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...

This small Italian town could be the answer to the debate surrounding monuments removal

2022-01-20T15:37:00-05:00

Yet today these two pieces of fascist architectural propaganda are the centrepiece of a bold artistic experiment in addressing the debate around contested monuments, one which offers a template for other communities divided over whether to tear down or keep up monuments with racist, imperialist or fascist connotations.

Bolzano, the capital city of the province of South Tyrol in northern Italy, has become an important case study over its demonstrated ability to thoughtfully frame several of its local fascist monuments in a contemporary light that presents the public with a challenge to improve its own attitudes and look at societal wrongs related to the subject matter of each.

Much of the border community’s original Tyrolean culture was wiped out during the reign of dictator Benito Mussolini, who installed and erected a host of fascist buildings and monuments as part of the establishment of a new ethnic enclave there before the war. The Victory Monument thus became especially potent talismans of Italian identity when set against the prevailing culture of the predominantly German-speaking region, and so they remained untouched until the local administration began its campaign or “recontextualizing” in the last decade following years of dispute and violent episodes which have now gone the way of Il ...

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...

Creative community issues a call to remove Philip Johnson's name because of his fascist past

2020-12-03T18:00:00-05:00

The ---- Johnson Study Group, an online organization "studying the legacy of a 20th century white supremacist [Philip Johnson] who founded the most significant modern architectural institutions in the United States" has released the following letter calling for all institutions to remove the name Philip Johnson from any reference of honor.

The letter specifically cites the Museum of Modern Art, where Johnson was the director at the Department of Architecture from 1930-1936 and 1946-1954. The letter mentions Johnson used his office at MoMA and his curatorial work as a pretense to collaborate with the German Nazi party.

According to this Twitter thread, the form will eventually be opened up for additional signatures. Follow the The ---- Johnson Study Group on Instagram to stay updated.

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."

Could this be the political/architectural diagram we have been waiting for?

2019-03-27T13:56:00-04:00

Can the relationship between architecture and politics ever be summarized by a well-organized diagram? San Francisco based writer Julia Galef recently offered a proposal on Twitter for distinguishing the four main political groups by their architectural preferences in a familiar format in the social media universe.

It recalls the drawings made by architect Leon Krier, who often preferred images over lengthy texts as a means of communicating architectural styles against their political intentions.

The Man in the Glass House: new Philip Johnson biography traces the architect's Fascist past

2018-12-17T18:37:00-05:00

In “The Man in the Glass House,” Mark Lamster’s brisk, clear-eyed new biography of Johnson, we are asked to contemplate why the impresario of twentieth-century architecture descended into such a morass of far-right politics—and how, given the depths to which he fell, he managed to clamber his way not just out of it, but to the top. [...] Johnson managed to abjure his past and, on the march toward an exceptionally successful career, leave it behind.

The New Yorker reviews the new Philip Johnson biography, The Man in the Glass House by architecture critic and professor Mark Lamster, and examines how Johnson eagerly embraced Fascism before WWII and still rose to great fame as America's iconic 20th-century architect.

"Indeed, it is difficult to think of an American as successful as Johnson who indulged a love for Fascism as ardently and as openly," writes Nikil Saval in his The New Yorker piece. "His design for Father Coughlin’s rally had been inspired by his tours of Italian Fascist architecture—though the white stage was drywall, it was meant to look like marble—and, critically, by the 'febrile excitement' that attended his visit to a National Socialist youth event in Potsdam, in 1932."

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:

Philip Johnson, the fascist

2016-04-19T13:30:00-04:00

Johnson returned home certain his life had been transformed. He found in Nazism a new international ideal. The aesthetic power and exaltation he experienced in viewing modernist architecture found its complete national expression in the Hitler-centered Fascist movement. Here was a way not merely to rebuild cities with a unified and monumental aesthetic vision for the Machine Age but to spur a rebirth of mankind itself. He had never expressed any interest in politics before. That had now changed.

"Over the next two years, Johnson moved back and forth between Europe and New York City. At home, he mounted shows and promoted modernist artists whose works he considered the best of the new. All the while, he kept an eye on the Nazis as they consolidated power. He had slept with his share of men in the demimonde of Weimar Berlin; now he turned a blind eye to Nazi restrictions on homosexual behavior, which brought imprisonment and even death sentences."

Read the rest of this fascinating excerpt from Marc Wortman's forthcoming book, 1941: Fighting the Shadow War in Vanity Fair. For more on Philip Johnson, check out these links:

“Le Corbusier was a combination of blind and naïve about all politics”

2015-07-13T15:08:00-04:00

“There’s still a myth surrounding Le Corbusier, that he’s the greatest architect of the 20th century, a generous man, a poet,” [journalist Xavier] de Jarcy said. That vision, he added, is “a great collective lie.” [...] “He is someone who thought that reform, social change, could only be made by an authority.” [...] “That’s why Le Corbusier is interesting, because of his own passions and the way he crosses the passions of the century.”

For more on the tug-of-war over Le Corbusier's politics and architectural ideology:

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.