Manfredo Tafuri’s work remains a key reference for the idea of a critical theory of architecture. Starting out from the basic intuition that architecture is fundamentally incapable of solving the contradictions that it addresses, he proposes to undertake a critique of architectural ideology. The nature of his analysis of architecture’s inherent contradiction will shift, from the dialectic of city and nature, subjectivity, and “Plan,” in the early work, to the multiple forces that in the later work finally make the very idea of contradiction tenuous, and instead necessitate a plurality of approaches that only with great difficulty can be brought into a dialectical matrix. This development, I suggest, can be taken as a staging of the inner tension in the very idea of critique and critical theory.