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Alice Davis Hitchcock Award for 1992, Society of Architectural Historians. Most Outstanding Book in Architecture and Urban Planning, Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division, Association of American Publishers, Inc., 1991. International Architecture Book Award, American Institute of Architects, 1992: "This is magisterial history with a grand sweep, an eye for detail and a determination not to simplify. If Modern architecture in Italy over five generations was complex, paradoxical and full of counter-tendencies in any one architect, then these are lovingly pulled apart and exposed.""
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2019
ARS [Journal of the Institute for the History of Art of the Slovak Academy of Sciences] (2-3/1994). Acts of the International Conference “Totalitarianism and Traditions,” Bratislava and Smolenice. October 25-27, 1993, 147-154.
2007, Italian Studies
The period between wars in Italy associated to the Fascism era in Italy, where Rationalism Architecture was born. Terragni's Casa del Fascio which designed and build in this period is a contradictory building which raises a lot of questions regarding the meaning and purpose of an architect and the building itself. Casa del Fascio has different interpretations, readings, texts, and written facts about it. It is the least propagandistic casa of all build ones looking through the building, its function and importantly in a period when it was build. That was the reason that it makes this building so important, and not only in architectural point of view. It can be argued that Terragni was trying to evolve his architecture less propagandistic way by analyzing Casa del Fascio. Although the Terragni described as rationalist architect, rationalists were Fascists indeed, but if we look to another perspective, if they were not in the party, is there any possibility of getting success in the architectural field of that era? However, Modernism without regime could not exist in Italy, at least it did. In this paper, we propose to identify and then examine three main characteristics of that time-period that can make possible to have an understanding about Terragni's Casa del Fascio. The paper will briefly render out the historical context of Italian Rationalism, mostly concerning important points and stress the role of context in Italian Rationalist Architecture. The period of architecture under the regime of fascism would be discussed with the analogy of the journal Quadrante. In fact, the architectural difficulties and complexities in the Fascism period in Italy was a precise measurement of the time for intellectuals working in this period. Terragni's Casa del Fascio will be the analogue of the discussion. It will not be an attempt to restore the Rationalist architects experience as antifascist, however, the analysis of Casa del Fascio bring us to another perspective. Can someone talk about the most important building of Rationalism in Italy, but not mention Fascism? How propaganda played a role of the building's composition? Is it a building of Fascism or just an office building? What is the view about Terragni as an architect, is he a genius modernistic architect or just a servant of the regime? These questions are the main concern while analyzing the Rationalist period in Italy and Casa del Fascio in Como, and the answers are not simple, rather they are complex. Keywords: Rationalism in Architecture, Giuseppe Terragni, Fascism, Casa del Fascio
2012
... Milan: F. Angelo, 1980; Lorenzo Cappellini and Paolo Portoghesi, Le città del silenzio: paesaggio, acque e architetture della regione pontina. Latina: L'Argonauta, 1984; Terry Kirk, 'Framing St. ... 4 (December 2006): 756–76; Paolo Scattoni, L'urbanistica dell'Italia Contemporanea. ...
2008
2006, arq: Architectural Research Quarterly
2018, Fascism, Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies
This article challenges the common assumption of the fascist nature of the Portu-guese Estado Novo from the thirties to mid-forties, while recognizing the innovative, modernizing dynamic of much of its state architecture. It takes into account the pro-lix discourse of Oliveira Salazar, the head of government, as well as Duarte Pacheco's extensive activity as minister of Public Works, and the positions and projects of the architects themselves. It also considers the allegedly peripheral status of architectural elites, and the role played by decision makers, whether politicians or bureaucrats, in the intricate process of architectural renewal. The article shows that a non-radical form of nationalism has always prevailed as a discourse in which to express the unique Por-tuguese spirit, that of a people that saw itself as transporting Christian morality and faith across the world, a civilizing role that the country continued to fulfil in its overseas colonies. Taking the architectural legacy of the Estado Novo in its complexity leads to the conclusion that, while the dictatorship did not dismiss modernization outright, and though it adopted what could be superficially considered fascist traits, the language of national resurgence disseminated by the Portuguese regime did not express a future-oriented fascist ideology of radical rebirth. The country's futural orientation would be accomplished by adopting a restrained policy of moderate modernization that lacked the dynamism and utopian ambition of fascism, a conservatism reflected in its architecture.
2013, Beyond the Piazza. Public and Private Spaces in Modern Italian Culture
“Polemical Rationalism,” in The Rationalist Reader: Architecture and Rationalism in Western Europe, 1920-1940/1960-1990, eds. Andrew Peckham and Torsten Schmiedeknecht (Routledge, 2013), 162-165. Abbreviated extract from Etlin, Modernism in Italian Architecture, 1890-1940 (MIT Press, 1991), 235-238.
The story of Mario Palanti's skyscraper design for Benito Mussolini of 1924-26 and subsequent projects.
2015, Architectural Histories (review article)
Giuseppe Terragni was among the modern Italian architects the most rooted in the European avangarde and the most inclined toward abstraction, deconstructing his building in layers upon layers of materials, architectural elements and strata conjuring to achieve a delicate and unstable equilibrium between plastic values and dissolution of architectural masses. His buildings as famously testified by Peter Eisenman- are critical texts of the possibilities of decomposition of architectural forms and typologies as well as they are machines for the contextual transformation of the historical urban form in a subtle, unrethoric but contemporary way. We analyze two unbuilt projects of the late creative season of the Italian master, two projects where the overlay of the sleekest, most dissonant, modernist language ever and the grid, textures and sense of Roman Como reaches a dramatic peak: the restoration of Casa Vietti and the Cortesella building (both 1940).
During the twenty years of Fascist rule, the diffusion and pervasiveness all throughout Italy of the popularized image of the ancient roman symbol of fasces lictoriae well reflects the sense of a political crusade that had made from the very beginning a decisive appeal on the symbolic lure of a spatially based rhetoric. The emergent regime would be well prepared in emotionally involving the Italians through a complete arsenal of symbols and rites that, much more than autonomous elements, will come to form - in the course of twenty decisive years - a well displayed set of spatially based dramatizations, where the figurative aspect would have paved the way to a rising and robust popular consensus. It was then in the name of a mythical idea of Romanity, that the Fascist leaders will lay the basis of a complex cultural project aimed at discarding the young and still imprecise construction of the Italian national ethos, through genuinely aesthetically based actions, perfectly functional to the systematic fascistization of the liberal institutions of Italy. Among the most successful aspects of this ‘branding strategy’, should be considered the re-invention of the fasces lictoriae operated by Fascism and its diffusion throughout Italy, starting from 1923.
2017, Rhodes Historical Review
Mussolini's Fascist government in Italy (1922-1943) embarked on an ambitious campaign of urban redevelopment across the Italian state. While these urban planning projects ostensibly sought to modernize Italy's urban spaces and solve systemic issues regarding health and traffic, they were also one of the most overtly Fascist expressions of ideology and purpose during the government's twenty years in power. By redeveloping major urban spaces, appropriating certain urban forms like the piazza, and engaging in a policy of 'sventramenti' - literally, disembowelment - urban planning became an expression of Fascist ideals of action and violence that left visible scars on the urban landscape. This paper seeks to explore the process of urban redevelopment in Rome by focusing on specific sites and analyzing the ways these sites reflected Fascist doctrine as well as the state's narrative aims. This publication is sponsored by the Alpha Epsilon Delta Chapter of Phi Alpha Theta, the national collegiate honors society for history.
2012, Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome
Why would a prominent public building that still serves its original purpose, was authored by two internationally renowned architects and part of a much-touted global building campaign by a triumphant nation remain unacknowledged? The U.S. Consulate in Naples (1946-1953) offers just such a curious case. Unacknowledged by George Howe, who designed the project while a resident at the American Academy in Rome from 1948-49, and Mario De Renzi, the Rome architect who modified its design and oversaw its construction, or the U.S. State Department, which still occupies the same, prominently-situated structure on the Neapolitan waterfront, this paper definitively adds a major work to Howe's sparse postwar oeuvre and explains the stylistic, political, and professional conflicts that led an elegant example of "postwar Fascist" architecture to remain an orphan for decades.
Unlike many other publications on Nazi culture, this book is not primarily about what has been called "the Nazification of the arts," based upon state-supported use of the arts for propaganda, a curtailment of freedom in art criticism, and the political and legal Gleichschaltung, "the forcing into conformity" under a hierarchical, dictatorial leadership (Führerprinzip) of all aspects of the various branches of national and local government, the civil service, education, public finance, business, the professions, and the arts. To complement earlier studies of Gleichschaltung, the essays in this anthology explore the underlying beliefs of the Nazi racist state as they were developed and propagated in various fields of artistic activity.
Tradition and Heritage in the Contemporary Image of the City
A b s t r a c t During the fascist government, many buildings are realized in Italy, according to a policy of modernization and new mass society creation. Primarily the buildings are new managerial and service centers for the community. It follows specific formal and typological issues. In particular they have to be able to arrange many different activities. The intellectual society presents strong polemics about the definition of the best and most functional architectural language. The debate focuses on the role of the architecture in country reorganization. The relationship between " modernity " and " tradition " is topical, although interpreted in different ways, accordingly to the themes of " monumentality " and "classic esprit " .
ProQuest 10621247 Published by ProQuest LLC (2017). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author.
This work seeks to redefine the scholarship on Aldo Rossi (1931-1997), an Italian architect known for having reintroduced symbolism to European architecture after the 1960s. My thesis addresses questions surrounding the development of Rossi’s theory of city morphology, proposing that it was rooted in anti-fascist sentiments and influenced by politics of the Cold War. Rossi’s professional growth is outlined through a period conditioned by the reactionary ideologies of postwar Europe, which deeply influenced the nation’s culture and shaped artistic production. This thesis relies on unpublished archival material from Rossi’s early career that documents the leading political and philosophical ideas of his time. It reveals Rossi’s growing interest in developing a theory for a type of architecture and urban design rational in form and socialist in content, driven by the ethos of an emerging political Left. In this narrative, Rossi’s work is contextualized within the efforts of a generation of Italian architects who conducted collective research on behalf of the Ina-casa program of national reconstruction in conjunction with the era’s leading politicians. This collaborative effort ultimately led Rossi to develop theories for a structuralist reading of the city, as well as to the formulation of a type of humanist architecture in support of the collective consciousness of the Italian “public city” in the latter half of the twentieth century. ProQuest 10621247 Published by ProQuest LLC (2017). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, MI 48106 - 1346 10621247
Nationalism in the Visual Arts, ed. Richard Etlin. Studies in the History of Art, National Gallery of Art, vol. 29 (1991), 88-109.
As a sequel, see "Turin, 1902: The Search for a Modern Italian Architecture,” Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 13 (Summer, 1989), 94-109; "Italian Rationalism,” Progressive Architecture (July, 1983), 86-94; Modernism in Italian Architecture, 1890-1940 (MIT Press, 1991): "Polemical Rationalism."
2015
The book proposes a survey of buildings from the first half of the 20th century in Europe. A first article will give an overview of the spread of the buildings from this time in Europe, focusing on a new construction material: the reinforced concrete, on the basis of a chapter from the doctorate thesis of Maria Bostenaru supervised by Cristina Gociman. For the documentation of these, Maria Bostenaru did study trips to investigate the buildings on site in the past 15 years. At the basis of these study trips was the literature review in the field, from which we highlight the references provided by a study seminar at the University of Karlsruhe about architecture in the first half of the 20th century in Eastern Europe and the series of books on 20th century architecture by Prestel. Apart of this monographs dedicated to the countries subject of the research were consulted. The result of the research on site were mostly the investigation through photography of the facade, which displayed a new language compared to the previous period. Where it was possible, this was combined with the investigation of the interior space. Also, sources of the floor plan were looked for, from the references but mostly from archives. As a result, the book includes a review of the study trips documentation, with example images, references and the connection to the online database of photography. The online database built the subject of a common research of Maria Bostenaru with Alex Dill during a short visit funded by NeDiMAH at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and the goal of this publication is to document this database. Browsing the database is predecesed by forms on selected architects, for which we present also the biography, along with main works and visual material. In the idea of forms are also the posters of Cristina Gociman about Romanian architects which created cultural heritage during this time. The research thus started at the University of Karlsruhe, where Alex Dill, chair of DOCOMOMO Germany (The association for the documentation and conservation of buildings, sites and neighbourhoods of the Modern Movement) approached the second pillar of the association apart of documentation: conservation. A series of workshops were dedicated to invite specialists from different countries, thematically organised, who were involved in conserving these buildings. The book contains reviews of these conferences and a chapter by Alex Dill about this conservation.
The subversive architecture of Giuseppe Terragni - Politicization of architectural discourse in Fascist Italy Introduction - The architectural discourse in Fascist Italy A new building typology: the Casa del Fascio Giuseppe Terragni’s Casa del Fascio in Como Socio-cultural excursus: architecture and politics in post-World War I Italy Futurism and Novecento (1914-1930) New architecture and the Regime Rationalism and the “gruppo 7” Conclusion - A universal poetry
2011
This study examines Bruno Munari’s work as a graphic designer from the late 1920s to mid-1940s, with the aim of understanding the emergence and characteristics of the modernist trend in Italian graphic design. Taking shape in Milan, an original ‘design culture’ eclectically brought together two quite different strains of Modernity: a local tradition represented by the Futurist avant-garde, and a European tradition associated with Constructivism. Munari (1907–1998) worked simultaneously as painter and as advertising designer. Concentrating on Munari’s stylistic development, the study seeks to explore the interaction between the Futurist visual vocabulary and conceptions coming from architecture, photography, abstract painting, and functionalist typography that trickled in from central and northern Europe. The discussion positions the designer in his time and place, concentrating as much on the artefacts as on the broader cultural framework. Secondly, the study attempts to assess Munari’s reputation against a body of exemplary work, based on firsthand documentation. It is the first extensive, detailed record of Munari’s graphic design output, and as such provides a substantial base for a full understanding of his œuvre.
“Beloved Child: Photo Essay as Metaphysical School,” in Andrea Frank. Search. Works 1998-2005, ed. Meg Rotzel (Rome: Aracne, 2010), 89-93.
Annali d'Italianistica
1996, Journal of Contemporary History
2017, Bruno Munari: The Lightness of Art
Nearly every piece of writing on Bruno Munari’s career includes passing nods to Dada and Surrealism: aesthetic (and anti-aesthetic) precedents casually appended to the more obvious influences of Constructivism and Concretism upon his prodigious body of work. Munari’s seemingly inexorable progression toward graphic and industrial design – the practices on which he le his most enduring mark – passed through various, successive stages, in ected in turn by Futurism and the Bauhaus, Abstraction-Création and Arte Programmata, among other movements and tendencies. These affinities appear well documented in scholarship. The nature of Munari’s rapport with Surrealism and Dada, however, has yet to receive any sustained examination – something this chapter aims to redress, considering along the way not simply Munari’s absorption of European currents, but the fittful reception of Dada and Surrealism in Italy at large.
2019, Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies
This article considers the involvement of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. It considers the form, function, and content of the Italian Pavil- ion designed for this fair and asserts that the prefabricated monumental structure would be best interpreted, not in isolation, but as an element of the larger architec- tural conversation which continued to unfold across contemporary fascist Europe. Such reconsideration of this building makes it possible to evaluate the relationship between Fascist design, the assertion of political will, and the articulation of national identity and cultural heritage within a larger, transnational context. The author also investigates the American exhibition committee’s earnest and persistent, yet ultimate- ly unheeded, solicitation of Nazi German participation and argues that motives be- hind German withdrawal from this event had as much to do with the threat of popular protest as economic pressure.
2019, BUILT UTOPIAS IN THE COUNTRY SIDE: THE RURAL AND THE MODERN IN FRANCO'S SPAIN
Built Utopias in the Countryside: The Rural and the Modern in Franco’s Spain Anchored by Hüppauf and Umbach’s notion of Vernacular Modernism and focusing on architecture and urbanism during Franco’s dictatorship from 1939 to 1975, this thesis challenges the hegemonic and Northern-oriented narrative of urban modernity. It develops arguments about the reciprocal influences between the urban and the rural that characterize Spanish modernity, and analyzes the intense architectural and urban debates that resulted from the crisis of 1898, as they focused on the importance of vernacular architecture, in particular the Mediterranean one, in the definition of an “other modernity.” This search culminated before 1936 with the “Lessons of Ibiza,” and was revived at the beginning of the 1950s, when architects like Coderch, Fisac, Bohigas, and the cosigners of the Manifiesto de la Alhambra brought back the discourse of the modern vernacular as a politically acceptable form of Spanish modernity, and extended its field of application from the individual house and the rural architecture to the urban conditions, including social and middle-class housing. The core of the dissertation addresses the 20th century phenomenon of the modern agricultural village as built emergence of a rural paradigm of modernity in parallel or alternative to the metropolitan condition. In doing so, it interrogates the question of tradition, modernity, and national identity in urban form between the 1920s and the 1960s. Regarding Spain, it studies the actuation of the two Institutes that were created to implement the Francoist policy of post-war reconstruction and interior colonization—the Dirección General de Regiones Devastadas, and the Instituto Nacional de Colonización. It examines the ideological, political, urban, and architectural principles of Franco’s reconstruction of the devastated countryside, as well as his grand “hydro-social dream” of modernization of the countryside. It analyzes their role in national-building policies in liaison with the early 20th-century Regenerationist Movement of Joaquín Costa, the first works of hydraulic infrastructure under Primo de Rivera, and the aborted agrarian reform of the Second Republic. Inspired by the Zionist colonization of Palestine and Mussolini’s reclaiming of the Pontine Marshes, Falangist planners developed a national strategy of “interior colonization” that, along with the reclamation and irrigation of extensive and unproductive river basins, entailed the construction of three hundred modern villages or pueblos between 1940 and 1971. Each village was designed as a “rural utopia,” centered on a plaza mayor and the church, which embodied the political ideal of civil life under the national-catholic regime and evolved from a traditional town design in the 1940s to an increasingly abstract and modern vision, anchored on the concept of the “Heart of the City” after 1952. The program was an important catalyst for the development of Spanish modern architecture after the first period of autarchy and an effective incubator for a new generation of architects, including Alejandro de la Sota, José Luis Fernández del Amo, and others. Between tradition and modernity, these architects reinvented the pueblos as platforms of urban and architectonic experimentation in their search for a depurated rural vernacular and a modern urban form. Whereas abstraction was the primary design tool that Fernández del Amo deployed to the limits of the continuity of urban form, de la Sota reversed the fundamental reference to the countryside that characterizes Spanish surrealism to bring surrealism within the process of rural modernization in Franco’s Spain.
Largely due to the conservatism of audiences and critics, Portuguese theatre was mostly indifferent, if not downright hostile, to the avant-garde theatre coming from elsewhere in Europe. Therefore, naturalistic theatre and historical drama were the staple of Portuguese theatres until the 1950s, with the only exception of the plays of Almada Negreiros and symbolist plays by Fernando Pessoa, Raul Brandão and António Patrício. However, modernism found its place on stage in one of the most typical Portuguese theatre forms: «Revista à Portuguesa», the Portuguese revue theatre, which welcomed the first generation of Portuguese modernist painters to work as set and costume designers. Artists like Jorge Barradas, Milly Possoz, José Barbosa, among others, took the influence of the Ballets Russes of Diaghlev, and the avant-garde visual arts, to change the appearance of the most typically Portuguese theatre genre, Revista à Portuguesa. With this paper I will try to document how modernist painters gained entry in «Revista à Portuguesa» and created an art that fused the commercial interests of theatre entrepreneurs, the tastes of the bourgeois audiences and their own artistic sensibilities.
2013, Modern Language Review, 108.4
The purpose of this study is to shed more light on the subjects of architectural historiography, historical criticism and the role of architecture as ideology.
2017, Modern Italy
This article examines how Italy has dealt with the physical remains of the Fascist regime, as a window onto Italian attitudes to the past. The ventennio left indelible marks on Italy’s cities in the form of urban projects, individual buildings, monuments, plaques and street names. In effect, the survival of physical traces contrasts with the hazy memories of Fascism that exist within the Italian collective consciousness. Conspicuous, yet mostly ignored, Italy’s Fascist heritage is hidden in plain sight. However, from the 1990s, buildings associated with the regime have sparked a number of debates regarding the public memory of Fascism. Although these debates present an opportunity to re-examine history, they may also be symptomatic of a crisis in the Italian polity and of attempts to rehabilitate Fascism through historical revisionism.