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Front to Rear: Architecture and Planning during World War II, March 7-8, 2009 >
Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item:
http://hdl.handle.net/2451/30267
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| Title: | Italy 1938: The Autarchic Debate |
| Authors: | Aviles, Pep |
| Keywords: | architecture
Italy
World War II |
| Issue Date: | 15-Sep-2011 |
| Abstract: | On 3 October 1935, Mussolini's fascist regime invaded Ethiopia with
undesired but foreseeable consequences for its imperialist aims: four
days after the conquest, the Society of Nations imposed the subsequent
economic sanctions, promoting an international economic blockage.
Although financial retaliations against Italy didn't last long, ending
on 15 July 1936, the chance was taken by the dictatorship regime to
intensify autarchic policies as a way to overcome the scarcity of raw
materials and successfully address the pre-war intricate global
panorama. This soon translated into both a ferrous control of foreign
currencies in order to purchase commodities in the international markets
and a vociferous campaign discouraging those materials as iron and
steel, which the military endeavor jealously demanded. Consequently,
architecture as a discipline and all the industrial activity around it
suffered from governmental interferences through the scarcity and
control of commodities, therefore accommodating the discourse to a new
tendentiously created material situation. If during the immediate past
the defense of modern materials was traditionally articulated around
technical and sociological values, the battle in pre-war Italy was
politically and geographically focused: after stigmatizing some modern
materials as 'antinational', the dispute among those who saw in modern
techniques a thread to Italian traditional architecture, and those
embracing the formal and intellectual basis of modern movement became
ideologically loaded. National and autochthonous values came to the
fore, promoting local materials as stone, marble, or wood, as a source
to diminish the cost of construction following a seeming
misinterpretation of the autarchic logic. The presentation is focused
on the written technical reports and the political reactions taking
place after the debate organized by Il Giornale d'Italia during July and
August 1938 and entitled 'Per l'autarchia. Politica dell'Architettura'.
The journal published fifteen articles with contributions of some of the
major figures of Italian architecture as Marcelo Piacentini, Gio Ponti
or Pier Luigi Nervi. Those articles soon triggered resounding reactions
in magazines such as Casabella or Rassegna, filling their pages with
technical investigations and opinionated articles and therefore
polarizing the discussion between the architects supporting the official
indictments and the ones against. The sour discussion led to a
definition of autarchy directly and intimately linked to the cheapness
of the outputs on the one hand, but also to a traditional, historicist
national turn as a legitimate way to address future challenges in
architecture. Material availability became then the battlefield of
ideology, intermingling political interests, aesthetic agendas, and
warfare events. Even though the paper does not address post-war Italian
architecture, the implicit target is to present an episode of the always
difficult relationships between politics, architecture, industry, and
material contingencies in order to partially unveil the archaeological
precedents of the Italian post-war architecture. |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/2451/30267 |
| Appears in Collections: | Front to Rear: Architecture and Planning during World War II, March 7-8, 2009
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Files in This Item:
| File |
Description |
Size | Format |
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| Aviles, Pep.pdf | conference paper abstract and biographical statement | 62.63 kB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
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