Italian architecture has long exerted a special influence on the evolution of architectural ideas elsewhere - from the Beaux-Arts academy's veneration of Rome, to modernist and postmodern interest in Renaissance proportion, Baroque space, and Mannerist ambiguity. This book critically examines this enduring phenomenon, exploring the privileged position of Italian architects, architecture, and cities in the architectural culture of the past century. Questioning the deep-rooted myth of Italy within architectural history, the book presents case studies of Italy's powerful yet problematic position in 20th-century architectural ideologies, at a time when established Eurocentric narratives are rightly being challenged. It reconciles the privileged position of Italian architecture and design with the imperative to write history across a more global, diverse, heterogenous cultural geography. Twenty chapters from distinguished international scholars cover subjects and architects ranging from Alberti to Gio Ponti, Aldo Rossi, Manfredo Tafuri, Vittorio Gregotti; cities from Rome and Venice to Milan; and an array of international architects, movements, and architectural ideas influenced by Italy. The chapters each question where, how, and why the disciplinary edifice of 20th-century architecture-its canon of built, visual, textual, and conceptual works-relied on Italian foundations, examining where and how those foundations have become insecure. Indispensable for students and scholars of both Italian and global architectural history, Italian Imprints on Twentieth-Century Architecture provides an opportunity to consider the architectural and urban landscape of Italy from substantially new points of view.

Italian architecture has long exerted a special influence on the evolution of architectural ideas elsewhere - from the Beaux-Arts academy's veneration of Rome, to modernist and postmodern interest in Renaissance proportion, Baroque space, and Mannerist ambiguity. This book critically examines this enduring phenomenon, exploring the privileged position of Italian architects, architecture, and cities in the architectural culture of the past century. Questioning the deep-rooted myth of Italy within architectural history, the book presents case studies of Italy's powerful yet problematic position in 20th-century architectural ideologies, at a time when established Eurocentric narratives are rightly being challenged. It reconciles the privileged position of Italian architecture and design with the imperative to write history across a more global, diverse, heterogenous cultural geography. Twenty chapters from distinguished international scholars cover subjects and architects ranging from Alberti to Gio Ponti, Aldo Rossi, Manfredo Tafuri, Vittorio Gregotti; cities from Rome and Venice to Milan; and an array of international architects, movements, and architectural ideas influenced by Italy. The chapters each question where, how, and why the disciplinary edifice of 20th-century architecture-its canon of built, visual, textual, and conceptual works-relied on Italian foundations, examining where and how those foundations have become insecure. Indispensable for students and scholars of both Italian and global architectural history, Italian Imprints on Twentieth-Century Architecture provides an opportunity to consider the architectural and urban landscape of Italy from substantially new points of view.

Architect Ernesto Nathan Rogers (1909-1969) was a towering figure in 20th-century Italian architecture, with a significant impact at the international level. Through the work of his collaborative firm (Banfi Belgiojoso Peressutti Rogers, or BBPR), the editorship of publications such as Domus and Casabella, and his teaching at the Politecnico in Milan, Rogers ensured a lasting influence on the field as a practitioner, theorist and educator. However his contributions have been largely neglected by scholarship outside of Italy. Published as part of the Bloomsbury Studies in Modern Architecture series, which brings to light the work of significant yet overlooked modernist architects, this book re-assesses Ernesto Nathan Rogers' cultural legacy. It is the first comprehensive, critical work on Rogers in English, and emphasizes Rogers' vision for the role of the architect as a public intellectual, as well as his commitment to pursue a renewed path of professional and cultural research within the “Modern Project.” The book also discusses Roger's willingness to challenge academic classicized monumentality as well as modernist stereotypes, to emerge as a leader of Italian design in the aftermath of World War II; his interest in all scales of design and planning, with a cross-disciplinary mentality; tradition in modernity; and criticality as a mode of practice, to bring a detailed account of the work and thought of Ernesto Nathan Rogers to an English-speaking audience for the first time. With a foreword by Kenneth Frampton.

This volume studies the architecture and urbanism of modern-era Italian colonialism (1869-1943) as it sought to build colonies in North and East Africa and the eastern Mediterranean. Mia Fuller follows, not only the design of the physical architecture, but also the development of colonial design theory, based on the assumptions made about the colonized, and also the application of modernist theory to both Italian architecture and that of its colonies. Moderns Abroad is the first book to present an overview of Italian colonial architecture and city planning. In chronicling Italian architects' attempts to define a distinctly Italian colonial architecture that would set Italy apart from Britain and France, it provides a uniquely comparative study of Italian colonialism and architecture that will be of interest to specialists in modern architecture, colonial studies, and Italian studies alike.

Winner, category of Architecture and Urban Studies in the 1991 Professional/Scholarly Publishing Annual Awards Competition presented by the Association of American Publishers, Inc. and Winner, Alice Davis Hitchcock Award, Society of Architectural Historians. Richard Etlin's sweeping, generously illustrated study explores the changing idea of modernism in Italian architecture over the five crucial decades that saw the birth and crystallization of modern architecture. Systematically treating the major architects and movements of the period - such as Raimondo D'Aronoco and Art Nouveau, Antonio Sant'Elia and Futurism, Marcello Piacentini and the modern vernacular, Giovanni Muzio and the Novecento, Giuseppe Terragni and Italian Rationalism - this book also explores the ways in which the original ideals of the various movements were transformed by working for the Fascist state. Modernism in Italian Architecture examines the legacy of the romantic revolution, which confronted architects with the dilemma of how to create an architecture that was both modern and national. It challenges accepted opinion on a variety of issues. Etlin argues against too close an association of Sant'Elia's architecture and manifesto with Futurism by demonstrating a broader context for its themes. His study of Novecento architecture chronicles a movement whose use of classical detailing created a "postmodernism" contemporaneous with the pioneering buildings of the International Style elsewhere in Europe and preceding its arrival in Italy. Etlin undermines the notion that the architects of Italian Rationalism blindly followed an antihistorical credo, by bringing to fight the profoundly contextual nature of the abstract geometries of the best Rationalist architecture. The final section, devoted to Fascism, focuses on Terragni's famous Casa del Fascio in Como and the Danteurn project by Terragni and Lingeri. Etlin concludes with a consideration of the anti-Semitic attacks on modern architecture during the Fascist racial campaign of 1938. Richard Etlin is Professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Maryland.

Aldo Rossi was a practicing architect and leader of the Italian architectural movement La Tendenza and one of the most influential theorists of the twentieth century. The Architecture of the City is his major work of architectural and urban theory. In part a protest against functionalism and the Modern Movement, in part an attempt to restore the craft of architecture to its position as the only valid object of architectural study, and in part an analysis of the rules and forms of the city's construction, the book has become immensely popular among architects and design students.

Today, nearly a century after the National Fascist Party came to power in Italy, questions about the built legacy of the regime provoke polemics among architects and scholars. Mussolini’s government constructed thousands of new buildings across the Italian Peninsula and islands and in colonial territories. From hospitals, post offices and stadia to housing, summer camps, Fascist Party Headquarters, ceremonial spaces, roads, railways and bridges, the physical traces of the regime have a presence in nearly every Italian town. The Routledge Companion to Italian Fascist Architecture investigates what has become of the architectural and urban projects of Italian fascism, how sites have been transformed or adapted and what constitutes the meaning of these buildings and cities today. The essays include a rich array of new arguments by both senior and early career scholars from Italy and beyond. They examine the reception of fascist architecture through studies of destruction and adaptation, debates over reuse, artistic interventions and even routine daily practices, which may slowly alter collective understandings of such places. Paolo Portoghesi sheds light on the subject from his internal perspective, while Harald Bodenschatz situates Italy among period totalitarian authorities and their symbols across Europe. Section editors frame, synthesize and moderate essays that explore fascism’s afterlife; how the physical legacy of the regime has been altered and preserved and what it means now. This critical history of interpretations of fascist-era architecture and urban projects broadens our understanding of the relationships among politics, identity, memory and place. This companion will be of interest to students and scholars in a range of fields, including Italian history, architectural history, cultural studies, visual sociology, political science and art history.