Review: Italy: Modern Architectures in History, by Diane Ghirardo

Abstract

Diane Ghirardo Italy: Modern Architectures in History London: Reaktion Books, 2013, 336 pp., 207 b/w illus. $29.95 (paper), ISBN 9781861898647 When we think of the history of modern architecture the story might revolve around the Germans and the Bauhaus, but Diane Ghirardo’s Italy: Modern Architectures in History might give us pause, since it reminds us of a more fundamental driver of “the modern,” namely, the rise of the nation-state. This was a significant aspect for the Prussians during the Enlightenment, and indeed some have argued that Friedrich Schinkel was, in a sense, the first modern for the Germans. But the German unification as such took place only in 1871, and though there are many parallels, the Italian situation was considerably more stressed, for they not only had to build a nation-state after 1861 out of the chaos of unification but also had to do so in the vortex of modern industrialization. Timing was everything; the Greeks won their independence in 1830, but the Greeks never accepted—or perhaps one can say embraced— “the crisis of modernity” in quite the same way as the Italians. The task of creating Italy’s image fell, of course, to the architects, city designers, and artists whose accomplishments gave visible definition to the question of what a national architecture should look like, especially in comparison with the architecture of countries far ahead in the modernization enterprise. The Italians were not alone in that general ambition. The Americas were equally concerned with developing a national style, as were many of the other European nations in the era of Romantic nationalism. But the Italian story remains unique, given the tension between that nation’s deep history and its now-nationalized civilizational ambitions. Unique to the Italian perspective was the situation that the country was not a colonial power with access to far-flung resources. In 1861, it was largely a rural nation. The scale of the transformation should, therefore, not be underestimated. …