Italian Architects and Fascist Politics: An Evaluation of the Rationalist's Role in Regime Building

The relationship between the thought and architecture of Italian Rationalists and the new Fascist state is commonly presented as a battle between revolutionary modernism and a reactionary regime. Most historians have ignored the ardent Fascism of the best architects, while others simply avoid the issue altogether and study the buildings as stylistic phenomena. This attitude in part derives from a post-war desire to extricate the best architects and their architecture from a thoroughly discredited political system. Consequently, the architects' own words about their architecture and their ideas about Fascist culture and the purposes for which their state-funded buildings were designed are ignored. Historians acknowledge that the Modern Movement in other European nations encompassed social programs, but Italian architecture of the inter-war period has been strangely exempt from discussion on this level. Despite years of heated polemics and debates during the 20s, Rationalists, traditionalists, and moderates in Italy reached a consensus on political and social objectives. The Fascist state claimed to offer revolutionary social programs, and the various architectural factions merely argued about the appropriate forms within which to house these programs. This article discusses the differences between the various groups of architects, examines the work and writings of some leading Rationalists with particular reference to Fascist notions of hierarchy, order, and collective action, and discusses the ways in which Rationalist architecture celebrated Fascism. It also offers an explanation for the fact that Modern Movement architecture received substantial state support in Italy as it did from no other major power in the decade before World War II.