Archinect - News

What to do about Italy’s fascist monuments? Contextualize them.

2023-02-27T18:01:00-05:00

After World War II, prompted by the Allies, Germany underwent an intense de-Nazification program. Not so Italy — there was no equivalent de-fascistization. The country is still filled with buildings and street names that evoke its 20-year dictatorship. By not challenging the history of these monuments, the memory of fascism has been smoothly integrated into the Italian present.

There are at least 1,400 monuments to the Fascist Mussolini regime spread throughout the country. The era's architectural legacy will, in lieu of full-blown removal, be placed in context according to the hopes of local historians and preservationists who say they want to fight back against the notion that fascism also ushered modern architecture into Italy.

This comes at a time when far-right politics are on the rise nationally. Many see parallels to the struggle of U.S. activists to remove Confederate Civil War monuments, which, unlike in Italy, were mostly the product of a bitter 30-year memory war between North and South.

Previously on Archinect: This small Italian town could be the answer to the debate surrounding monuments removal

A 2017 New Yorker essay from historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat outlined the contemporary causes succinctly:

“[W]hen Berlusconi brought the right-wing Italian Social Movement Party to power, his rehabilitation of Fascism was aided by an existing network of pilgr...

Nuremberg plans to convert monumental Nazi-era relic into a concert venue

2021-12-17T17:53:00-05:00

One of the most significant pieces to the architectural history of Hitler’s reign is now set to be converted into a concert venue in a controversial decision currently making waves in the second-largest city in Bavaria.

DW is reporting that the infamous Nuremberg Congress Hall building, which is part of Hitler’s planned Nazi party rally grounds complex, will serve as the new temporary home of the Nuremberg State Theater following a city council decision Wednesday.

The cultural venture would join another recent adaptive reuse plan from MVRDV that will transform a portion of Berlin’s erstwhile Tempelhof Airport into a local film academy campus.

The Ludwig and Franz Ruff-designed building’s construction was never completed as Nazi officials struggled to finance it and other ambitious construction projects in the build up of armaments for World War II. The building is currently administered by the Documentation Center Nazi Party Rally Grounds (Dokumentationszentrum Reichsparteitagsgelä...

Nuremberg will stop Nazi rally grounds from further decay but won't restore them

2019-05-20T13:39:00-04:00

Should a modern democracy preserve an architecture and landscape designed to glorify the 20th century’s most infamous dictator? And, if the answer is yes, how? The city of Nuremberg has grappled with these questions for years. It is now about to embark on an €85m plan to conserve the vast Nazi party rally grounds designed by Adolf Hitler’s architect Albert Speer.

The enormous former Nazi party rally complex, with its Zeppelin Grandstand centerpiece, has been decaying for decades but—preserved and presented in the appropriate manner—could serve as a highly relevant educational landmark.

"We won’t rebuild, we won’t restore, but we will conserve," The Art Newspaper quotes Nuremberg’s chief culture official, Julia Lehner, saying. "It is an important witness to an era—it allows us to see how dictatorial regimes stage-manage themselves."

Casa del Fascio eyed by Italian far right to become major art & architecture museum

2018-04-03T19:06:00-04:00

Italy’s far-right Lega party, which won almost 18% of the vote in the general election on 4 March and could form part of the next coalition government, wants to turn a former Fascist party headquarters in Como, in the Lombardy region, into northern Italy’s biggest museum of Modern art, architecture and design.

As reported by The Art Newspaper, the leader of Italy's newly empowered far-right Lega party, Matteo Salvini, has called in his manifesto, besides the expected anti-immigration, anti-European Union views, to create a grand museum of architecture, design, and modern art in the northern Italian city of Como — inside the Mussolini-commissioned 1936 former Casa del Fascio.

The New Yorker asks, "Why are so many fascist monuments still standing in Italy?"

2017-10-16T12:57:00-04:00

So why is it that, as the United States has engaged in a contentious process of dismantling monuments to its Confederate past, and France has rid itself of all streets named after the Nazi collaborationist leader Marshall Pétain, Italy has allowed its Fascist monuments to survive unquestioned?

Many monuments and buildings constructed in the late nineteen-thirties, as Benito Mussolini was preparing to host the 1942 World's fair, are still standing in Rome.

"In Germany, a law enacted in 1949 against Nazi apologism, which banned Hitler salutes and other public rituals, facilitated the suppression of Third Reich symbols. Italy underwent no comparable program of reëducation."

The architectural eclecticism of Mussolini's Italy

2016-06-01T13:18:00-04:00

...Mussolini, at least for his first decade in power, wasn’t quite as interested in architecture as his fellow dictators. While enthusiastically censoring film-makers, writers, academics and journalists, he let architects do as they please [...] The resulting architectural output, between Mussolini’s rise to power in 1922 and the late 1930s, when he began to exert more control, embodies an accidentally healthy pluralism.

"While Hitler rejoiced in the traditional völkisch kitsch of his imaginary master race, and Stalin revelled in over-iced baroque confections, Mussolini sat back and let historicist revivalism compete with the crisp forms of forward-looking modernism."

For more on the architecture of fascism, check out these links:

Second life for fascist architecture: Will Mussolini's Square Colosseum become a Palazzo for Fendi?

2015-02-17T14:14:00-05:00

A cash shortage in Rome could see the city’s fascist-era Square Colosseum sold to the fashion house Fendi, despite calls in the Italian capital to keep the building in state hands. More than 70 years after the Palazzo della Civiltà del Lavoro was built under the orders of Benito Mussolini it could soon be reinvented as a home for luxury goods.

Italy’s planned Holocaust museum moving to EUR, Mussolini’s expo site

2014-09-05T13:07:00-04:00

The Holocaust museum planned for Rome since 2005 could open next year in a new, bigger location at EUR, named after the Esposizione Universale Roma, in time to mark the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. After almost a decade of delay and €15m spent to acquire a plot of land, the first Museo della Shoah quietly stalled before construction even started.

Nuremberg to spend €70 million on re-building Nazi rally grounds

2013-09-05T18:50:00-04:00

Nuremberg plans to spend up to 70 million euro restoring the sprawling complex used by Adolf Hitler for his mass rallies, as debate continues in Germany over what to do with Nazi-era architecture. “This is a job of national importance, we cannot take it on alone,” said Ulrich Maly, the Social Democrat mayor of the Bavarian city, who added he would ask for federal funds to complete the project.

Editor's Picks #314

2013-05-07T13:14:00-04:00

Over at the LA Times, Christopher Hawthorne reported on LACMA Director Michael Govan’s plan’s for $650-million new building by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor...Eric Chavkin commented "New construction has always been fundraising tail that wags the museum dog. Big names to draw bigger money...Now that AMPAS is leveraging it's Oscar prestige to be a part of LACMA, a new name to entice donor dollars is Zumthor, a name that means absolutely nothing to most.

News
Michael Z Wise reviewed the newest edition of Albert Speer, Architecture by Léon Krier for the Wall Street Journal. Mr. Wise concluded his review "Though he is again bemoaning a contemporary inability to regard classicism in a detached manner, it is Léon Krier who is in a delirious thrall to a malevolent aesthetic".

Will Galloway was surprised "wow, i didn't need another reason to dislike krier, but this one certainly seems more than enough to set aside any other complaint about the guy and never revisit them. its amazing that someone could hate modernism so much that even hitler's vision for the world seems palatable to him. nasty". For his part Steven Ward
argued "I'd rather see the swastika redeemed for its original associations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika) than see any redemption of Speer's work. It's not that the style(s) from which he borrowed were bad so much as his intentional bombastic over-scaling of everything. These buildings were meant to communicat...

KATARXIS Moment: Peter Eisenman and Leon Krier, on dishwashing...

2009-06-30T23:18:00-04:00

Vintage 1983... Based on real and virtual quotes, the debate is fictitiously edited by KATARXIS.
Peter Eisenman: "Leon, come on, you cannot build this way anymore today!"
Leon Krier: " You can't, but I can! "
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