This richly textured cultural history of Italian fascism traces the narrative path that accompanied the making of the regime and the construction of Mussolini's power. Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi reads fascist myths, rituals, images, and speeches as texts that tell the story of fascism. Linking Mussolini's elaboration of a new ruling style to the shaping of the regime's identity, she finds that in searching for symbolic means and forms that would represent its political novelty, fascism in fact brought itself into being, creating its own power and history. Falasca-Zamponi argues that an aesthetically founded notion of politics guided fascist power's historical unfolding and determined the fascist regime's violent understanding of social relations, its desensitized and dehumanized claims to creation, its privileging of form over ethical norms, and ultimately its truly totalitarian nature.

This volume collects the proceedings of the International Seminar The Mediterranean Medina, that took place in the School of Architecture at Pescara from 17th to 19th of June 2004.

"Tafuri's work is probably the most innovative and exciting new form of European theory since French poststructuralism and this book is probably the best introduction to it for the newcomer. ..."

How can architecture today be simultaneously relevant to its urban context and at the very forefront of design? For a decade or so, iconic architecture has been fuelled by the market economy and consumers' insatiable appetite for the novel and the different. The relentless speed and scale of urbanisation, with its ruptured, decentralised and fast-changing context, though, demands a rethink of the role of the designer and the function of architecture. This title of 2 confronts and questions the profession's and academia's current inability to confidently and comprehensively describe, conceptualise, theorise and ultimately project new ideas for architecture in relation to the city. In so doing, it provides a potent alternative for projective cities: Typological Urbanism. This pursues and develops the strategies of typological reasoning in order to re-engage architecture with the city in both a critical and speculative manner. Architecture and urbanism are no longer seen as separate domains, or subservient to each other, but as synthesising disciplines and processes that allow an integrating and controlling effect on both the city and its built environment.

"In this volume, which accompanies the largest exhibition ever mounted at the Guggenheim Museum, twenty-one essays by eminent scholars from Germany, Great Britain, Russia, and the United States explore the activity of the Russian and Soviet avant-garde in all its diversity and complexity. These essays trace the work of Malevich's Unovis (Affirmers of the New Art) collective in Vitebsk, which introduced Suprematism's all-encompassing geometries into the design of textiles, ceramics, and indeed whole environments; the postrevolutionary reform of art education and the creation of Moscow's Vkhutemas (Higher Artistic-Technical Workshops), where the formal and analytical princples of the avant-garde were the basis of instruction; the debates over a "proletarian art" and the transition to Constructivism, "production art," and the "artist-constructor"; the organization of new artist-administered "museums of artistic culture"; the "third path" in non-objective art taken by Mikhail Larionov; the return to figuration in the mid-1920s by the young artists - and former students of the avant-garde - in Ost (the Society of Easel Painters); the debates among photographers, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, on the superiority of the fragmented or continuous image as a representation of the new socialist reality; book, porcelain, fabric, and stage design; and the evolution of a new architecture, from the experimental projects of Zhivskul'ptarkh (the Synthesis of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture Commission) to the multistage competition, in 1931-32, for the Palace of Soviets, which "proved" the inapplicability of a Modernist architecture to the Bolshevik Party's aspirations."