The lessons of Fascist Rome

Abstract

In 1923, Le Corbusier’s Vers une architecture warned architects that Rome was a dangerous vector of anti-modernist principles. Two decades later, the built legacy of Italy’s fascist era had reshaped the postwar city, but the architectural status of this modern and often-modernist fabric was ambivalent. While it often fulfilled Le Corbusier’s aesthetic ideals, it also concretized a politically discredited regime. Although the United States’ midcentury architects understood that fascist works should be classified among Rome’s perilous “horrors,” they nonetheless influenced several key figures at the postwar American Academy. Robert Venturi’s fascination with Armando Brasini and the evocations of EUR at Lincoln Center in New York City both demonstrate direct lines of influence from Fascist Rome to Cold War–era US that, much like interwar Italy, deployed reconciliations of modernity, monumentality, and history to proclaim a modern imperium. These architects followed a parallel call from Le Corbusier, who had challenged those with “eyes that can see” to discern timeless lessons beneath Rome’s surfaces. Their absorption of the city’s fascist legacy helped reposition a repudiated period in architectural discourse.