intrigue, while other attempts at utopia have failed. I would say that Corbusier never sought Utopia, but more of a synthetic blend of forms. These may not have been past and future, but they definitely allowed variance and change. If Corb's practical dreams could be blended with Bretons serious fantasies, then a synthesis could be achieved between two quite opposite, but contemporary intellectual giants. Tafuri, who heroically deconstructs modernist efforts, describes Corbusier's methodology as the "most advanced and formally elevated hypothesis of bourgeois culture in the field of design and urban planning to its day" (Hayes 1998, 28).
Source: Hays, Michael. Ed. Architectural Theory Since 1968. MIT: Cambridge, 1998.