Abstract
Visibility, public space, social modernization and aesthetic rationalization were the key features of the debate on the arts in Italy during the dictatorship, but architecture encompassed all of these at once, thereby gaining a privileged position in the competition to become the official State Art. Taking the debates on architecture and the national struggles for the hegemony of architectural movements and styles over others, most notably the dispute which pitted the proponents of rationalism against those of monumentalism, we argue that architecture functioned as a tightly-organised system of theory and practice, and thus as a point of reference for many forms of artistic expression, and most notably for the national novel in its attempt both at reformulating the dialectics between subjectivity and objectivity and at reconstructing the real.
Between Theory and Construction: The Dialectics of Architecture. Debates in the field of architecture were crucial for the artistic and political life of the regime. These debates revolved around the definition of some key expressions, such as 'Fascist architecture', 'modern architecture', and 'arte di Stato'. However, they chiefly centred on the idea of the total work of art that all forms of artistic expression had to aspire to be. The total work of art had not only to account for the change in the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity, but also to represent the sacralisation of the New Man through the arts as well as through urban reality. Moreover, it had to function as an expression of how the New Man participated in the political modernity of the dictatorship and its drive to modernize the social sphere, while at the same time formulating on the terms of the artist's legitimation. Because of its aesthetic, social and political profile, the architectural experiment, whether in its rationalist or monumental form, embodied all of these features, but it could not function in isolation.
Central Hypothesis
Our main hypothesis as far as architecture within the Fascist system of the arts is concerned is that it functioned as a catalyst and point of reference for many other forms of artistic expression.
General Principles
3. The Spatial Construction of the New Man's Urban Reality
In Italy from 1928 until 1935, battle raged between rationalist and functionalist architects: intellectually speaking, it was won by the former, politically by the latter. From 1932 onwards, architecture became more and more prominent within the debate on State Art. As far as architecture was concerned, l'arte di Stato up until the mid-Thirties privileged simplified construction, intended to eliminate any excess in order to rationalize the experiences of the daily life for Italians. This can be seen in such buildings as Giuseppe Terragni, Casa del Fascio (Como), 1928-36 Pier Luigi Nervi, Stadio Giovanni Berta, (later renamed Stadio Artemio Franchi), 1929-33, or Luigi Figini and Gino Pollini (+ Libera, Frette, Bottoni), Casa Elettrica, 1930.The New Man had to live in a space, which was rational in public and constructive in private. From 1935 onwards, Piacentini would become the leading architect in Italy, spelling the end for rationalist architecture, whose experimental drive, as he saw it, had removed it from the social problem which, with the collapse of consensus, the regime needed to tackle. The value placed on architecture throughout the twenty years of Fascist rule, however, lay in its social impact. The debate on the novel emphasised similar aspects: social significance, collective ethos, construction over fragmentation of narrative structure. To a certain extent, both forms constituted social experiments in so far as they were committed to the idea of radically changing the daily lives of Italians and in doing so of becoming l'arte di Stato, an overarching superior aesthetic and political order. Both projects aesthetically called for a return to simplicity of execution and an emphasis on the sharing of collective spaces, as Pietro Maria Bardi wrote on 4 August 1932 in his praise both of Mussolini's collective revolution and of how this political system had changed the lives of Italian citizens in their daily habits and spaces of action. In both cases, lucidity, clarity and direct contact with the materiality of reality were to be priorities– whether in writing or in public buildings, as seen in the corporativist cities.
4. Narrative Rationalization: Staging a Collective Spectacle
This project of construction was based on the idea of the narratological rationalization of forms: in architecture, it is exemplified by Giovanni Muzio's Milanese Ca' Brutta (1922), delineating a clear moment of transition from Novecentismo to rationalism through the use of streamlined geometry. The equivalent in literature ensued with Alberto Moravia's landmark of unadorned stylistic precision, Gli indifferenti (1929). This notion of narratological rationalization combines the principles of architectural theory which regarded construction as the rationalization of forms, upheld for example in Giuseppe Terragni, Casa del Fascio (Como), 1928-36, with those governing the novel, which combined morality with a new understanding of the relationship between the subjectivity of the character and the materiality of external reality (Dino Buzzati, Il deserto dei tartari, 1940, or Massimo Bontempelli's magic realism). In his writings on twentieth-century literature later collected in L'avventura novecentista, Bontempelli theorized and advocated an anti-rhetorical, anti-subjective, and anti-decadent literature, committed to the 'construction' of objects and the creation of new myths of modernity, a project he explicitly compared to architecture. In Quadrante (Milan, 1933-36), these theorizations were reprised and elaborated upon: the first issue opened with Bardi's statement on the need for a 'united front of aesthetics', followed by Bontempelli's 'principles' to achieve the 'unity of space and time' which is the highest aim of the arts. These founding principles of narratological reconstruction had a much wider application, which went beyond architecture and crossed over into the novelistic realm.