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Manfredo Tafuri’s guide to modern architecture in Japan was published in 1964, when he was twenty-nine years old. He wrote the book during a period of transition, from being a young architect and writer in Rome to becoming a historian of architecture in Venice, where he would eventually assume the chair of architectural history at IUAV, the university’s institute for architecture. 

Photography has changed memory, forming a double to the storehouse of the mind. It is hard to remember anything in the day and age of the personal digital archive, which holds on to everything, as if we had all become hoarders. We keep things in order to more easily forget them, assured that they are tucked away in our basement or in the cloud. But if psychoanalysis is right, this only serves the purposes of resistance, giving repression more mojo.

In the spring of 1955 the UNESCO Committee of Art Advisers invited a number of celebrated artists to contribute an artwork for their headquarters building, which was then under construction. Moore was among them, and he devoted an unusual amount of time to the commission. He visited the site several times, firstly later that same year, and next in July 1956.