Modernism in Italian architecture, 1890-1940 9780262050388

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Acknowledgments (page ix)
Introduction (page xiii)
Modernism before World War I
1 The First Italian Exposition of Architecture (page 3)
2 Arte Nuova: Turin, 1902 (page 23)
3 Sant'Elia: From Arte Nuova to Futurism (page 53)
4 Contextualism and the Reasoned Picturesque (page 101)
5 A Modern Vernacular Architecture (page 129)
Modernism between the Wars
6 Decorative Novecento Architecture (page 165)
7 The Birth of Italian Rationalism (page 225)
8 Rationalist Architecture: A Contextual Avant-Garde (page 255)
9 Geometric Novecento Architecture (page 329)
Modernism and Fascism
10 The Rationalist Discovery of Fascism (page 377)
11 Imperial Architecture for the Fascist Revolution: Rome, 1924-1934 (page 391)
12 The Casa del Fascio, Como (page 439)
13 The Esposizione Universale of 1942 (page 481)
14 The Danteum, Rome (page 517)
15 Italian Rationalism and Anti-Semitism (page 569)
Notes (page 599)
Works Cited (page 679)
Illustration Credits (page 713)
Index (page 717)

Citation preview

Modernism in Italian Architecture, 1890-1940

Modernism in Italian Architecture, 1890-1940

Richard A. Eglin

The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England

© 1991 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. Excerpts from Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, translated by Arthur Goldhammer, © 1984 by The University of Chicago. Used by permission of the University of Chicago Press. Originally published as La naissance du Purgatoire, © 1981 Editions Gallimard. Excerpts from The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, 3 volumes, translated by Allen Mandelbaum, © 1980, 1982 by Allen Mandelbaum on the English translation. Used by permission of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam, Doubleday, Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

This book was set in Sabon by DEKR Corporation and printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Etlin, Richard A. Modernism in Italian architecture, 1890-1940 / Richard A. Etlin.

p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-262-05038-2 1. Fascism and architecture—Italy. 2. Architecture, Modern—20th century—Italy.

720’.945'09041—dc20 90-32983 3. Nationalism and architecture—Italy. I. Title. NA1118.E86 1990

CIP

for Melissa

Contents

Acknowledgments 1x

Introduction xiti

Modernism before World War I I 1 The First Italian Exposition of Architecture 3

2 Arte Nuova: Turin, 1902 23 3. Sant’Elia: From Arte Nuova to Futurism 53 4 Contextualism and the Reasoned Picturesque 101 5 A Modern Vernacular Architecture 129

Modernism between the Wars I 6 Decorative Novecento Architecture 165 7 The Birth of Italian Rationalism 225 8 Rationalist Architecture: A Contextual Avant-Garde 255 9 Geometric Novecento Architecture 329

Modernism and Fascism | 10 The Rationalist Discovery of Fascism 377 11- Imperial Architecture for the Fascist Revolution: Rome, 1924—

1934 39] 12 The Casa del Fascio, Como 439 13. The Esposizione Universale of 1942 481 14 The Danteum, Rome 517 15 Italian Rationalism and Anti-Semitism 569

Notes 599 Works Cited 679 Illustration Credits 713

Index 717

Acknowledgments

Research for this book was facilitated by a series of grants that provided summer support and permitted release time from teaching. Thanks to a Fulbright-Hays Junior Research Fellowship for Italy and a fellowship from the American Academy in Rome (National Endowment for the Humanities Post-Doctoral Fellowship), I was able to spend the 1980-81 academic year abroad. In recording my gratitude to the administration and staff of these organizations for their generous and cheerful assistance, I wish to mention in particular Cipriana Scelba, Executive Director of the Commissione per gli Scambi Culturali fra l’Italia e gli Stati Uniti, and, at the American Academy, the administrative assistant Bianca Passeri, the former secretary to the director Christine Young, the former receptionist Maria Verzotto, and the librarian Lucilla Marino. During my sojourn in Italy, I concentrated on the documents in the archives of several of the main architects found in this study. I am grateful to the late Arch. Giovanni Muzio, who generously allowed me two extensive interviews, gave me a tour of the Ca’ Brutta, showed me his library of folio editions, and placed his personal archives at my disposal; Cav. Enrico Moiola, who faciliated my research at the Angiolo Mazzoni Archives conserved in the Galleria Museo Depero of the Comune di Rovereto and to Carlo Prosser, who helped me with my work there; Arch. Emilio

Terragni and Ing. Carlo Terragni, who warmly welcomed me at the Terragni family archives in Como; and Sig.a Stefania Libera Boscaro and Arch. Paola Libera, who enabled me to consult the Libera family archives in Rome. I am particularly grateful for the continuing assistance of the Terragni family over the ensuing years, including the help of Ing. Attilio Terragni, who facilitated my research during my last visit in the summer of 1986, and Arch. Elisabetta Terragni, who subsequently provided me

with important documents. My work in Rome was especially fruitful thanks to the assistance of Ettore Alberti at the Library of the Facolta di Architettura, Universita degli Studi di Roma.

After my year at the American Academy, I was fortunate to receive continuing support from the University of Maryland General Research Board in the form of a Summer Research Award (1982), a Book Subsidy Award (1983), and a Semester Research Award (1984). These were followed by a Guggenheim Fellowship (1985—86) which enabled me to spend

the academic year exploring Fascist ideology and the summer back in Italy. On this trip, Arch. Lorenzo Muzio generously permitted me to study

further the documents in his father’s archives, where I was patiently assisted by Arch. Giovanni Muzio’s draftsman of many years, Geom. Luigi Razzini. At the Archivio Storico Civico in Milan, Franco Ganzaroli helped me decipher several hard to read handwritten notes and reports and elucidated the meaning of a technical and bureaucratic vocabulary used by the Commissione Igienico-Edilizia a half century ago.

Continuing research on this project has been made possible by the facilities of the Library of Congress, New York Public Library, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University, and especially by the services of the interlibrary loan system. Over the years, the staff at the University of Maryland Interlibrary Loan Division, under the direction of Judith Cmero, has cheerfully and efficiently processed my nu-

merous requests for books and articles. At the University of Maryland School of Architecture, the former librarian Berna Neal and the slide curator Elizabeth Alley, along with their respective staffs, have been exceedingly generous with their time and assistance. Mary Volpe and the Computer Emporium of the University of Maryland provided crucial technical support. I am also grateful to Prof. Rossana Bossaglia; Arch.

, Giorgio Cavaglieri; Prof. Enrico Mantero; Lisa Licitra Ponti; Prof. Giulia Bologna, Director of the Archivio Storico Civico e Biblioteca Trivulziana of the Comune di Milano; Dott. GianLuigi Dacco, Director of the Musei Civici of Lecco; Arch. Cesare Columba, Dirigente nel Servizio Lavori e Costruzione delle Ferrovie dello Stato; Kathryn Deiss, formerly Serials Librarian of the Thomas J. Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City; Lea A. Nickless, Curatorial Assistant at the Wolfsonian Foundation; Peggy A. Loar, Director of the Wolfsonian Foundation; Marilyn Holt, Assistant Head, Pennsylvania Department, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh; Marcia Reed, Associate Librarian at the J. Paul Getty Center and Library; Lisa Rosenthal, Assistant to the Curator, Division of Drawings and Archives, and Kate Chipman, Indexer-Reference Librarian, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, for providing me with important documentation. I also have a long-

standing debt of gratitude to Angela Giral, head Avery Librarian. Piergiuseppe Bozzetti, Cultural Attaché at the Italian Embassy in Washington, D. C., provided invaluable assistance with bureaucratic and intellectual matters. Joseph Mills made excellent photographic prints for many of the illustrations used in this book. John Eveleth, Jr., redrew a number of illustrations from photocopies and poor photographs with a patience and skill that I deeply admire and highly value. Special mention must be made of the untiring assistance of Arch. Rosalia Vittorini, who made my 1986 summer visit to Rome doubly pro-

x | Acknowledgments

ductive by working with me as we found, transcribed, or photocopied the

documents that I had not yet consulted abroad and that could not be found in the United States. During the hot summer of 1987, while I was writing a new draft of this book at home, Arch. Vittorini persevered in Rome to locate and secure the numerous newspaper and magazine articles and hard to find pamphlets that I was requesting. This invaluable assistance continued into the winter of 1988—89 and provided me with crucial documentation in the last phases of production. During the course of researching and writing this book, I have benefited from the exchange of ideas or information with many friends and colleagues, including especially Giorgio Ciucci, Silvia Danesi, Francesco Moschini, Giorgio Muratore, Silvio Pasquarelli, Marcello Ricci, and Giuseppe Vallifuoco in Rome; Maurizio Grandi and Luciano Patetta in Milan; Cesare De Seta and Anna Giannetti in Naples; and my colleagues in the United States, many of whom are writing on aspects of this subject— Esther da Costa Meyer, Dennis Doordan, Diane Ghirardo, Henry Millon, Richard Pommer, Carol Rusche, Thomas Schumacher, Ellen Shapiro, Debora L. Silverman, Nancy Troy, Carol Willis, and R. Lindley Vann. Mary McLeod and Gwendolyn Wright sent me important material from New York libraries. Arch. Paolo Farina and Fiamma Arditi made it possible for me to visit and photograph the Casa Borletti, as did Arch. Attilio Pizzigoni for the Villa Pizzigoni. Arch. Maria Luisa Belgiojoso extended a warm hospitality and arranged an interview with Arch. Lodovico Belgiojoso, whose reminiscences were very helpful. I am truly grateful to Arch. Aldo Norsa and Arch. Paola Iacucci in Milan, Prof. Maristella Casciato and Arch. Franco Panzini in Rome, and Prof. Giorgio Ciucci in Venice, who provided not only intellectual stimulation, but also a deeply appreciated hospitality that made research abroad particularly pleasurable. Maristella Casciato also sent me important documents and assisted me with the translation of several of the more difficult Italian texts. Anna Neri and Maria Trunnell also gave advice in this area. Responsibility for all translations is, of course, my own. Ada Francesca Marciano generously sent me photocopies of several primary source documents that she used for her book Giuseppe Terragni. Opera completa 1925-1943 (1987). Dennis Doordan gave me permission to read his doctoral dissertation, “Architecture and Politics in Fascist Italy: Il Movimento Italiano per |’Architettura Razionale, 1928-1932” (Columbia University, 1983), which is held under restricted access by University Microfilms International. Esther da Costa Meyer kindly sent me a copy of her doctoral dissertation, “The Retreat into the Future: the Work of Antonio Sant’Elia” (Yale University, 1987). Since my “shop talk” in April 1981 at the American Academy in Rome, I have had numerous opportunities to lecture or write about the subject of this book. I am particularly grateful to have had the privilege to speak to the Architectural League of New York in 1982, in the 1983 Alcan Lecture Series in Montreal, at the Italian Cultural Institute in New York in 1984, and at the Sant’Elia Symposium sponsored by the Yale University Art Gallery in 1986, as well as at the other dozen institutions whose

xi | Acknowledgments

invitations to lecture helped me focus and develop my ideas. This process

of refinement was further assisted by the opportunity to publish the articles requested by Richard Pommer, guest editor of the summer 1983 issue of the Art Journal; by David Morton, formerly executive editor of Progressive Architecture; and by Suzanne Stevens, formerly editor of Skyline.

Release time from teaching for an academic always requires the compliance of one’s dean. I am grateful to former Dean Anthony Eardley, who supported this research by granting me a leave of absence from the College of Architecture, University of Kentucky in 1980-81. I was later given a similar degree of support by Dean John Steffian of the School of Architecture, University of Maryland, who generously enabled me to follow my 1984 fall Semester Research Award with a full year off in 1985-86 when I received the Guggenheim Fellowship. This book has also benefited from the attention and patience of the MIT Press. An early manuscript was read by Kenneth Frampton and Henry Millon whose reports were instrumental in prompting me to broaden the scope of my study from an initial work that focused on Milanese Novecento architecture. The MIT Press displayed a remarkable degree of understanding as both the range and the size of the manuscript expanded and the time of publication receded into what must have seemed a much too distant future. I have also benefited from friends and colleagues who read all or part of the new manuscript as it existed in the fall and winter of 1987. Gerald Silk and Esther Da Costa Meyer read chapter three. Alexander De Grand read the entire book. Their comments were very useful to me when I put

the manuscript through the next and final stage of revisions and new developments. Patricia Stabelin Harris, who read the final draft of chapter fourteen, also offered helpful comments. Pamela Hall generously assisted me in correcting the galleys. In many respects this book is a tribute to the education that I received over twenty years ago at Princeton University. I wish to record especially my enduring gratitude to my undergraduate teachers in the French section

of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and in the Special Program in European Civilization and to those in the graduate professional program in architecture and in the Ph.D. Program in Architectural History at the School of Architecture and Urban Planning. Among these, Emilio Ambasz, Blanchard Bates, Alan Colquhoun, Kenneth Frampton, Robert Geddes, Michael Graves, Joseph Rykwert, Carl Schorske, and Anthony Vidler have had a lasting and formative influence on my work. Finally, I] thank my wife Melissa and my two children, David and Marc,

for whom this book has been like an additional member of the family. Melissa has been not only a continuing source of encouragement, but also a keen critic whose observations have helped me focus my thoughts and clarify my prose. This book is dedicated to my wife in gratitude for her assistance and patience.

Xli | Acknowledgments

Introduction

This book is a study of the pluralistic and evolving notion of modernism in Italian architecture between 1890 and 1940. Rather than privileging any one movement from the vantage of today’s values, it seeks to understand the varied and often conflicting convictions about appropriate cul-

tural expression through a contemporary architecture found in Italy during the crucial fifty year period that saw the rise and triumph of modernism throughout the West. Starting with the inspirational glass and iron monuments of the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle, the Eiffel Tower and the Galerie des Machines, and ending with the onset of World War II, this book presents a complete historical cycle that, nonetheless, is only the culminating phase of a cultural crisis crystallized around the Romantic revolution toward the 1820s. The combination of the new cultural relativism and heightened nationalism that characterized the major change in cultural attitudes at that time presented the world of architecture with a dilemma that haunted the West until at least the Second World War.

: From the early nineteenth century onward, it became incumbent upon the architect to create a new architecture that would simultaneously be national and modern. The inherent difficulties of balancing the demands of tradition, which was a secure guarantor of national identity, and of modernity, which nearly always meant sharing forms and symbols of modern life with other cultures, created tensions that could be resolved only by favoring one value or the other. Nationalism and internationalism,

tradition and modernity, classical Latin culture and modern machine civilization, these were the opposing terms of a cultural fulcrum that the architects of Italy’s various modern movements attempted to balance in one way or the other. Whereas architects and critics initially addressed these issues within the

parameters of what might be termed the culture of architecture, after Mussolini’s March on Rome of October 28, 1922, they were faced with

the possibility and eventually the necessity of confronting the ideology, politics, and culture of Fascism. This book then is also a study of the ways in which these two cultural worlds—architecture and Fascism— either passed each other by or came together. Once again the primary concern has been with the changing notion of modernism, now understood as a function of Fascist Italy’s cultural expression. People, Movements, and Cities This book focuses on people, artistic movements, and cities. Italy enjoyed virtually all the different movements in the quest for modern architecture found throughout the West: the enthusiasm for the new iron architecture; the generalized phenomenon of Art Nouveau, with its full range of activity from the Belgian whiplash line to the Austrian Secession; the idealized vision of a mechanized world that was rapidly assimilated by Futurism and that combined Art Nouveau tendencies with Expressionist interests; the fusion of the Sittesque school of artistic urban design with attempts to create a modern vernacular architecture; the fashioning of a contemporary Neoclassical style; and, finally, the development of Italian Rationalism, a distinctly Italian version of the avant-garde European architecture now known as the Modern Movement or the International Style. Within each phase, though, certain individuals and groups played a preeminent role in defining values, stimulating activity, generating publicity both within the profession and for the general public, and, most importantly, giving concrete vision to emerging cultural values by designing and building the new architecture. These leading figures, moreover, were closely

associated with certain cities whose historical identity sustained their work.

The cultural climate of a particular city could either assimilate new art or offer a foil to what might become a deliberate provocation. The Futurist use of city settings is well known. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti issued the first Futurist Manifesto in 1909 in Paris, where it would be best understood. Similarly, on April 27, 1910, the Futurists challenged one of the symbolic centers of tradition in Italian art and culture by showering Venice with thousands of leaflets from the top of the tower on Piazza San Marco, while below on the loggia Marinetti, megaphone in hand, harangued the crowd returning from a quiet Sunday at the beach.! From Venice to Rome,

Bologna, Florence, Genoa, Mantua, Verona, and Padua, the Futurists assaulted the “past loving” traditions of Italy’s cultural centers in incendiary speeches that always prompted a general uproar and various degrees

of physical violence. The history of modernism in Italian architecture from the turn of the century until World War II also has its centers of actual and symbolic focus—Turin, Rome, Milan, and Como. The book begins in Turin in 1890, where the architects of the Circolo Artistico di Torino organized the Prima Esposizione Italiana di Architettura (First Italian Exposition of Architecture). This exhibition, intended to promote a modern architecture as well as enhance the status of the architect with the general public, took place in the highly charged atmosphere that accompanied the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle. Not only

xiv | Introduction

had the Galerie des Machines and the Eiffel Tower become symbols of a new architecture, but the tumultuous Congrés International des Architectes (International Congress of Architects) held in Paris that year in conjunction with the exposition had also pitted the French Rationalists against the Beaux-Arts guardians of tradition in a loud and acrimonious exchange. The Turin exhibition opened in the shadow, so to speak, of the Eiffel Tower, with the Paris exposition and the international congress providing the principal points of debate for the major Italian polemicists. A decade later the same Circolo Artistico di Torino initiated the Prima Esposizione d’Arte Decorativa Moderna (First International Exposition of Modern Decorative Art), which opened in 1902. This exposition introduced Art Nouveau into Italy as a polemical alternative to the revival of

historical styles that had dominated nineteenth-century architecture throughout the West. After the debates of 1890 about an emerging modern

architecture in the new iron structures of the 1889 Paris world’s fair, a different modern style seemed to have been created in dramatic buildings by Raimondo D’Aronco and Annibale Rigotti, which housed the exposition’s international display of furnishings for daily life executed generally in some variant of an Art Nouveau style. The location of the exposition in Turin was seen at the time as symbolically appropriate. Turin, deemed a modern city without a long historical heritage of venerable art, could well introduce a new style in architecture and the decorative arts. Turin, open to initiatives from northern Europe, had introduced a style from abroad that generated a vigorous debate about the conflicting values of tradition and modernity, nationalism and internationalism in modern architecture. After the controversy about the 1902 Turin exposition, the critical center for modern thought shifted momentarily to Milan. Milan, the Gallic Mitta-land or city in the middle, was now the center of Futurist activity.

Yet the Futurists were not alone in seeking artistic renewal. In 1914 Antonio Sant’Elia, the young architect from Como, now established in Milan, joined first the reforming efforts of the Associazione degli Architetti

Lombardi and then the Nuove Tendenze movement, which joined progressive artists with architects. In the first exhibit by the Nuove Tendenze in May 1914, Sant’Elia and Mario Chiattone each exhibited avant-garde designs for the city of a new mechanical world. Sant’Elia’s drawings as

well as his manifesto were rapidly assimilated to the cause of Italian Futurism. This study emphasizes the cultural context that fostered an appreciation of the machine and its related developments in the modern street, apartment house, and city, thereby setting the stage for Futurism and furnishing the background for Sant’Elia’s powerful vision of the Citta Nuova (New City). The most enduring developments in the Italian exploration of modernism during the first two decades of the twentieth century came in Rome. Whereas the 1902 Turin fair and the 1914 Nuove Tendenze exhibition, along with the subsequent issuing of the Manifesto of Futurist Architecture, were like cultural firecrackers, the work of the Roman Associazione Artistica fra i Cultori di Architettura was like a slow-burning fuse. This

xv | Introduction

group of architects and amateurs, under the emerging leadership of Gustavo Giovannoni and Marcello Piacentini, applied the nineteenth-century legacy of the reasoned picturesque while attempting to develop a modern architecture from local and national vernacular traditions. As elsewhere in the West, vernacular building was seen by architects searching for a modern, national architecture as a powerful alternative to the meaningless revival of historical styles. At the same time, this Roman group availed itself of the most modern developments in urban design—the garden city movement and the Sittesque school of picturesque urbanism. The modernism pursued by the Roman Associazione Artistica was closely related to the group’s efforts to chart a course for modernizing the city while preserving not only its monuments, but also the atmosphere of its setting. All of these interests—the reasoned picturesque, vernacular building, modern urbanism, and the commitment to a meaningful preservation of Rome’s “minor” historical architecture, understood not only as individual buildings, but also and primarily as the urban tissue—coalesced into a coherent architectural philosophy whose most significant legacy to the next generation of Italian modernists was the concept of l’ambientismo, contextualism. In the years following World War I, Milan became the leading center in the creation of Italian modern architecture. A new movement, known today as the Milanese Novecento, dominated the city’s postwar housing boom and endowed Italy with its first widespread and enduring manifestation of modern architecture. In Milan Giovanni Muzio and Gio Ponti,

editor of Domus, led a loosely constituted group of architects in an attempt to fashion a twentieth-century equivalent to the late-eighteenthand early-nineteenth-century Neoclassical architecture of Milan. This was achieved by applying a thinly layered rendition of the classical vocabulary of architecture in a decorative manner to a building’s facade. Utilizing the modern technology of reinforced concrete construction, the Milanese Novecento movement challenged the tenets of nineteenthand early-twentieth-century progressive architectural thought, which envisaged new forms not only free of historical stylistic reminiscences but also expressive of new materials and methods of construction. Although it would be foolish to equate the trauma of the post-World War I years with its classically and nationalistically oriented “return to order” and the post-World War II “consumer society” with its emphasis on “pastiche and parody,”? the Milanese Novecento and today’s “postmodern” architecture share a common desire to express cultural tradition through the signs of the classical past while emphasizing ornamentation and deemphasizing structural expression. As a result, much of today’s so-called classical postmodern architecture utilizes the visual vocabulary of the earlier modern movement, which developed simultaneously with the International Style elsewhere in Europe and before its arrival in Italy in the late 1920s. The historically oriented stylistic appearance of Milanese Novecento architecture was challenged by a younger generation of recent graduates from the Milan Politecnico in December 1926. Forming the Gruppo 7,

xut | Introduction

these architects declared the birth of what they called Italian Rationalism,

, a term intended to convey the values being championed by the architecture and polemics of Le Corbusier’s Vers une architecture (1923) and Walter

Gropius’s Internationale Architektur (1925). Now Milan became the bridge between northern Europe and Italy as the Gruppo 7 adapted to Italian sensibilities a vision of architecture primarily from Holland, France, and Germany. In 1928 the polemical stance of the Gruppo 7 found confirmation in Turin in the modern architecture at the Esposizione

| di Torino. In the same year Italian Rationalism became a national movement. Its influence grew in the 1930s as part of the increasing acceptance throughout the West of the International Style.

Italian Rationalism created an architecture of pure prismatic forms devoid of applied ornamentation and free of stylistic reminiscences, an architecture intended to reflect the spirit of a new machine civilization. Yet, in a seeming paradox, this architecture, in the hands of its best designers, was fully contextual as well, relating to historical Italian culture, to its city’s heritage, and to the specific features of the site. Anti-historicist

but not anti-historical, Italian Rationalist architects used abstract geometrical forms to root their buildings in the past. Although the Ration-

, alists tilted the balance between modernity and tradition and between internationalism and nationalism toward the former, thereby reversing the emphasis found in Novecento architecture, the two terms of the equation were still decidedly present. This study not only explores the contextual basis of Italian Rationalist architecture, but also demonstrates its debt to the earlier Italian modern movements that fostered an appreciation of contextualism (l’ambientismo) through attention to vernacular building, local traditions, and Sittesque urbanism. In the 1930s the leading Milanese Novecento architects responded to the challenge of Italian Rationalism by changing their approach to the richly decorated surfaces that characterized their earlier work. Abandoning the classical vocabulary that they had used to layer their facades, they turned to abstract geometric patterning integral to the fabric of the exterior walls themselves. Both Italian Rationalism and this new geometric Novecento style coexisted throughout the 1930s as alternative visions of modernism in architectural design. At this point the history of the idea of modernism in Italian architecture becomes the history of Italian modern architecture, as the achievements and controversies spread beyond the urban centers that had engendered them. The city retains an important role, now in the determination of the fate of various modern projects. Florence, Venice, and Rome, for example,

were the stages for major controversies over the initial design for their new train stations. In Florence a design by Angiolo Mazzoni in what might be termed a modern monumental vernacular prompted an uproar as unsuitable for the Italian city of art par excellence. Subsequent Rationalist projects by the same architect for Venice and Rome produced the same result. The story of these and similar conflicts, which involves as well an exploration of the complex system of power in the selection of style in certain types of state buildings during the Fascist period, will be

xvii | Introduction

examined in a separate volume.* Here I have chosen to concentrate on the idea of modernism as it developed out of the nineteenth-century Romantic revolution. The Romantic Legacy Romanticism, as the French critic Ludovic Vitet observed in 1825, was a cultural phenomenon that both united and transcended the specific movements known by this label.’ Central to the Romantic outlook was a new appreciation of cultural diversity that relished the distinguishing features of different peoples and different times without subjecting them to the universal standards that had been promoted by the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. As the Italian publishers of a history of world architecture, itself a characteristic product of these new attitudes, expressed it in 1846:

Cultured readers who are interested in broadening their sphere of ideas in order to “take in the entire universe” should certainly welcome a work offering a precise picture of different peoples and times, which facilitates the understanding of the nature, history, customs, and special character of nations, while avoiding the mistakes of certain writers of the previous century who often attributed the same ideas to the Persians and Greeks, and to the Celts and Romans.® This new appreciation of cultural diversity, however, caused a crisis in Western architecture. Since it was now a commonplace that every major civilization had its own architectural style characteristic of its culture, it was now seen as incumbent upon the architect to create an architecture for contemporary times. The British architect Thomas Leverton Donaldson, vice president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, was speaking for the entire period when he asked in 1847, “The great question is, are we to have an architecture of our period, a distinct, palpable style of the nineteenth century?”” This charge would dominate Western architectural discourse until at least World War II. Hence the Italian architect Gio Ponti, editor of Domus, to choose but one example, reminded his readers that the new architecture and decorative arts at the 1928 Espo-

sizione di Torino were creating “the style by which our age will be recognizable.”®

The current times, moreover, were not seen as merely a continuation of the past. Rather, the French Revolution had given Europeans a sense that an old world had ended and that a new one was in the process of

formation. Shelley was not alone in 1819 in feeling that the French Revolution was “the master theme of the epoch in which we live.”? Decades after the French Revolution, its lessons for contemporary art remained. “Now after so many great things that our fathers have done

and that we have seen,” affirmed Victor Hugo in 1830, “we have left behind the old social forms. How could we not leave behind the old poetics? ... This France of the nineteenth century, with its liberty from Mirabeau and its power from Napoleon, will have its own personal and national literature.”!° As Hugo’s reference to a “national” literature reminds us, the new cultural relativism arose within the context of a heightened sense of national identity, understood both in a political and ethnic

xVili | Introduction

sense. Herder’s dictum “Every people is a folk: It has its own national

character as well as its language” was to become a leitmotif of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, at least until the advent of World War I].?!

The quest to create a contemporary architecture was dominated by the

need to balance national identity and contemporary culture. Modern civilization was widely seen as issuing from the industrial revolution, which, along with the French Revolution, heightened the sense of a new

, age. The advent of the railroad, the perfection of the ocean liner and the creation of automobiles and airplanes, the invention and diffusion of mechanical devices of all types, and the application of new materials for construction—iron and glass, steel and concrete—led many to feel that contemporary culture had a distinct identity different from that of previous ages. The American Victorian architect Leopold Eidlitz was speaking

for this entire period when he wrote in 1881 that the new architecture would have to issue from the new culture and the new technics: “We

| should then see springing up around us buildings of a character entirely new in expression, representing the many new ideas and wants of civilized society made possible by modern science, and called forth by political, social, and religious changes, and by a vast increase in the best building material.”!2 From the onset of the Romantic revolution each generation reiterated what was seen as this truism. Hence, when Marcello Piacentini, editor of Architettura e Arti Decorative, identified in 1921 the different approaches to modernism found throughout the West, he described each

. in terms of the presence of the two tendencies, nationalism and modernism, mingled together. Today’s observer, he stressed, had to distinguish “the principles linked to race, climate, in brief, to ethnic reasons, from those tied to the intellectual, moral, and material needs of our age.” Finally, the legacy of the French Revolution, which was widely seen as replacing an age of aristocracy with one of the common man, whether the worker or the middle class, was understood to be consonant with the phenomenon of the industrial revolution. Writing in the avant-garde periodical L’Arte Decorativa Moderna (1902), the Italian architect Sylvius Paoletti explained: I believe that with the end of the eighteenth century, an age was finished and closed; that, just as the humanism of the Renaissance closed an epoch

and buried the theocratic and feudal spirit, so too the affirmation of liberty and the rights of man buried the last vestiges of arbitrary power and privilege. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, the free and indomitable modern spirit began to live a new life. The days of horse-drawn carriages ... and sailing ships are over. The days of candles and oil lamps have been succeeded by those of gas and electric light. We no longer build large, sumptuous private palaces, symbols of authoritarian and privileged

grandeur, but rather homes for the ordinary citizen. . . . In place of temples we now have the great train station.'4

These words are doubly significant. First, this Italian champion of Art Nouveau was not alone in associating the new spirit in architecture and the decorative arts at the turn of this century with the cultural transformation that began with what is now called the Romantic revolution.'*

xIx | Introduction

This view was expressed throughout the West at this time by writers such

as the French critic Jean Lahor in L’Art nouveau (1901), the German architect Hermann Muthesius in “Das Moderne in der Architektur” (Kunstgewerbe und Architektur, 1907), and the Belgian architect Henry Van de Velde in Vom neuen Stil (1907). Second, Paoletti’s text reveals that modern architecture required not only the creation of forms to reflect current conditions of civilization, but also the transfer of the status of “representative architecture” to new or different building types. Since the earliest times, temples and palaces had been invested with an importance that reflected the legitimacy of religious and civil authority. With the cultural relativism of the Romantic revolution, representative architecture was now deemed to be the building type that best reflected the most characteristic features of that particular culture. By the late nineteenth century this had come to mean the new glass and iron structures such as railroad stations, which combined what were seen as three essentially modern characteristics of contemporary life: the new building materials, the new and important mode of transportation,

and the large crowd. The complement to these large spaces of assembly , was the home of the ordinary citizen. As the eminent Italian architect Camillo Boito explained in 1880:

In a democratic society such as ours, the essential monument, the dominant feature, so to speak, of the world of architecture must be the house. The Greeks had their temples and propylaea; the Romans their amphitheaters and baths; the first Christians their catacombs and basilicas; the knights in armor their cathedrals and city halls, and so forth. We have our dwellings.!¢

The dual legacy of the Romantic revolution—the need to create a modern and national architecture—left architects with a difficult if not insoluble problem. National identity was generally identified with a traditional and hence recognizable style, hardly the vehicle for the expression of contemporary life. A modern idiom, though, would present the public with an unfamiliar architecture that could not necessarily be easily related to national traditions and hence national identity. Any modern style was also likely to be shared by architects in several countries, since modern technics and contemporary modes of living were common to the times. Thus architects were faced with the dilemma of reconciling the two related sets of opposing values—tradition and modernity, nationalism and internationalism—in ways that would inevitably favor one term of each set. Each of the different phases of Italian modernism addressed in this study confronted these issues in its own particular ways.

Fascism and Modern Italian Architecture The advent of Fascism in Italy through what has been called Mussolini’s “violent, semilegal seizure of power” on October 28, 1922, added another component to the problems faced by the culture of architecture in Italy.!” The nationalist component of modern architecture took on new meaning as the legacy of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century cultural nationalism was overlaid with the multiple purposes of Fascist nationalism.

xXx | Introduction

Three aspects of Fascist nationalism were of particular importance to modern architects. The first and perhaps most significant, because the most inseparable from the Fascist regime, was the aggressive, militaristic, and xenophobic nationalism that Mussolini promoted throughout the Fascist period. The Fascist spirit that architects were called upon to translate into monumental

state buildings was largely reflected by the slogan “credere, obbedire, combattere” (believe, obey, fight). Militaristic rhetoric took on new meaning with the invasion of Ethiopia. There was now substance behind the expressions of bellicose nationalism as found in Mussolini’s “Proclama-

! tion of the Empire” of May 9, 1936. The following words were not only published in newspapers, but also inscribed on public buildings: “The Italian people have created the Empire through their sacrifices. They will make it fruitful with their work and defend it against whomever with their weapons.”!8 This book studies the response of Italian modern architects to such rhetorical postures from the March on Rome to the declaration of the Empire to the onset of World War II. Over the course of these nearly two decades, Italian architects designed colossal and massive forms that constituted a truly Italian Fascist style. These buildings can be termed “Fascist” because they were intended to convey those combative aspects of Fascist ideology that were fundamental to the movement’s professed ideology and political success.

The history of modernism in Italian architecture during the Fascist period, though, is to a great degree independent of Fascism. Left to their

own in designs for private individuals and for religious and cultural institutions, and at times even for state-sponsored buildings, modern Italian architects generally ignored the more overt requirements of combative Fascist nationalism and designed instead according to the general parameters of the Romantic legacy to European cultural nationalism as it was being addressed throughout the West. Yet Italian architects could never entirely escape the implications of Fascist nationalism because Fascism assimilated what might be called the privileged nationalism that constituted another aspect of the Romantic legacy. Privileged nationalism assigned to a particular country a primacy in certain aspects of culture. The grandest of all nationalist privileges in the nineteenth century had been the charge to lead Western civilization,

if not the world, to a new state of existence. This type of privileged nationalism is associated with several of the most famous political theorists, historians, and philosophers of the times. Hegel in The Philosophy of History (1822-31) had assigned this role to the German peoples.!? Jules Michelet, in his Introduction a4 l’histoire universelle (1834), claimed the same for France. It was not through patriotism, wrote Michelet, but only “through logic” and from the lessons of history that he came to the conclusion that: “henceforth our glorious country will pilot the vessel of humanity.”?° The patriot Giuseppe Mazzini tied the quest for the unifi-

cation of Italy and its freedom from outside rule to an Italian world mission of ensuring national integrity and freedom to all peoples as the basis for “Progress in the collective life of Humanity.” Following the

Xxi | Introduction

example of universal leadership given first by “Rome of the Caesars” and then by “Rome of the Popes,” now “la Roma del Popolo, della Nazione Italiana” would fulfill its third “world mission” as “guide and sustainer” for humanity.?!

Fascist ideology assimilated this vision of world leadership for the progress of civilization by purporting to offer a new form not only of government but also of economic and cultural life to lead the world from

, what was depicted as the dual dangers of capitalism, grounded in political liberalism, and of communism. Through a series of comprehensive endeavors ranging from the institution of what was supposed to be a corporative state run by associations of workers and executives grouped by profession to the creation of an Enciclopedia Italiana to rival the great French Encyclopédie of the Enlightenment as a summation of contemporary human knowledge, Fascism promoted itself as the creator of a new civilization, a new civilta for humankind. Whatever Italian architects accomplished, then, could be seen as contributing to the Fascist creation of a new civilta, even if it was conceived

within the culture of architecture rather than the culture of Fascism. Italy , had for a long time seen itself as the country whose privilege it had been to teach the world in artistic matters, and any expression of this thought could easily be assimilated to the purposes of Fascist cultural politics. This does not mean, though, that expressions of national pride or identity by modern architects under Fascism necessarily reflected an enthusiasm for Fascism. Since the culture of architecture and the culture of Fascism were layered at this time, the same words could express very different notions about national architecture. A third type of Fascist nationalism, which involved the modernization of contemporary Italy, was easily related to the culture of architecture. One aspect of Fascist ideology was that Italy would once more become a world leader, Roma Caput Mundi, partially through its modernization at home and its preeminence in communications—shipping and air travel— throughout the world. Via dell’Impero, the new, wide thoroughfare that Mussolini had cut through Rome, symbolically across the exposed ruins of the ancient Imperial Fora, was the setting not only for the parade of soldiers returned from the successful conquest of Ethiopia in 1936, but also in 1932 for the fliers of the squadron of seaplanes that had made the transatlantic voyage from Italy to Chicago on the occasion of the world’s fair whose theme was “A Century of Progress.”22 These planes were seen as a symbol of Italy’s modernity and primacy in modern communications.

When high members of the Fascist government wanted to promote through buildings an image of Italy as the most modern of states, they readily assimilated the modernism of the culture of architecture that could be found not only in Italy, but also throughout the West. Progressive architects, such as those associated with postwar Futurism and Rationalism, who were also ardent Fascists could likewise continue to develop their own Italian version of a modern idiom while simultaneously considering themselves to be creating a Fascist architecture.

XXII | Introduction

It is important to remember that although Fascism proclaimed itself to

be a “totalitarian” regime, neither Mussolini nor other Fascist leaders

| attempted to impose a single style on Italian architecture. Within the

government, moreover, each minister could promote a style that he favored. So too could high functionaries, either individually or collectively, of a particular ministry. Municipalities also often had a say in the style of buildings to be constructed there. Hence, selecting a style for state buildings constructed by the various ministries could involve a complex interplay of competing interests. Often it seems that the battles over style were fought not according to the parameters of Fascist culture but rather

| according to the aesthetic sensibilities and emotional attachments to traditional or modern styles within the culture of architecture. The final chapter addresses the issue of anti-Semitism introduced into debates about modern architecture. Whereas critics of Italian Rationalism had accused it of being Bolshevist and Jewish since at least 1931, the significance of anti-Semitic attacks not only on avant-garde art but also on individual artists acquired new meaning during the Fascist racial campaign, which began in 1938. As a study of culture, this book seeks to recreate the climate in which architects, artists, and critics took a stance on this issue. The disparagement of Jewish artists, as well as modern art that was labeled Jewish, was instrumental in creating the particular cultural setting of that time.

XXU1 | Introduction

Modernism before World War I

The First Italian Exposition of Architecture

The Prima Esposizione Italiana di Architettura (First Italian Exposition of Architecture) held in Turin in 1890 was a turning point in the formu-

lation of a modern architecture in Italy. Virtually all the progressive themes of the Romantic revolution were reiterated at a time when the latest accomplishments in the new iron architecture at the Exposition Universelle of 1889 in Paris were very much on people’s minds. The opportunity to join the zeal of a reforming tradition with the achievements of what seemed to be an emerging architecture gave special meaning to both. At the same time, the very occurrence of the 1890 exhibition helped groups in Turin and Rome focus their efforts at reform, with significant results over the succeeding decades. This First Italian Exposition of Architecture was the work of a group of architects, the Sezione di Architettura of the Circolo Artistico di Torino.

To promote new architecture through a solid knowledge of the past, in 1884 the newly formed Collegio di Ingegneri ed Architetti of Turin initiated its activities with a public competition for accurate drawings of historical architecture. Three years after this modest beginning, the association was invited to combine with the Circolo Artistico as its newly constituted Sezione di Architettura. From this point onward, its activities were numerous: “Assemblies, discussions, lectures, commemorations, artistic tours; every month, rather every week they did something. One senses that this feverish enthusiasm and work that had spread to everybody would soon be translated into some concrete event.”! That event was the 1890 exposition, which was largely the idea of the architect Giovanni Angelo Reycend. Professor of Architecture at the Scuo-

la di Applicazione degli Ingegneri in Turin and Consigliere Comunale, Reycend was made president of the organizing committee.” Architects throughout Italy were invited to name local committees or representatives to organize their city’s participation in this national event. The obstacles were numerous—skeptical colleagues, an indifferent public, an economic crisis, and even the novelty of the undertaking, the “first exposition of its type ever.”? Yet in seven months the organizing committee assembled a

show with 657 participants exhibiting 14,000 drawings in 34 rooms arranged into 4 sections: modern and ancient art, crafts and applied design, architectural literature, and edilizia (architecture and city planning). This last section had exhibits from numerous foreign cities, including London, Prague, Berlin, Vienna, Amsterdam, Warsaw, Nuremberg,

Munich, and Leipzig. Between September 28 and December 8, 1890, approximately 40,000 people visited the show.* This was an accomplishment, observed Dionigi Scano of Sardinia, that only Turin, “capital of old and industrious Piedmont,” could have realized.° The building erected for the fine arts exhibition at the Esposizione Nazionale Italiana of 1884 was the logical site for the exposition. It was located in the magnificent Valentino Park, the Bois de Boulogne of Turin, with the Po River and the hills beyond the shore as the backdrop. Since the architecture of the 1884 exhibition building was deemed inappropriate to express contemporary sensibilities in 1890, the sponsors of the exhi-

bition held a competition for the design of a new facade. The winning project (figure 1) was by Raimondo D’Aronco, a thirty-three-year-old architect from Udine who in 1886 had won by unanimous vote the chair of disegno d’ornato e d’architettura at the University of Messina as well as the competition for the decoration of the Palazzo della Prima Esposizione di Belle Arti in Venice.®

Raimondo D’Aronco was the most audacious of the young Italian architects. To Camillo Boito, one of the patriarchs of the architectural establishment, D’Aronco was a “young man of fervid and restless talent,”

| who was first among Italian architects seeking to renew old styles with new forms and proportions.” For others, D’Aronco, “this strong and restless talent,” was an architect of “inexhaustible enthusiasm” and an “enthusiast, perhaps even fanatic .. . of the great French critic” Violletle-Duc.®

In his competition-winning design, D’Aronco created a facade of plain masses and surfaces, free of stylistic reminiscences and with “two vivid and audacious red masses that gave the prize-winning project a character of striking vivacity.”® For economic reasons this facade was not executed as designed,!° but forty years later, Marcello Piacentini, in his synthetic overview of modern architecture, Architettura d’oggi (1930), would signal both D’Aronco and his initial design as crucial factors in the development of modern Italian architecture:

In Italy Raimondo D’Aronco was the first to cry out. From the still classical forms of his project for the Palazzo di Giustizia [1882] in Rome,

he passed gradually to the first simplifications of the pavilion for the Esposizione d’architettura of Turin of 1890 (a jewel of architecture for this period, which will remain one of the touchstones in the history of Italian architecture).?!

Toward a New Architecture After the full unification of Italy in 1870, when Rome became the country’s capital city, the Romantic notion of a national architecture took on both new meaning and an increasing sense of urgency. “By now,” wrote

4 | Modernism before World War I

|

|

,,!|

|

§. it i eS | Ae rs

wok . beeen —erTT eereada Ge See Se ee ere a Sa i) Seas . ee -~ ere r iy, Ser. pe :. |= ae |

a—a Ed * =eeview; Prasrae | ‘ || a— ~ Ssi 4"

oo 4 - f mt }

Be Pv eeria heeae , io.ieei- ||

—_ P , 2 - ° AS AO , a : ere aoe | ; pe j = - aN A ee ral ; |

1 the architect Mario Ceradini in 1890, “the sense of the lack of a national Raimondo D’Aronco, Facade for the First architecture, which speaks for our age and which remains a point of

ItalianTurin, Exposition of Architecture (unexef hjthehnation’s a h Snag cuted), 1890. orientation for our history, has entered into spirit.”oe It was

discussed in all quarters, “in the daily newspapers, at artistic and profes-

sional congresses, from the chairs of rival schools, and in the halls of Parliament.”!? The First Italian Exposition of Architecture prompted a host of reflections about the preeminence of architecture in reflecting a culture’s identity. “Architectural works,” wrote Scano, “the most durable of all creations, are those that give an accurate idea of a people’s genius, customs, and wealth.”! Yet, to fulfill this task, observed Reycend, architecture had to renew itself. Only a “new art” could “raise architecture up again to the dignity of representing a people, an epoch, a civilization.” ' The 1890 exposition was undertaken to promote a renewal in Italian architecture. “For several years,” explained the first circular distributed by the organizers, “there has been a noteworthy reawakening in architectural studies.” Historical studies of “the monuments of all ages and all peoples had served to discredit academic prejudices, to destroy age-old

conventions, and to fortify architecture with a regenerative breath of liberty.” Then came the “progress in science that furnished an extraordinary amount of new and unused means and materials that opened vaster horizons and that pointed the direction to unexplored ways.” !»

5 | The First Italian Exposition of Architecture

The promoters of the exposition felt themselves on the threshold of an exciting future. As a collection of past work from architects of all persuasions throughout Italy, however, the exhibition could not live up to the expectations of its organizers. A review of the published albums of works from the show reveals very few buildings free of stylistic imitations. Revivals, mostly classical and medieval, along with monumental neoRenaissance Beaux-Arts architecture dominated. Perhaps the engineer and editor of L’Ingegneria Civile e le Arti Industriali, Giovanni Sacheri, most accurately recorded the disappointment the exhibit engendered: “In general, there is little dynamism. ... Unfortunately . . . we see that a daring concept and the manifestation of new, significant, and grandiose forms

are a privilege of few and not all times.”!© Mario Ceradini, a young assistente in architecture at the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti in Turin,

gave voice to the reformers’ frustration at being unable to move from principles to concrete realizations: We must admit that for some time now, in speaking of the future architectural art, when we are at a loss for arguments, we readily repeat a thought that has already been heard on all lips: modern architecture must not be inspired by any of the past architectures, but must proceed freely while aiming toward the new and special character of our society. The thought is correct enough and contains within itself, with few words, an entire complex of aspirations and ideas for which it is like a preface. But now it is time that we finish with this preface and that architects understand how to interpret this special character.!’ On the occasion of the 1890 exposition, Ceradini and others articulated a series of points that would recur over the course of the next half century

, in the various movements searching for a modern Italian architecture. The most fundamental issue was the dependence on past styles. Reycend, in his inaugural address, lamented that “our reconstituted country” did not yet have a corresponding “national art.” Italian architecture was only a “reflection of what was.” He then proceeded to mock the reliance on historical styles: This is how it has been! At the dawn of this century people yearned for a return to the ancient architecture of Greece and Rome. It was a useless effort that died in a hybrid, cold, weak classicism, empty of meaning, a veritable parody of the art of Pericles and Vitruvius. . . . Now we are caught up with the Middle Ages and it is to be feared that this will not end soon if there are those who think that in the period of the Middle Ages is hidden the secret of the new art! But while we try to extract these secrets, our architecture languishes, painfully floundering between the memories of a past to which it is impossible to return and the uncertain hopes of a distant resurrection!!8 On October 6, 1890, as part of a series of public lectures accompanying

the exposition, the architect and critic Alfredo Melani vigorously denounced this same attachment to the past: It has been said again and again that the past is master of the future. We are so convinced that beyond the past all is silent for us. . . . In short, ours is an architecture suffocated by art, with inspiration stifled under the inordinate weight of stylistic erudition and under the invalid authority of a doctrinaire scholasticism.!?

6 | Modernism before World War I

To create a modern architecture required a dedication that could not be found in many of Italy’s brightest and most talented architects. “The best,” rued Sacheri, “dedicate themselves to the study of the past and lose themselves there.”2° Restoration, observed Ceradini, was a type of compensation in a world in which no nation had a modern architecture. In contrast to the “true passion” devoted to the competition for the facade of the historic Duomo of Milan, which yielded “brilliant” results, Italian architects were “disheartened and almost indifferent to the competition for the [new] Parliament building, ended now with negative results.” It is a delusion, though, warned Ceradini, to think that the skillful and loving attention to completing old buildings can be readily transferred to the task of creating a modern architecture, to the task of “translating the aspirations and the character and modern needs into a modern building.” From “all these passionate and intelligent restorers of monuments, a nucleus of modern architects has not yet emerged.”?! The basic problem, as most progressive architects understood it, was the divorce between a modern system of construction and a covering whose forms came from a different age. The majority of architects, lamented Sacheri, attach to the skeleton of modern constructions forms born in other times or developed in other settings.2* Not only could such buildings not symbolize the new age, but this mode of design often hindered the satisfaction of programmatic requirements. Reycend denounced the “sacrifice of every commodity, every reasonable requirement, every useful advantage to the desire to reproduce a preestablished form.”

| Buildings had to be designed with respect to “internal needs” and with the “new materials” that industry and science were furnishing.?? Architecture, to these critics, had to balance the functional components with the artistic. For Cimbro Gelati the way to “the architecture of the future” was through buildings whose beauty was “consistent with the perfect rationality of the construction”: “If then with this rationality, we

can invest an elevated idea, the fruit not only of study, but also of the divine flame of genius, then we will have that form to which we should be directing ourselves, which will correspond to the architecture of the future.” Gelati hoped that the new architecture would be “perfectly original,” but he nonetheless believed that it never would or should be divorced from “our splendid traditions.”4 Ceradini suggested balancing these two factors of function and poetry in a similar manner. Any new architecture, he explained, would have to

take into account both the new needs and materials—“the special expression by which our society differs from others, those material or moral expressions from which this society forms its character”—and the constant, deeply rooted sensibility that never changes—“sentiments that, in-

nate and rooted in the blood of a race, which distinguish it from the others by opinions, aspirations, and by taste, form the absolute ‘why’ of all of its evolutions, especially artistic.” Reason, of course, was necessary, but it could not in itself supply art, “because rationalism, whether in the use of materials, the arrangement of spaces, or the overall concept, is

7 | The First Italian Exposition of Architecture

indispensable for producing a good building. But making a building reasoned and good does not necessarily make it beautiful . . . because the beautiful is something ungraspable that reaches beyond the limits of the useful and the reasonable.” For both Gelati and Ceradini, then, the new modern architecture would be grounded in reason but would have to rise to a high poetic level that drew sustenance from the “old Latin blood.”** By coupling rationalism with artistic fantasy, progressive Italian archi-

tects hoped to avoid many of the difficulties that were besetting their French counterparts. Rationalism, as its French champions at the Encyclopédie d’Architecture explained at this time, was a term that followers of Viollet-le-Duc had adopted as much for its positive value as in defiance of the academic critics who used it pejoratively to criticize their position. The word, as Paul Gout admitted, had significant drawbacks. “In effect,” wrote Gout, “in opening the dictionary to the word ‘rationalism’ | find: ‘Rationalism, system of the philosophers who disdained the givens of the senses and of experience in order to admit only the ideas and first truths

furnished by reason.’” Yet the position of the architectural rationalists, objected Gout, was not a system, nor, as Viollet-le-Duc had amply argued,

did it entail rejecting the experience of the senses. Rather, as Gout observed, it was based on “common sense applied to artistic manifestations, nothing more and nothing less.”2¢ Like their French counterparts, progressive Italian architects at the time of the 1890 Turin exposition invoked rationalism to explain the considered use of new materials and ways of building and the attentive solution of functional issues. Unlike Anatole de Baudot and Paul Gout, they refrained from calling themselves rationalists.

Reforming Architectural Education A modern Italian architecture, it was widely believed, could only emerge after the reform of the educational system that institutionalized the split between what was called the internal structural “organism” and the exterior form executed in some historical style.2” In addressing the question

of a new architecture, virtually all Italian commentators speaking or writing on the occasion of the First Italian Exposition of Architecture directed their remarks to the inadequacies of architectural education.?® In

Italy architects were trained either in an engineering school (Scuola di Applicazione per gli Ingegneri) or a fine arts academy (Accademia di Belle

Arti). In the former, “the scientific part absorbs everything.”?? In the latter, technical studies were not just lacking, but were despised.>° The divorce between the architect and the engineer was a problem that plagued numerous countries in the nineteenth century. In Paris at the 1889 Congrés International des Architectes, Anatole de Baudot, the crusading editor of the Encyclopédie d’Architecture, warned that “for a long time now the influence of the architect has been diminished and that of the engineer, the modern man par excellence, is tending to replace him.” This situation, continued de Baudot, was doubly dangerous for the architect, since it encroached upon his professional prerogatives and threatened the course of art. The engineer was not trained either directly in aesthetics or

8 | Modernism before World War I

in history, which was pregnant with artistic lessons. Nor did engineering attract people “endowed with artistic sentiment.”*! In Italy the problem was especially acute, because only engineers or architects trained in a school of engineering were recognized before the law as qualified to practice architecture.?? Unlike France, Italy did not have an Ecole des Beaux-Arts that trained qualified architects. After seven or eight years of study in an Accademia di Belle Arti, the student was given a diploma as professore di disegno architettonico that merely qualified him, quipped Ceradini, “to train other disegnatori.”> In actuality, a professore di disegno architettonico had the foundation for becoming a qualified architect. The engineer and architect G. G. Ferria, while objecting to the disdain for matters of construction in the fine arts academy, nonetheless observed that the student there and not in the Scuola di Applicazione could come up with an “idea” for a building and know how to develop it.3+ This should not surprise, because as Boito explained, at an Accademia di Belle Arti the architecture student studied decoration, perspective, and figure drawing, the major styles of architecture, and the composition of various building types. Many would complete their studies

on their own by taking technical courses elsewhere and by learning through building. This was especially true in Milan, where most students at the Accademia also enrolled in the Scuola dei Capomaestri (School for Master Builders), the only institution of its type in Italy.** In order to create a program that would lead to a professional degree of architecture conferring a legal right to build, it was hoped that a new type of institution, a Scuola Superiore di Architettura, would be established. This new school would not only combine the technical studies of the Scuola di Applicazione with the artistic studies of the Accademia di Belle Arti, but would also provide a synthetic program that addressed questions of plan design, composition, architectural history with respect to the relationship between style and culture, the history of construction, and elements of a liberal arts education in ways that neither institution currently addressed.

This attention to educational reform took place in the context of a proposed law presented to the Senate on June 14, 1889, by Minister of Education Paolo Boselli to create Scuole Superiore di Architettura. In 1885 Boselli’s predecessor Michele Coppino had issued two decrees stipulating the creation of “three complete schools of architecture” within the Accademie di Belle Arti of Rome, Florence, and Naples, with not a full degree, but rather a diploma di approvazione for the graduate. “The innovation,” as Boito explained, “consisted in adding to the artistic education those scientific courses necessary for the practice of civil architec-

ture, and even other courses of general culture—world history, natural history, geography, and Italian language and literature.”3 Coppino’s decrees were deemed inappropriate in a situation that required an actual law. The law itself would not see fruition until thirty years later with the opening in 1920 of the first Scuola Superiore di Architettura in Rome. Others schools were then opened in Venice (1925-26), Turin (1926-29), Florence (1926-30), Naples (1928-30), and Milan (1933).3”

9 | The First Italian Exposition of Architecture

AW In the Shadow of the Eiffel Tower ‘ais

High The First Italian Exposition of Architecture took place, so to speak, in i the shadow of the Eiffel Tower (figure 2). In the long search for a modern es | architecture, the Exposition Universelle of 1889 was greeted as a major xa hee turning point in the history of Western architecture. The Eiffel Tower, - oe , ; designed in 1884, and the Galerie des Machines (figure 3) became symbols et aainal wt an for a new architecture that helped to focus the debate about the relationpagxee me : = = ship between art and engineering, tradition and MOREETIEY, and copying

a SS

a ee See eee and originality over the next half century. In Italy, virtually every modern = ee ie SS movement from 1890Tower to 1940and would its position by explaining its Ra srelationship to the Eiffel thedefine Galerie des Machines.

= BRS Je The two structures produced a rupture felt throughout the West. Ac= ee == === «cording to Marcello Piacentini, “It truly seemed toward 1880 that a oP === Ss Clamorrouss and violent revolution suddenly changed the face of world : ae , bacco a architecture. Eiffel thrust his tower three hundred meters high and Hardy ee ae) = ae and Duval built the famous Palais des Machines that was to represent the = il Ais oS a new architectural religion.”** This revolution was more a crystallization

| iA “2 ees ~~ of previous tendencies. “The new architecture,” the French architect SSS, Louis-Auguste Boileau explained, is “what has been called for everywhere ot ieee re since 1835.” Both temporally and conceptually this was an architecture NN hahaa | that stood at the turning point between two eras. Although the “century

ee that is about to end will not have had its own architecture,” affirmed au... Boileau, this new architecture was a “prelude to the architecture of the ey ie twentieth century.”°? For Paul Gout the architecture for this universal

: ESi) saletielenrablin Vee _. €xposition was a “centennial art” in the dual sense of occurring at the

pate fee one-hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution and consolidating eee oS ck aa the tendencies toward reform that had been ushered in by the Romantic

— geyolution.4° Gout quoted approvingly the words of Octave Mirbeau,

2 which reflected the thoughts of so many progressives throughout the West: Gustave Eiffel, Eiffel Tower, Exposition

Universelles Paris: 1889. It is not in the studios of painters and sculptors that the often heralded and widely desired revolution is being prepared. It is in the factories. The [new] forms are being born under the rude hammer of those who shape iron. No longer would either Bramante or Michelangelo construct Saint Peter’s in Rome. It would be Dutert and Eiffel. From these two colossal embryos—the Galerie des Machines and the Tower—a splendid art, one that our century lacked, will arise: architecture.*! Both the Exposition Universelle and the International Congress of Architects held in Paris that year drew the attention of Italy’s most radical critic, Alfredo Melani, who a decade later would not unjustly describe himself as “one of the first, perhaps the first . . . to advocate a complete change of form.”42 In Architettura italiana (1887) Melani had pleaded for a modern architecture freed from the “dead” styles of the past and informed “a little by that reasoning that we know how to apply so well to the objects of practical life.” Here Melani repeated the progressives’ faith in the great engineering structures of the age as a source of inspiration

for a new architecture: “It has been said... that the century that dug the Mount Cenis Tunnel in so few years, that cut through the Isthmus of Suez, that threw tubular bridges over the most tempestuous arm of the

10 | Modernism before World War I

3

Charles-Louis Ferdinand Dutert and Victor Contamin, Galerie des Machines, Exposition Universelle, Paris, 1889.

os Seale | ii dee ff >. SS one ra a , iF ; : iiss ; “ - RL AT EN TE Pe aR ie tanta spect owc ener

Lo rms, lle alt a LL agen fede | 7}

Aa ett “ae ;

“ge a et raamananie | } SH) , 1 =" ; Nad » ~~, : f alt . iy % a " ;)thie ; =—y A i aMa oO&BT Sy | LSS Td Sed |) ‘&A te |e NP eo ea | Eee | |)a | Bl S|a 9:Gee RZ iZL ’vi 4 4eee itP 1} eR ‘Sa i od ie PAN | miesimm toSSS ‘ ~~ i: va asain: . arg eee ype >| See 8oe1

hd ed eS |S ce

AACE LA ie LE BBO i OF 8Eee ere ieM - a ee Zee wi Uy hha Us, ee eaOS UP Se >

hu = t 4 . | a ois Os a ‘? > Pi i a so ek 32 > a ht . aoe MEW ty Sh ‘ wm isei 4 : ete, =i. arte g x ai Boag ES SeRy ed NeSSSR ss eens op Po RUS or en KCN PE oye cha :~f~ OG, A ate Sy eT ARI Gget ESee BEERR ag —

~~ ati ;aiff Si; :inate ES ; ex: i capa ). aseal efe.Poa hig baea Lr eeak-aek - hi By tepeel Sky. |ake : .yas7:Aoe aa :27stn ats:.: .

I] | The First Italian Exposition of Architecture

sea that divides European nations, and that erected in a few months glass,

iron, and wooden palaces for industry would not fail to have its own character.”43 In 1890 the Galerie des Machines and the Eiffel Tower were

further confirmations of a new way out of the current “architectural doctrinarism.” For Melani the lessons these structures held for the creation of a new architecture were multiple. First, they showed that it would be possible for the modern age to satisfy the general maxim, amply demonstrated by history, that “every culture, every well ordered people had its own characteristic architecture.” Second, the French monuments had used new materials particular to the times in ways that showed they were capable of being given artistic expression. Iron was not, as its detractors claimed, an ignoble material good merely for roofing, but rather was fit for monumental architecture. Melani contrasted the combination of iron used in conjunction with glass, terra cotta, and glazed ceramics in the Galerie des Machines with the “mute monochromy” of contemporary Italian architecture derived “from a false interpretation of classical antiquity.” Third, the Galerie des Machines also created a vast covered space filled with “air and light” to serve what was seen as the characteristic social phenomenon of the age, the crowd—“these great spaces for the coming and going of an inquisitive and bustling crowd.”* Finally, the Galerie des Machines and the Eiffel Tower were evidence of the artist’s creative powers. Melani’s paper is replete with expressions

of admiration for “the flower of [the artist’s] own originality” and for

, creative imagination, “la fantasia.” This emphasis on imagination and originality, as expressed by Melani, Gelati, and others at this time, was an important component of the progressive Italian architect’s psyche around 1890 and would remain a fundamental issue in the succeeding decades.

The way in which Melani responded to the artist’s success in “giving form to the images that come into his imagination,” reflected the lyricism of a Baudelaire or Rimbaud. “Entering this vast vessel [of the Galerie des Machines],” wrote Melani, “raised under the slim shadow of the tower hurling its swan’s neck three hundred meters into the air, an awesome feeling of piety, after a warm flush of enthusiasm, overwhelmed me.”** Such reactions to these two monuments were not uncommon at that time.

For a French observer, the skeletal construction of the Eiffel Tower sug- , gested a future architecture conceived as a scaffolding covered with bright panels of enameled terra cotta and colored glass:

We have just spoken of enamels and colored glass; and in effect it is hardly possible to imagine it other than dressed in the richest colors, this metallic architecture of the future at its fruition. One thinks that he sees standing out against the sky harmonious and true constructions of daring

forms, in which the brown coloring of iron serves as a framework for ceramic reliefs, for the brilliant colors of enamels: a jeweler’s architecture, a giant ceramic cloisonné, where gold and silver, a luminous yellow, blacks and deep blues, reds and greens are assembled in a skillful harmony. But

I stop and end with a wish: that this enchanting vision be a prophetic vision and that it become a reality .. . for our grandchildren.*

12 | Modernism before World War I

These texts stand somewhere between the crystal skies and crystal buildings of Rimbaud’s Illuminations (1886) and Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto” (1909). Similarly, Melani’s uncompromising and radical demand for the most complete “liberty” for the modern artist was a variation on the lessons of history taught by Paul Gout in his series of articles published in the Encyclopédie d’Architecture (1889-90). Writing about the French architects of the thirteenth century, Gout explained that they did not solve their new structural problems by utilizing the Romanesque forms whose pleasing aspect was known and hence comforting to the public. Rather, they “freed themselves from the start from every tradition of forms and resolutely embarked upon the search for a new system of construction responding directly to their principal preoccupation, that of buttressing the thrust of the vaults.” The result, explained Gout, was an ingenious constructive solution refined into the most exquisitely beautiful artistic forms ever created: “The oblique support is rendered with a clarity, a frankness, an ingenuity of aesthetic expression and constructive technique that will never by surpassed.”4” The great lesson of Gothic architecture, then, was a daring break with past forms. In this vein, Melani explained the lessons of the 1889 Paris exposition: “Here every tie to tradition was

willfully and, I would add, sharply cut; and the products of modern industry, until then hardly used by architecture, were, on the Champ de Mars, given a truly official consecration.” Drawing a lesson from what the radicals of the Encyclopédie d’Architecture were calling the architecture of the centenary of the French Revolution, Melani explained, “The principle ‘destroy to rebuild’ is necessary in architecture as in politics.” The Constructive System

Those who placed their hopes in the new iron architecture generally adhered to the widespread nineteenth-century notion that every true culture had its own characteristic architecture and that each architecture was grounded in a new and different system of construction. The idea that architecture was grounded in the art of building, which in turn became

the basis for aesthetic expression, was so common that the repeated laments about the inability of the times to create its own characteristic architecture was often framed in these terms. Thus Ludovic Vitet, who served as the first French Inspector General of Historical Monuments from 1830 to 1833, explained in 1838, “I do not believe that it is possible

to expect our century to have its own architecture, that is to say, an entirely new, special, and individual system of construction that distinguishes it from all others that preceded it.”*? By the 1880s, though, a new iron architecture grounded in what the French called “la construction apparente,” or visible structure, had become sufficiently established to belie Vitet’s pessimism.*°

For progressives, it was important that architects assimilate the new developments in engineering into their profession and into the domain of art. This had been a constant theme since at least the construction of the Crystal Palace for the 1851 Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, London. At

13 | The First Italian Exposition of Architecture

the Congrés International des Architectes held in Paris in 1878, for example, the French architect Gabriel Davioud had cited the Bibliothéque Sainte-Geneviéve by Henri Labrouste, the Central Markets of Paris by Victor Baltard, and the glass-covered atrium of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts by Félix Duban as successful assimilations of modern engineering into art. Here were “new beauties” that displayed a “character of grandeur and simplicity unknown until then.”*! The primacy of the constructive system in the creation of a new architecture was also a central theme of a pamphlet, Architettura del XX secolo (Architecture of the Twentieth Century) published in 1889 by the architect Mario Ceradini. Ceradini’s essential argument, according to Boito, was that art from the Parthenon to the cathedral of Paris enjoyed a “‘triumphant march,’ interrupted only by the ‘sculptural bacchanalia of the Renaissance’: from the architrave to the arch, from internal buttresses to external flying buttresses, from inert masses to opposing and equilibrated masses, from simple round arches to multifaceted and audacious pointed arches.”*? For Ceradini the only nineteenth-century Italian architect to pursue the structural innovations of past eras, which had been interrupted by the Renaissance, in a manner that held great promise for the future was the Piedmontese architect Alessandro Antonelli.5> By study-

ing Gothic architecture, explained Ceradini in L’architettura italiana alla Prima Esposizione d’Architettura in Torino (1890), Antonelli had invented an original “system of construction” that developed the potentialities of Gothic architecture further than in the Middle Ages.** In Turin the promise of a new architecture offered by the French glass and iron

, monuments was shared by the daring masonry of Antonelli’s structures. Alessandro Antonelli’s New Constructive System

By the 1850s Alessandro Antonelli had developed the basic components of what his contemporaries would call the “sistema antonelliano” or the “muratura antonelliana.” In his system, the wall exists only as a means of covering or closure; the support and the solidity of the building is entirely entrusted to pillars that provide the principal points of support; to arches that, as counterpoint to the pillars, offer new points of support when needed and that support the vaults. Order and equilibrium govern and harmonize the entire mass of the building. A complex of hidden tie rods integrated into the mass of the masonry itself complete the solidity, the invariableness of the structural system.°°

The culminating application of this system of building came in the Mole Antonelliana (figures 4—6), designed in 1862 as a synogogue for the Jewish community of Turin. Like other Italian Jewish communities in subsequent

years, the Jews of Turin erected a building that would express their gratitude for their civil emancipation in 1848, their contribution to the life of the city, and the dignity of their religion. The grandiose architecture of these synagogues reflected the joy of a liberation from a legal confinement in the insalubrious ghetto, from punitive heavy taxes and tributes, from police confiscation of belongings, from restrictions that kept Jews

14 | Modernism before World War I

| in degrading professions, and from the threat of forced conversion that as late as 1864 in Rome would see the removal of a Jewish child from his family.°®

Consulted after a competition of 1862 for the Turin synagogue yielded projects that failed to provide for all the stipulated rooms or to adhere to the budget, Antonelli applied his original system of construction so as to create a building that economically fulfilled the program on the relatively

small site. Yet shortly after work began in 1863, Antonelli secretly changed his design to make the edifice taller. By 1867, when the initial project was no longer realizable because of Antonelli’s alterations, the Jewish community requested an explanation from the architect. Originally projected to rise approximately 47 meters high, Antonelli’s design now called for a monument reaching over 113 meters tall. Although the Jewish community reluctantly accepted these changes, it eventually halted construction in 1869 when funds had all been spent. Nine meters of the dome were still unbuilt. It was also clear that Antonelli was actually constructing an even taller vault than had been agreed upon even in the latest negotiations with the Jewish community.°” At this time, the Jewish community was reluctant to sink more money into this edifice. Furthermore, the transfer of the capital of Italy over the following two years, with the concomitant exodus of people and money to Rome, made it difficult if not impossible for the Jewish community to

raise the additional funds required to complete not only the upper part of the structure but also the interior finishings for the entire building. Offered to the city of Turin in 1875 by the Jewish community, the building was acquired by the municipality in 1878 with the intention of establishing it as a Monument of National Memory to King Vittorio Emanuele II. In 1908 the Museum of the Risorgimento established its quarters in the Mole Antonelliana, whose structure had been completed in 1889, shortly after

the architect’s death on October 18, 1888.58 After the city of Turin acquired the building, Antonelli sucessively altered his design to make it reach still higher to 146 meters, then to 153 meters, and finally to 163 meters.°? The city of Turin, like the Jewish community before it, was confronted with accepting the architect’s changes after the fact. In the Mole Antonelliana, Antonelli realized the most sophisticated and daring version of his constructive system. Compelled to occupy the entire available area of the site to satisfy the complex program, Antonelli erected

a square building measuring 37 meters on each side without internal courtyard. Yet Antonelli felt that the edifice provided excellent hygienic conditions of light and ventilation according to the current standards of sanitary engineering.®° Two floors of rooms for ancillary services were conceived as a base for the grand room of the sanctuary proper, capped by a dome (figure 4) constructed with a predominently brick skeletal frame of thin masonry ribs, arches, and vaults reinforced with a framework of iron tie rods (figure 5).6! In the lantern above the dome (figure 6), explains Franco Rosso, where the loads on the entablatures as well as

15 | The First Italian Exposition of Architecture

x

Sie Fit

SSS i! ee rE ie . eeTe ethene SS jo SSa a SS LS en ioeee aeee : SSIS Ee SSSee art Fee ae ith a hoes at on

Se ee 5S eer -: aessage = SEs Set ae

ee eek eotiah BIE -- dee Sime SS}. .aa: ae [| IX sg Ap f ist 5 M re ER ifHT sar \ //A’ SS\ oF)ya: a -eee

5 LP SRO Sr t uuiig/) 1Bwe SSSRiSeey SEES ed SRN

Antonelli, Mole Antonelliana, ie 1 FES & here , , ‘ov “OSUstructure SEESi ifPee RFi. oP \¥ of the cupola. From L’ Ingegneria Civile e } Lf 2) / SES ae at 2aN dl Be a le Arti Industriali (1888). a} Nk / & ‘Re euace ee 7 4,Pe\ .Sieslp 5 = sa See ye RS =a “ADS " {EE =ik 4* ia £ae{i‘g4EX Se SigSa 2 Se SRES SSAA EAs

; Sartoris, Ay F pfEncyclopédie EE PSS oeRey Pe rg a=wgBE Unset I 3 From l’architec[Ss BEde is Jae, SS ete - (Se — AF ra, SNS mahaeo ae 2 ae ture nouvelle (1957). if ff 2|MEMee exMEE / cs eae:—ERESt Ge LS : | tee iSB. he Aiee“= = pega ee | beSORE 5 | BE32ay4 cad See aaaee== 2 the lantern (1880-83) above the cupola. |} 1) ReeeSn SS St Se iae — apes = i‘ | DL, Ba EEE A= Sa CRG ceapeN a = os if fa og 5 SEs Shas at soe~iste Se a Sey fy ieDRMEE fifiPat SStSLNCS OoRa le PE Me: Wee eee See eaeBaa eye4sea SO3Beal eeaie FERS SERRE SN Se eae é - i} jf | Se oa Ea Bi,SR 3 ~\= So) ESS Sees

ae 4We; i+ShEB ee cee ra stee=e] EA == | | fHifPip” ch ey Bae = =e eee ety ernie ae: | (= he oe SS ee espomee7¢Se ee—1aASSees 0 SRR BS Sa SSeS, Say SSS

ONLY | Sah a DERE S= ee Rare ees 5 ae {! re,” 33 4 ‘eS 4 mks Rte a a ee 4 iow Rice2,See ota eetaPaOTE AE: RSseget ote MITTpir Sic AP SoS2 ee Seg Biot HeaFea teas ei tlm fy) ON Steamy iten sae es RL eae termeairpsese as eae

See|ees cS Ee et oesFas ee) Be iRatae Ses | etSeer eSeSa

| TONG | RRRRORISUITASAS SSeSSRRE ole fee ee aT k

NN So \éFs, ticki

sf a ; ‘4 iS

16 | Modernism before World War I

, ‘ iia rwl, 7 " Pi r’ " ™ a j oA, i, ' Pala ‘li . 7 “ Wh,

Tw " i ) hy, | [ ;a.\,:,i|Mibi 4 s >i{; i|ah ; i i a @ no ” ar Wi it i "y ,*; 5:i ' i ; A3y Wid Malis iif a ae r m, ‘ai i , Ohi ae ae ll #uy “uf ; git ' Fi eal Ci a ii — . . | E , ao | , " a uA a i a = 4 “ pre te4 ¥,éi iieshttihe Hl ’ ooSae wh ={ jEc moe OE Oaae I a

| . : || :| % ef m &) Bh ' | Md ‘Wig mn

;. a..‘

Lt La Wes| ie ee2 re " rice 4 ‘* hlON i i ES Ni, Li ibi F4 Saas mate ‘ae le EE TRthe miCae : ,cm F. ;”me ;TE Iii AN aaaIF 7

‘4 ae : i Me ok | | y re ; an | ees > ee , i ty ; , “ Bc, Nil , bic ee i, ob oi 7 ‘; -be 5 ane ie: ie ~.3 aa

_Feoe y ¢ ~ ; i. aw Pe ge »," _ ¥ ? Z . - ye ~

~. 22 s “s . = 4. s = . . 7 e ; ¥ P m z ¢ . ~~ . : : ae. 6 o ny ia ;nd Wea > >! ; .*”= oes *er mt7ot! es :ad> ».YX 5 > bh’ ws, P f = i f “| 7 ~ a e . a > _— a Ne 7 > s . « ’ rr . . ha —_— et? -#£

, Pa .-*‘A ' " the . ° 7sad . >,aa‘. 7i*ys r> x29

; 2 / 7 — \ . * ‘ . =~ Pa a . : PY ~ 7 ‘gb i. ag . ~~ fae -

the spacing between the vertical supports are not too great, Antonelli came closest to realizing a pure skeletal system of vertical and horizontal members.° The skeletal structure of the Mole Antonelliana operated according to Viollet-le-Duc’s third general principle of masonry construction. It was not like Egyptian and Greek buildings, with their “simple stability through superimposition of materials resolving themselves through vertical loads,” or Roman buildings, with their massive exterior concrete walls containing internal thrusts. Rather, the Mole Antonelliana followed the tradition of

the “elastic” masonry of medieval architecture built according to the “principle of equilibrium obtained through forces acting in opposing directions.” ®

In developing a masonry skeletal system of construction, Antonelli was

offering an alternative to the dominant innovative trend outside Italy based on the new iron skeletal system of construction.** As Antonelli explained in his memorandum of March 6, 1874, to the mayor of Turin, “The entire brick construction in this building resembles metal constructions to the extent that a distinguished engineer from Geneva has said to me: if metal architecture did not exist, it would be intuited in this construction.”® Antonelli’s use of masonry vaulting reflected both his interest in native building traditions and the economic realities of the times. Even

in the early 1880s Italy did not have the capacity for large-scale iron

construction.® ,

The importance of the sistema antonelliano to the development of a modern Italian architecture was recognized by its champions. In 1878, for example, the engineer Ferria argued that the Mole Antonelliana was rescuing for Italy its traditional leading role in architecture by offering an alternative to the foreign system of iron construction hailed abroad as the “architecture of the future.” Ferria was proud that a “monument to the first King of Italy would have its seat in the Mole Antonelliana, first truly Italian monument characteristic of the century.”®’ In his dissertation of 1875 that defended the Mole Antonelliana against critics who wanted to demolish the vault and replace it with a metal construction, Crescentino Caselli observed that this building certainly satisfied the call for a “national architectural style” that had preoccupied the last Congresso Artistico held in Milan in 1872. “To me it appears that this is the modern Italian style par excellence.” The Mole Antonelliana, in the words of a contemporary observer, was a “formidable staircase to the sky.”® In this sense, it shared with the Eiffel Tower that quality of daring monumentality achieved through innovative structural design.”° Like the Eiffel Tower, the Mole Antonelliana provided a literal staircase to the sky with an observation post at the top. The skeletal lantern (figure 6) was as much a scaffolding for its stairs as

a source of light for the domed space below. Above the lantern, the staircase wound its way upward as a spiral around the central core of the spire.”! On the occasion of the First Italian Exposition of Architecture, for followers of Antonelli, the sistema antonelliano appeared to offer the “fecund germ of the future.”7?

18 | Modernism before World War I

Although the most ardent champions of the Mole Antonelliana were pleased with its outward appearance, other supporters were not. Alfredo Melani, for example, argued that there was a disjunction between the internal structure and the exterior form. For Melani, the Mole Antonelliana was the “most original modern monument in Italy, which represents the triumph of the laws of construction.” Yet “when looking at the Mole Antonelliana, one might perhaps desire that the visible structure corresponded better with the real structure.” 73 Melani’s critique encapsulated the two types of criticism about the Mole Antonelliana heard at this time.” One was that Antonelli did not leave behind the Greco-Roman classical vocabulary of architecture. Here the shortcomings were double. First, the architect did not invent a new stylistic idiom to express the new constructive system. Second, the outward appearance of the Mole Antonelliana hid and even contradicted the nature of the inner structural organism. In the end, Caselli’s enthusiasm for the clarity of the classical architecture in which every feature served a structural role and every division of the facade corresponded to an interior zone of structure or space simply could not stiffle this critique. For Caselli, the “entire edifice, without being made of glass, is transparent, and whoever admires it from the outside

knows almost as much about it as he who is inside.””> Yet a mere correspondence between interior arrangements and exterior elements did

not mean a clear reading of the inside on the outside. For critics, the visual evidence was not compelling. Nor was the beauty. Many people, observed Ceradini, felt that the Mole Antonelliana was “ugly.”76 Once again, Caselli and Ceradini objected in

vain. The seeming awkwardness of proportions would leave the Mole Antonelliana an admired monumental construction but without widespread admiration for its appearance. A Challenge from the Patriarch of Italian Architects The avant-garde positions taken in Paris and Turin prompted a lengthy response by Camillo Boito in the prestigious intellectual review Nuova Antologia. Here Boito attacked not only the “French rationalists,” but also the “Italian nihilists” whom he believed were following their example in an exaggerated way. Boito had previously outlined his basic position in his essay “Sullo stile futuro dell’architettura italiana” (On the Future Style of Italian Architecture), published as an introduction to his Architettura del medio evo in Italia (1880). Here he had dismissed the current eclectic mixing of dissimilar styles as productive only of “abortion or monstrosities.” The hope for a future style for the “new Italy” resided in the renewal of one of Italy’s many past styles to the point that it would lose its “archaeological character.” If architecture, like the other arts and letters, were “to break the chain of tradition, it would lose its living, manifest, and popular language, and thus, its moral and civil efficacy.” For Boito, the conviction that “national character comes from historical character” precluded any rupture with the past.”’

19 | The First Italian Exposition of Architecture

Hence, when the Encyclopédie d’Architecture sponsored a competition to stimulate the creation of a new architecture foreshadowed by the 1889 Paris exposition, Boito responded with derision. Boito found the compe-

tition so “ridiculous” that he dismissed it as a journalistic ploy. “The competition,” he explained, “has a prodigious intention: to give finally ‘a

style to the architecture of the nineteenth century.’ They will have to hurry; there is no time to lose.”7”8

The competition announcement was free of the sense of temporal urgency that Boito mockingly invoked. Rather, it had serenely declared that

the new architecture was well under way: “The palaces raised on the Champ de Mars, with their new forms and their use of uncustomary materials, have proven that it has been wrong to deny the existence of a style to the architecture of the nineteenth century.””? The reason that Boito denigrated this competition was that it threatened his belief in the gradual evolution of historical styles toward modern forms. “But not aspiring to renovate the world,” quipped Boito, “does not seem to be an excessive humility.”®°

For Boito, the call for a new architecture based upon a new constructive system was equally threatening. This was a position that Boito had found in Architettura del XX secolo by Mario Ceradini, whom Boito characterized as “a young person full of talent .. . and destined to make beautiful and sensible things once he ceases to be a martyr” to the new cause. Boito suspected that Ceradini had no interest in beauty, but only in construction. “Perhaps for him construction suffices; but construction does not suffice for architecture.” As Boito observed, Crescentino Caselli shared Ceradini’s enthusiasms.*! Antonelli’s disciple and knowledgable champion of the Mole Antonelliana as well as the sistema antonelliano, Caselli had the greatest admiration for what he termed Antonelli’s “personal architectural system,” which was an “aesthetic system always derived and intimately connected with the truth and excellence of the constructive system.” ® As for Melani, this “most recent and noteworthy” proponent of radical ideas had to be answered. Melani’s warning about the stifling effects of the study of past styles on the creative imagination of architecture students

seems to have troubled Boito the most. “Better to launch the bark of one’s own creativity among the tempests of the ocean,” Melani had affirmed at the 1890 Turin exposition, “than to stay immobile on the shores of the past. There one does not risk the danger of drowning, but there one will never be able to discover the far off land of truth.”* The first modern movement, Arte Nuova or Art Nouveau, was to realize Melani’s dream of a radical break from the past. The introduction of Arte

Nuova into Italy as a polemical alternative to historical revivals and stylistic eclecticism occurred at the Prima Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte Decorativa Moderna (First International Exposition of Modern Decorative Art) in Turin in 1902. After the success of this fair, Melani thought that he would have the last word with Boito in the ongoing controversy about innovation and tradition. Writing in the fourth edition of his Manuale di architettura italiana antica e moderna (1903), Melani

20 | Modernism before World War I

recalled Boito’s admonishment that Italian architecture “had to ‘link it-

, self’ to a single Italian style,” which the triumph of the fair’s architecture seemed so emphatically to belie: “A step forward has been made. The rigorism of styles is out of season; and the public will get used to a new art that wants to provide it with new emotions and new pleasures. ”84

21 | The First Italian Exposition of Architecture

Arte Nuova: Turin, 1902

In Italy, Arte Nuova or Art Nouveau burst into the public’s consciousness with the Prima Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte Decorativa Moderna (First International Exposition of Modern Decorative Art), held in Turin in 1902.! Whereas over the previous few years there had been isolated examples of Art Nouveau furnishings, decoration, and even architecture created in Italy largely under the influence of the floral forms of Belgium and France, the 1902 Turin exposition introduced the latest avant-garde style of the Austrian Secession with a complex of buildings that housed modern decorative arts from all over the West (figures 7-12). This fair, affirmed a writer for the popular journal L’I/lustrazione Italiana, was “the

most daring and original artistic undertaking that the new Italy had attempted.” Like the first national exhibition of architecture in Turin in 1890, the impetus for this First International Exposition of Modern Decorative Art came from Giovanni Angelo Reycend and his fellow architects in the Circolo Artistico di Torino.’ Five members of the exposition’s executive committee—the two vice-presidents, Reycend and the sculptor Leonardo Bistolfi; its secretary, the art critic Enrico Thovez; and the decorator Giorgio Ceragioli along with the sculptor Davide Calandra—also created a new interdisciplinary journal, L’Arte Decorativa Moderna, under Thovez’s direction, to promote the cause of the new architecture and deco-

rative arts in Italy. The January 1901 “Manifesto of the Turinese Committee” expressed confidence that Turin was the ideal city for this undertaking:

Precisely because it is less rich in monuments of the decorative arts in relation to other Italian cities and precisely because it is less enslaved to stylistic traditions that, although glorious, are sometimes grave impediments to the development of new forms, Turin seems particularly suited for this attempt at renewal. Perhaps here better than anywhere else, one can usefully host the first exposition of modern decorative art.* At the time, Art Nouveau in architecture and the decorative arts seemed

an invigorating alternative to what was seen as the stifling historical revival styles. The organizers of the 1902 Turin exposition hoped that the

|

Cab» | (e et “aw aa es )a,‘\ ors g *: ey ey 1 % _ MASS i Aanes ratRZtyet,eo c_. > 4 oes, in.

PX a helt, os . *“ en \VY : PA, tess 1UeSs.

ae eA rs i: Px at ™S “ZA 7* &es:¥ee Seot BS‘i 4eee . ear#é

.¥J]ei. i ke ae HY we as a ae Rehis v i: & ergs RSS 3 : ‘Be ss

wh SMa ‘ fa aaee reeset s.=T.nt). i? debe Pa jfo. ? eetir‘s iT oe See mt fi 4 / ee 5 tei oe et res ok ete bd : 4 : nf *« é 2 pth pty —h / g? ¢ a A * Fe StF w ee ot et Aap ah DEV Ry Awe et) f ie a tied e-~iiis ow) fe ge te ‘ Ne «seRoa fhih}: iit S : BRN is i ree 'Se 5 ED * :Nk . aR ini*7 PLAYS) i CA a.ey s+ WH : wien “RETR 2 HR\OR J Te NERD & OR, seas j cy ig) BAe . iy S4TT1TS he SS Se :. PASS ae SNe SS eS ae Van a : Se ‘* SS 3 Pee oi . ! ¥ ‘ y CLES Tee eS.~ \Feta?; >’ COP RS ar wobie mee et elSeae. 50 BrAt Rae G8eRE BE Ce RARER ea.REGS «Fe Se,x, P: Stes ‘ vr. P 5 * BY oo aa wsa 3~~ eG & ea s ae \ ) a. : Sg efBRaqAe Se t& BAY sy *meer SS ee yiad &>Be arr 35S bSEWey F~bd aiSeg) ~~ at og eS Se | * } t, aitee CLoeil rye og Sas eg viet ee & § SARS : SSR : yy ty 2 as SARE aoe i coat : eB OR ORS, we a ESSE SSS , : Pe A ee + ! \ : RAS ek, Pier SAGE BE = iS FiO, 4 ee ag Fon ‘ : \ '

Oe Ee8 = OeSeUSereome)) saat roe EES ; oun pesanaa a ateie. ceeoe We!) SD2: Boe 2 *, %a.sated *s'x'ad ' KeeneA, i el 4 i f ® Aya >. = ‘ ve & és Se SE RY : i a” weg vi WS ¥. coveet sy Ly b‘ Sy48 : ime we)RE |) Wheel | ne*senme XS OS Ve. ii —q. so gettper ete. 4Ne | ey aS Red ‘“Se“Sua SS

4ANE 8 Se SS FSS bi tiitis 2Beciiras SRe:Rae . :;ts.2aaBE aNiay | be . :' WE BT fire ee.i. ‘Sa 7SSS 8we yt We TY oe NN ‘ie NRRtae UE | TTP i i(pie Hi

oa oe ? 2:‘a‘| ieRece ,| *;‘ ‘PPP? E met=Reon +ss7a ee amas mal ees vy .3 ; ail aY. we RSS ‘>a Re tFSS, : ESz_i[eee a oer>ee ;* Ree

© ace wd ~~ re “9 mt MS a R 3 Fa a [= ** $- a bef a og : be at¢ iad ie2*ail ef.

24 | Modernism before World War I

g

D’Aronco, Galleria degli Ambienti (de-

tail), First International Exposition of pace

Pema 4 et ee ] a’ | 4 tee : % i ’ fog maga. Bi ta

Modern Decorative Art, Turin, 1902. ="

ce

w een °

Fe a. (*iA* tf4 Xs A,44rns SS — } fe if ih } 4

“ “i LS ue -¥ Be sf #3 rr 4g p : f "WE i Sai

é‘ |{f\f%lank ,i ae er es- y{3ai AN ” j?4.Wy

i :- 4M; d Sy7 eee ' uf ‘ We jj - -: '6aea| Ve .@ > fBi ae)F2h Aon yyae%;;\j > sa ;=a! : 7: ae %y; :ii ¢‘ 2: : ht \9 ‘ak * 2' é “ ss iy i ‘«“ ;ei : Yiat ny : /* —— ee ri 2»vs Mh: y:}.;i.& ;4 Pe; “- ‘ SS —— tif } : j 2 ®4 4 BE 34 y ~ ry ‘Qi :ie§N\A ~ Ly 2 / J many ma e . anil 4 pe ; ye ’ = FE 7 1 } 4 ' Pf f all wie 4

: aa: : ; ; ay vy ‘ 10) a”

eek, » bag Sy gag Bae GY Core em ) ? 4 F “ : aif 3 $

I)nasgfi :| dy _=' :: fi( 1 , Pe — mF -

.” laid - y’ wont de st : ——*, a“ond es fe See.So atalatete :— ts A ean it -—a8 2.=4=YY epTtema 9: allogoyat ——~S ES ;y.-

eee aSARRAS SO OO_ =a ic, ie — Ys los ae ae ie ga* Pg ys Ag on,Aoaages ae peeesusede ted ot gt _ . % ®*. @eSeeaeaeaes ,

Se, Ite 4) ss _ d », * te : “4 es |

ee : b.. ue. ae ‘ Pris aa7A Se =: ae % Jackie - T — soewn PR wae ane) ; ie atest

Ps

26 | Modernism before World War I

&

, op oO eeePOPP onga he |i A fora I ik IN I. aagee,OO * oa ES ine ye eee. eh Dae eea '— ig" RE ? WL,Gates Ly ae ae4ey— piceny BDT* Bu ae a i -_—e ::xaa Bk F Fme wg 7 y f That at e . 5 : : ” 4 2atlas 4 - :ili- as . 2a :te4liti ttt a hma}!eae . ‘.“7‘ bar “aanf,| g ‘TUS. ee ie)Lh i ye y ae, / aYY me", ties aS ba

a 7, | | a

at : : a 13 : thy es i ‘ : i : i | e aes STL > —e . 4 . py ae. a : n*) { 4 s r ii » Eiaeneg I %y |jee &atToe ° } erro é y$ » | . , 3 RNS. > , foe || ckeR Pas ¥.-DY ee tere ae |)bh bag “'owe pi Lsial¥ 4. in Be Badks atan a an eh‘€pee 2.3 ee oo oR Eas | eee XZ a BY ; , ahs yh.bee Jags oy ry “>. Rye4Sat. ty ine ‘S iam - f fFc a mt e*ort \* |7Shae y rsree . a ne

Pa~oP . “WL)» ‘ 7 uitGO & . at“ul On?”yi - fer%ity f FF ” ’ ay ee» Semen: meen me = s 4 :

» % % te ty 7 if | MR A ail “ be ¥: - an F eticens A a” % 4 ' ' eer ys.

- e 1 iy : . he 4 ; nate ‘A . “0 ; - R f" ) ; x, h 5 ‘ «a ;

e ee : gray, ok key i cr sol ee OD Mi sg Prevay , Ne 6. : ™

4 cap ee0; aot?Ag i, , via “te ‘ “ a‘ HER mage . te aAap yy pe: “§ vr 1? s . aT - we ‘ Py et * rr» aeoh Resear c; Ve a.An Ty! »> Es . _— ry Puytamg ‘he dig rae a, Maer am 3 ATs ; on: Pant by D reN| ay *‘ Md wd

‘ 4 oN ; 3 Met +2 a ** - a

ie - ‘: P. Ja" es fethe a . ay ‘ re‘ =’ ;aes PNadsy- pst Re ia ieie stay Bont /. ‘TA +-% Pasa. 12

Ludwig Baumann, Austrian villa, First International Exposition of Modern Decorative Art, Turin, 1902.

27 | Arte Nuova: Turin, 1902

example of foreign accomplishments would stimulate native efforts in this

direction. Italian artists, “rather than copying,” would be inspired to imbibe the “spirit” of these new foreign works, “and by returning to nature, know how to give expression to their own creations according to the national temperament.”* Widely ranging in genres, from jewelry and book design to buildings, and varied in aesthetics, the products of Art Nouveau inevitably reflected different intentions. Critics debated its significance. In 1902 The Architectural Record wondered whether the “‘New Art’ is only one of many expressions of ‘fin de siécle’ sensationalism, which tries to whip jaded sensibility into new life by violent stimulation” ?¢ Siegfried Bing, who, as creator of the Salon de |’Art Nouveau in Paris in 1895, had been one of Art Nouveau’s earliest and foremost promoters, responded to such concerns by acknowledging the superficiality of much that was fashioned under its banner, but nonetheless insisted on the seriousness and importance of its ideals.” Over the portal of the Secession Building (1898) in Vienna, those ideals had been inscribed in a slogan that reiterated the terms of the Romantic revolution—Der Zeit ihre Kunst/ Der Kunst ihre Freiheit (To the age its art/ To art its freedom). This sentiment was the impetus behind the 1902 Turin exposition. In their manifesto, the organizers of the fair conveyed the reasoning that not only informed their own endeavors, but that would also inspire progressive architects of other modern movements over the succeeding decades: By now it is no longer necessary to insist on the need for the modern age

to have its own style. Nor is it rash, as it was a few years ago, to demonstrate that this is now possible. Modern man, busy until now with renewing his mind, has finally understood that his city, his house, and his person require equal care, without which his intellectual faculties cannot be given their full development. He has understood that if the material setting does not correspond to the spirituality of the person who inhabits it, it is not possible to have harmony either in life or in art, which is its highest expression.° Decorative Art, Democratic Art

The organizers of the 1902 Turin exposition hoped that the fair would not only display luxury items, but would also exhibit “prototypes of complete decors adapted to all homes and all incomes and especially for the most humble so as to promote a real, effective, and complete renovation” of the setting for daily life.? To this extent, the 1902 Turin exposition was conceived according to the ethos of “l’art dans tout” (art in everything), “l’art public,” and “l’art social” that progressive architects, designers, and social reformers throughout Europe had been promoting since the 1880s as a way improving the lot of ordinary people.!® Both architecture and the decorative arts were intimately tied together in the turn of the century Art Nouveau movement, whose socially conscious champions sought to adapt art to the needs of what was seen as the age of the crowd and the era of democracy. Mario Ceradini, who had been an outspoken participant in the 1890 Turin exposition, addressed this

28 | Modernism before World War I

issue in an article and a brochure of 1896 on the subject of “aristocratic art in a democratic society”: “Art must be in everything and for everybody.” This new art was not to be found in the traditional “aristocratic” formats of the painted canvas and the statue, but rather in the artistic rendering of the humble objects of everyday life: “decorative art, democratic art.”!! Whereas some critics stressed that the new art was imparting “a characteristic aesthetic expression to our scientific and mechanical civilization,” !* others saw what was popularly termed the “educational” role of the decorative arts as a “corrective” to the “too utilitarian” spirit of contemporary society.!? To this dual end, the program for the 1902 Turin exposition stipulated three areas for exhibits in the decorative arts— the street, the house, and the room.'* [nitially, the organizers had hoped that the exposition would feature “veritable streets and plazas in harmony with the tastes and needs of the day,” but the lack of time reduced this ambitious idea to the more modest creation of two villas in addition to the numerous complete room decors. !* The notion of the complete interior decor was also seen as an innovation for expositions of this kind. “We want our exposition to have a completely new character,” affirmed the printed program. In place of the customary assemblage of isolated objects, there would be “organic” ensembles: “a series of decorative complexes, of complete interiors, responsive to the true needs of our existence.”'® The degree to which the notion of the ensemble was fundamental to the Art Nouveau movement can be gauged from Victor Horta’s remarks about his decision to participate in this undertaking even though his interior ensemble would be divorced from its own architectural setting. The public should know, proclaimed Horta, that the only reason that he departed from the principle of deriving an interior decor out of the particular circumstances of the architecture was

so as “not to miss out in this battle in favor of the renewal of art, in favor of the sane principles that have been neglected too long, and that | am participating here so as not to be absent in a place where it is important to fight.”?!”

That sense of battle was fostered by the innovative program established

for the exposition, which encouraged not only the creation of entire ensembles, but even more importantly rejected any historical copies. All exhibits had to be inspired by a desire to renew the decorative arts. Article 2 of the General Rules stipulated: “Only original products that show a decisive tendency toward the aesthetic renewal of form will be admitted. Neither mere imitations of past styles nor industrial products not inspired by an artistic sense will be admitted.”!8§ Thus, the 1902 Turin exposition became the first international exposition in which only modern decorative arts would be shown. Nearly all countries that had been enjoying the development of some

form of Art Nouveau participated in the Turin exposition—England, Scotland, Austria, Germany, Hungary, Holland, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Sweden, Japan, and the United States. Only Spain declined the invitation. These countries were represented by their most renowned artists, including Joseph Maria Olbrich, Peter Behrens, Victor Horta, Charles

29 | Arte Nuova: Turin, 1902

Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret Mackintosh Macdonald, Charles Tiffany, and Walter Crane. Political maneuvering in Austria kept the artists of the Secession from exhibiting, but the Austrian spirit was well represented in the architecture of Ludwig Baumann, who designed both an Austrian Pavilion and a model house (figure 12), both fully in keeping with the Secessionist aesthetic of the main fair buildings. Although the architecture and the exhibits imparted a sense of the new style, the 1902 Turin exposition was not successful in realizing its goal of

art for all classes. The most significant exhibit of this type were the “‘ambienti’ economici” by the progressive Famiglia Artistica of Milan: a cherry dining room set, a chestnut study, and a chestnut bedroom.!® There were, however, few moderately priced objects and interiors in comparison with the great number of luxury items.

The Public Competition and the Lessons of Darmstadt

To secure an appropriately expressive architectural setting for the new decorative arts that would be displayed at the exposition, the organizers sponsored a public competition in February 1901. Contestants had only six weeks to design a complex to cover ten thousand square meters in Valentino Park, along the Po River. Raimondo D’Aronco was awarded first prize on April 12, 1901, for a series of Art Nouveau buildings.*° Since winning the competition in 1890 for the facade of the building to house the First Italian Exposition of Architecture (figure 1), D’Aronco continued to display the talent and energy that had merited such praise at that time. His projects and buildings were seen as contributing to the development of a modern architecture. When the Societa Promotrice di Belle Arti of Turin published for the first time in 1894 a work of architecture in the catalogue of its current Esposizione di Arte Moderna, it was a design by D’Aronco. In 1896 this same organization awarded D’Aronco a gold medal in recognition of the work he had exhibited on the occasion of the society’s fiftieth anniversary. This architecture was praised for its “completely modern” character, the product of D’Aronco’s “extraordi-

nary activity and ardent genius . . . his extraordinary facility of invention. ”7!

In 1893 D’Aronco had been called to Constantinople to design the projected international Industrial and Agricultural Exhibition.2? The Le-

vant Herald reported that “the building will be for the most part in modern style, but in some parts will have a national character.”*’ Although this exhibition did not take place, primarily because of the earthquake of 1894,24 D’Aronco remained in Turkey as Chief Architect to the

Sultan and architect for the ministries of war, agriculture, and pious bequests.2° In 1896 the engineer Riccardo Brayda, who had been promoting the cause of modern architecture in the Societa Promotrice di Belle

Arti of Turin, expressed the hope that D’Aronco would soon bring to Italy the inventive talent that he had been displaying in Turkey.26 By winning the competition for the First International Exposition of Modern Decorative Art, D’Aronco would now satisfy this desire.

30 | Modernism before World War I

4 7 ‘ " — . , ~, : -

SS eee wil . eg a a lilqo oe aw

|Oh yy: :iq : ai %,,4! Pe. ~ fo n j wg , ping ann AX pei i (ih WNee 1 ih

ay Ge. i 4 ] 7. ” :» “ .4A{,a8;|”¢aie is i mi ae. | oe | “sg ‘ f mi a ae Ripe PE) 4a. ™% _—— Pa, ie! ae ih ie’ " «ge

i "| th | Caan - owen) ( . | i "s fas t wat . : 2 “5 _ es - j hye “ip. ae Coa 3 &. ey a $ : ; ,

seph Maria Olbrich, E il- 7 ;

13 The jury in the competition for the architecture of the 1902 Turin Stee hans Dipie cap ene Bee exposition awarded second prize to Annibale Rigotti, the architect who

ions, “A Document of German Art” Exhibition, Artists’ Colony, Darmstadt, had worked for D’Aronco in Constantinople. As a result, D’Aronco and

1901. Rigotti were invited to collaborate on a final project.*”? On April 23, 1901, D’Aronco arrived in Turin from Constantinople to design in conjunction with Rigotti a new project that would satisfy changes in the program. Once again, repeating the experience of his work for the Industrial and Agricultural Exhibition in Constantinople, D’Aronco and his associates dazzled observers by completing the new designs in under twenty days.?® D’Aronco had effectively become principal architect for the exposition with Rigotti designing several buildings (figure 11).*? With D’Aronco

obliged to return to Constantinople, Rigotti was made overseer for the construction of the fair.*° D’Aronco’s executed buildings for the exhibition (figures 7-10) devel-

oped Art Nouveau themes even further than his competition entry by following the example of Joseph Maria Olbrich’s architecture, especially as found at the Darmstadt Artist’s Colony, whose first exhibition, Ein Dokument deutscher Kunst (A Document of German Art), featuring a village of avant-garde architecture and decorative art, had just opened in May 1901 (figure 13). The significance of Olbrich’s architecture at Darmstadt for progressive Italian architects can be gauged by Thovez’s account of his visit there during the summer of 1901 in the company of an unnamed “architect friend” who, described as having “traveled half way around the world,” could be none other than D’Aronco. Thovez reported that D’Aronco could

31 | Arte Nuova: Turin, 1902

hardly sleep the night before their visit, so excited was he about seeing Olbrich’s architecture. On the train to Darmstadt, D’Aronco observed that the Germans seated with them were oblivious to the Austrian architect’s achievement: “These people who hear us speak of Olbrich and who do not even appear to recognize the name: they have no idea that their train trip is taking them by a man and a work from which a new period in the history of art is beginning.” Once at the Darmstadt Artists’ Colony and in the company of Olbrich himself, Thovez and Darmstadt heard “frequent” expressions of dismay from confused or hostile visitors at the exhibition—“totally crazy,” “dreadful.” Yet, as Olbrich explained, the

exhibition had been a great success: “In three months, two hundred thousand people and one hundred thousand marks in sales.”+! Following Olbrich’s example, D’Aronco’s exhibition buildings presented an architecture of simple prisms with gently bent lines that gave a supple organic look, which was reinforced by the emphasis of flat surfaces covered with vast expanses of bright colors such as yellow, blue, or white and decorated with linear forms suggesting growing plants, waves, or wind. Creating a total ambience in which an artistic spirit of the newest kind could permeate all objects would not have been possible had the

existing buildings on the site, such as the old exhibition building in a “classical style,” the skaters’ chalet and neighboring shed by the lake, the police gazebo by the entrance, and the small building belonging to the Veloce-Club, been left unaltered. These were masked by the new buildings. The old exhibition building itself was obscured by the new ceremonial rotunda and its exhibition wings. The administration and press building was designed to hide the chalet and a neighboring structure, just as the paired entrance pavilions enclosed the former police gazebo. The grandiose facade of the automobile pavilion rose not only as a backdrop to the monumental fountain but also as a screen to hide the chimneys of the university buildings visible in the distance. Rigotti’s pavilion for the international exhibition of wines and oils masked the small building belonging to the Veloce-Club.*? The physical aspect of the 1902 Turin exposition elicited an enthusiastic response from viewers searching for or merely receptive to something fresh and new. Gustave Soulier, who was highly critical of the architecture in his reviews published in L’Art Décoratif, nonetheless opened one of his articles by recounting the experience of a French master sculptor who, after finding in Italy’s famed “cities of art” only a “giant cemetery” of culture, arrived at the Turin exposition to discover a bracing manifestation of “life.”°3 In this vein, various critics found the exhibit and especially its

architecture to be engaging if not dazzling. To Giovanni Sacheri, for instance, the architecture, recognized as the product of an “assiduous search for newness, truly constitutes, as was intended, a great and perhaps

the main attraction of the new exposition.”?4 Giovanni Beltrami and Vittorio Pica reflected the general amazement when they wrote about the “gay and bizarre novelty”35 of this new architecture “with forms never

32 | Modernism before World War I

seen before.”3° The colors also had their effect. The bright yellow entrance, with its white, red, green, and even checkerboard accents, especially, was appreciated for its “intense and vivid coloring, so striking, perhaps even excessively.”>7

The First Festival of the New Style

The year 1902 was a time of reckoning for Art Nouveau throughout the West. Enough had been accomplished in several countries since the inception of the style in the mid-1890s to prompt several periodicals to solicit articles that would explain the nature and significance of the new movement. The Craftsman asked the distinguished Columbia University historian A. D. F. Hamlin for an assessment. Likewise, The Architectural Record solicited explanations about the nature of Art Nouveau from two leading French practitioners, the sculptor and designer Alexandre Charpentier and the architect Hector Guimard. In these responses and with the explanations offered to the Italian public by the new periodical L’Arte Decorativa Moderna, there are several common points. All writers agreed that Art Nouveau was an “uncompromising revolt against the mere copying of conventional forms,”3® achieved with a style inspired by the world of nature. As the Italians noted, “The return to the treasure of natural forms has been universally recognized as the cardinal principle for the renovation of the decorative arts.”3? Guimard explained that the new style was based on “the interpretation of the elements of the flower,” whether leaf, blossom, or stem.*° Hamlin distinguished between two different tendencies within the movement, one marked by the “floral and animal forms” of nature, the other using “restless movement and fantastic curves.”*! The Architectural Record, in summarizing the result of its inquiry, observed that Art Nouveau’s “most salient technical motive was a noticeable liking for continuity of line.”4? This line, explained Melani, was the “specific symbol of the impulse and the action” of the contemporary temperament and way of life.4? Thus, through the use of plant or animal forms abstracted to varying degrees in flowing, curved lines, architects and designers of decorative arts believed that they had found a solution to the dilemma of nineteenth-century historicism and eclecticism. By 1902 Art Nouveau, in the judgment of progressive artists such as the prominent avant-garde French architect Frantz Jourdain, had become “the style of the twentieth century.”44 Although Art Nouveau had just enjoyed the benefits of an extensive, prestigious, and influential exhibition at the Darmstadt Artists’ Colony in 1901, it had not yet been the subject of an international exhibition. The First International Exposition of Modern Decorative Art, then, took place within the dual framework of the advancement of the cause of Art Nouveau as a Western phenomenon and the promotion of modernism in Italian architecture and decorative arts. This exposition largely redeemed Italy in the eyes of foreign critics everywhere, who were keenly aware of the country’s general indifference and even hostile opposition to modern tendencies in architecture and the decorative arts. The Deutsche

33 | Arte Nuova: Turin, 1902

Bauzeitung remarked that Italy had resisted “the modern movement in decorative arts” longer than all other Western countries.* Several critics contrasted what was deemed Italy’s abysmal showing at the Exposition Universelle of 1900 in Paris with its sudden initiative in 1902 at Turin. “The idea of an International Exhibition on Italian soil was at first startling,” wrote W. Fred in The Studio, “for in the Exhibitions of recent years, and especially in Paris in 1900, Italian applied art had made no such display as might induce high hopes of its success.”4¢

“Let’s be frank,” wrote M.-P. Verneuil in Art et Décoration about Italy’s presence at the 1900 world’s fair, “in Italy the modern movement did not exist and bad taste seemed to be the master.”*’ To Italian critics such as Melani and Pica, the problem was that Italians had been “hypnotized by their glorious artistic past.”48 With the 1902 Turin fair, it was now universally recognized, as an English writer expressed it, that “a great step in advance has been taken.”4? In addition to enhancing Italy’s position in the international community of progressive artists, the exhibition was greeted as an important achievement in the creation of a contemporary Western culture. The participation of so many leading designers from all over the West and the harmony between the exhibits and the audacious architectural setting confirmed for many that the new age was finally creating its own characteristic art

forms for all the material aspects of the built environment. Arduino Colasanti, writing in L’Arte, was speaking for many progressive critics when he wrote, “The reunion of such names . . . means that the movement of the new decorative arts is no longer limited to a small confraternity,

| but rather extends to all times and countries and reaches into all forms of life.”5° On the eve of the opening, the Corriere della Sera commented on the international significance of the Turin exposition by terming it “the first official affirmation of the existence and legitimacy of a modern style.”5! Alfredo Melani said the same after its closing in the pages of The

Architectural Record: “We have before us an exposition of great importance. . . . For, the First International Exposition of Modern Decorative Art, this first festival of the New Style, is really the official consecration of the movement which sends to renovate, and does renovate, the images of the beautiful.”52 Responding to what it considered the shallow criticism of the Turin exposition, the Architektonische Rundschau of Stuttgart explained:

The Turin Exposition, in spite of all its faults and deficiencies, is and remains an achievement whose significance will only be revealed later. It is only incredible that such an obvious idea had not materialized long ago somewhere else. Did nobody see the necessity or had nobody the courage of the Turinese when they gave life to this exhibit? Why has Berlin been so completely passive until this time? Why Munich?*3

Nor would the significance of the Turin fair be forgotten in succeeding

years. In 1911, for example, the president of La Société des Artistes Décorateurs, in reporting on the preparations for the 1915 Paris exposition of decorative arts, which would be postponed until 1925, lamented the loss of initiative to the Italians: “It is by an unfortunate failure [to

34 | Modernism before World War I

sustain] its legitimate fame as initiator of progress in the domain of the

arts as in that of ideas that France left to Italy the honor of having organized the first International Exposition of Modern Decorative Art.”*4 Before the famous 1925 Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs could be held, the Italians organized an entire series of expositions of modern decorative arts in Monza based upon the principle first applied at Turin in 1902. The Milanese architect Paolo Mezzanotte, in reviewing the Prima Mostra Internazionale delle Arti Decorative di Monza in 1923,

noted that its program, which excluded “any return to the formulas of the past, is essentially that” of the 1902 Turinese exposition.*> Occurring first as a biennale until 1927 and then from 1930 as a triennale, these expositions not only promoted the most modern developments in Italian

decorative arts, but also featured the architecture of Italy’s principal postwar modern movements—the Milanese Novecento and Italian Rationalism—as well as both exhibiting Futurist interiors and exhibition buildings and reflecting the interests of progressives who drew sustenance from vernacular art. With the passage of time, the Monza Biennale and its successor the Milanese Triennale increasingly favored the display of architecture, not only in exhibits, but also through model buildings erected for the fair. In the end, the history of the Triennale became inseparable from that of the evolving and pluralistic notion of modernism in Italian architecture between the two world wars. National or International Architecture?

The similarity of the architecture at the 1902 Turin exposition to the latest modern Austrian architecture, which was termed either Sezession or Wagner-Schule, brought into focus the potential conflicts in the Romantic goal of creating an architecture that is both modern and national. The difficulties inherent in reconciling these values came into focus only with the emergence of an international architecture and were perhaps felt most keenly in a country such as Italy, which did not originate but rather followed the new style. The debate prompted by the new Italian architecture at the Turin exposition articulated the terms by which modern ar-

chitecture would be discussed and judged in Italy, as in many other Western countries, for the next half century. This debate was characterized by three related sets of opposing notions: nationalism versus internationalism, nationalism versus foreign influence, and originality versus copying or even plagiarism. These issues, which involved the cultural significance of style, generally took precedence over aesthetic analysis, which was often only briefly discussed, if at all. Even then, aesthetics were generally considered within the framework of national or international character. Critics in virtually all countries remarked that the exhibition buildings by D’Aronco and Rigotti followed the example of the Austrian Secession, both in general style and in specific references to Joseph Olbrich’s buildings in the 1901 Darmstadt exhibition. D’Aronco’s main entrance pavil-

ions, in particular, were repeatedly compared to the similar forms of Olbrich’s entrance at Darmstadt (figures 10, 13).

3§ | Arte Nuova: Turin, 1902

The reasons why D’Aronco had modeled his architecture upon OIbrich’s were not difficult to ascertain. D’Aronco was not alone in believing

that the Austrian Secession marked the beginning of a new age of art: Austrian modern architecture had a privileged status in the contemporary mind. The French critic Roger Marx explained that Austria was “the mother country of the arts of the home and of daily life.”5* To Italian critics such as Pica and Frizzi, the Wagner-Schule was “the most future oriented” group of artists and Olbrich its “most distinct representative.”>*” As Pica explained, followers of the Wagner-Schule “scattered here and there, in Europe and America, were searching for, working, busying themselves with the enthusiastic desire to give the new century a new style of architecture as soon as possible.”*® By following Olbrich’s lead, D’Aronco was designing within what was

widely seen as the most modern trend in architecture and the most concerted effort to create an artistic expression consonant with modern times. The significance of this architecture, though, was judged according to two opposing sets of values. On the one hand, the architecture at the Turin exposition was criticized in Italy and abroad for not being Italian. On the other, it was praised as a vital sign of a modern culture common to the West and a beginning of an Italian effort to stamp a distinct national identity on its own products in the new modern style. Whereas with the development of Italian Rationalism in the late 1920s, the battle lines between these two camps would correspond more neatly to the opposing temperaments and values of conservative and progressive critics, at this earlier date progressives could be found on both sides and for various reasons.

In Italy, as elsewhere in Europe, national identity was the concern of progressives as well as conservatives. This can be demonstrated with two opinions voiced at this time by the pioneers of Art Nouveau in France. As Hector Guimard explained to the readers of The Architectural Record in 1902:

A style of architecture, in order to be true, must be the product of the soil where it exists and of the period which needs it. . . . Let the Belgians, the Germans and the English evolve for themselves a national art... . I will venture to say that my American colleagues have been, and are still, in the most favorable position for creating an “Art Nouveau.” I am sorry that they have not thought proper to strive after a national art, evolved

from their own temperament; that is, an art produced on the spot and instinct with the life of that spot.>? Similarly, Siegfried Bing explained that he had quickly realized:

It was necessary to resist the mad idea of throwing off all associations with the past, and to proclaim that, on the contrary, everything produced by your predecessors is an example for us, not, assuredly, for its form to be servilely copied, but in order that the spirit which animated the authors should give us inspiration. As Bing changed from accepting outside works in the decorative arts to fabricating them in his own workshop, he defined his goal as the effort to “thoroughly impregnate oneself anew with the old French tradition;

36 | Modernism before World War I

try to pick up the thread of that tradition . . . and give it new developments.”69 Rarely would any of the parties in Italy who would debate this issue over the next half century deny the importance of national identity. Disagreement came over the nature of the outward signs by which national character would be recognized. The architecture at the 1902 Turin exposition was beset by domestic and foreign criticism for its seeming lack of national identity. To Gustave

Soulier “there is no real sincerity in adopting these preexisting forms, brought in from German lands and that do not at all correspond to the traditions and nature of Italy.”6! Verneuil was no less sparing in his criticism of the fair’s buildings: “None have their own and distinctive character. It is impossible to find there even the germ of a national school. . . . This, in effect, is the great danger for Italy. It must free itself from outside influences and draw from its own depths, utilize its own genius. There is too much Austrian influence in Italian modern art.”*® Italian critics could be just as severe. “Let me state without hesitation,” wrote Frizzi, “that national architecture cannot expect a period of felicitous evolution if it is going to imitate such examples, thereby distancing itself so sharply from all those traditions that for centuries were the heritage and pride of our Italy.”® A young critic named Ugo Ojetti stressed D’Aronco’s mistake in not grafting his new architecture onto Italian tradition. “No style,” explained Ojetti, “is ever invented, but rather is always derived through a necessary and unconscious evolution.” D’Aronco, asserted Ojetti, had permitted himself “the ostentation of inventing.”®* For Ojetti, Bing was “the true founder of arte nuova,” for he had successfully “derived with elegance and economy a style that is his own and that is new,” which, nonetheless, was visually tied to French “national tradition” as found in the styles Louis XIV, XV, XVI.% For Ojetti, the new architecture in Turin was not Italian.®°

Ojetti’s remarks have an importance beyond their immediate application, for he would become an increasingly famous and powerful champion of tradition in contemporary art. Already in 1902, Melani regretted that this “talented young man” sided with the “enemies” of Art Nouveau.°’ During the Fascist regime Ojetti would exercise considerable influence over the selection of new state buildings, whose style he judged by the criteria that he formulated at the turn of the century. Northern Europe held threats to Italy beyond the imposition of an alien ethnic character on its art. Its new aesthetic seemed to undermine the very

notion of art itself. Taking out of context a remark by Henry Van de Velde, “one of the most authoritative evangelists of the new northern faith,” Raffaele Savarese warned that the northern approach would reduce architecture to engineering: ““The style that has been developing since 1890 on the continent draws its origins and its characteristics in factors whose awakening we have already noted: practicality, comfort, and hygiene.’” According to Savarese, not only did this “dangerous theory .. .

entail the abolition of the art of architecture, [but it also] explains the

37 | Arte Nuova: Turin, 1902

facile swarming of creators in all countries and the fundamental tie that unifies all these manifestations in spite of differences of race, ambience, and traditions.” He added: It is noteworthy, in fact, that the same Van de Velde, who admits that his

art is a descendant of the English movement, is the leader of the new Belgian tendency, whereas he and Olbrich, famous champion of modern Austrian architecture, have been able to become the most authoritative inspirers of the new German decorative arts!®

Enrico Thovez would answer these charges by explaining that neither Van de Velde nor the other Art Nouveau artists intended to deny the importance of art or to banish it from their architecture. Thovez was certain that the progressive German architects were not advocating “the horrible glass and iron cage of [the Crystal Palace as rebuilt at] Sydenham or the Glaspalast of Munich as models for the modern style.”® Furthermore, the supposed “battles between North and South,” according to Thovez, were artificial: “There is something higher than northernism or southernism—it is naturalism, the return to natural inspiration.””° The charge that the new architecture denied the role of art in favor of a strict functionalism would become the leitmotif of conservative critics whenever radically new forms, especially those associated with Northern Europe, were introduced into Italy over the next few decades and especially by the Italian Rationalists in the 1920s and the 1930s. Thovez’s disparagement of the great achievements of nineteenth-century engineering structures was indicative of the aestheticizing tendency widely shared by advocates of Art Nouveau who recoiled from the prospect of the abandonment of art to the seemingly cold domain of engineering. The example of Victor Horta’s architecture in Brussels and of Frantz Jourdain’s in Paris, in which the use of exposed iron and glass became the basis for a modern aesthetic, demonstrated that this sentiment was not universal. Ironically, D’Aronco’s architecture at the Turin exposition was criticized

by that progressive champion of new art Alfredo Melani, who found himself ideologically opposed to this Italian version of the Austrian Seces-

sion. Melani’s objections, though, arose from his commitment to the nineteenth-century ideal of originality. If a building were copied, then it could not be “spontaneous, sincere.” He warned, “I will become an enemy of Arte Nuova if in Italy it ties itself to models that come from England,

Belgium, France, or Germany. Art made this way is not worthy of the name. The stigma of plagiarism will reveal a fatal impotence.” Italian artists could create true works of art only by drawing sustenance from “our own tendencies and our own national needs.””! Melani, then, could

not accept D’Aronco’s new architecture: “I accuse the Palazzo dell’Esposizione of reflecting the art of the Viennese Secessionists and say that this is not an art worthy of D’Aronco. Driven by an influence alien to the spirit of its author, this building, for us modernists, has the value of pseudo-ancient art.”72

38 | Modernism before World War I

In contrast to these two different types of negative assessments, which stressed the preeminence of Italian character either to assure national identity or vital art, one finds those architects and critics who welcomed the international aspect of the 1902 Turin exposition’s architecture. Dino Mantovani, in the widely circulated L’Illustrazione Italiana, for example, praised the exposition in general for having “clearly shown that this universal avidity for an aesthetic reform is already well advanced and fruitful,” while congratulating D’Aronco for having demonstrated in his exposition buildings that “if Italy learns something from abroad, it nevertheless has the creative energy to equal rapidly the masters.” Mantovani had no trouble distinguishing in the different exhibits of the new art “the national characteristics that provident nature will never permit to be erased from this cosmopolitan civilization.”’3 Of course the applied arts, affirmed the Turinese newspaper La Stampa, have “universal characteristics, because our civilization is universal; with distinct forms, because nationalities and races are always distinct. Each produces a modern art necessarily derived from some past heritage.”’* In an article previewing D’Aronco’s architecture for the exposition, Reycend had stressed the balance between national and international characteristics in the new European architecture:

As in the other fields of the decorative arts, even in architecture ethnic differences have impressed a particular physiognomy on the various tendencies. Between the Castel Béranger by the French Guimard and the Maison du Peuple by the Belgian Horta; between the Handelsbank by Schilling of Dresden and the Secession’s Gebdude by the Viennese Olbrich,

there are profound differences. But all are tied back together again by certain common characteristics that constitute the physiognomy of the new style.

Although D’Aronco adapted the overall aspect of the Viennese school as well as its ornamental details, he “brought a special elegance, a eurhythmy

of parts that reveal the precious quality of harmony of the Latin intelligence.””°

D’Aronco, according to numerous critics, had through a “Latin” or “Oriental” quality, the latter sometimes attributed to his sojourn in Turkey, imparted his own particular flavor to the Secessionist basis of his architecture.” As Sacheri maintained, if D’Aronco’s architecture “does not have a true novelty of style, it certainly has the spirit of variety, originality, and modernity.”’” Pica, while conceding to D’Aronco the importance of the new “cosmopolitan spirit,” looked forward to the architect’s future work, which would undoubtedly become more Italian.’ Even one of the rare aesthetic analyses of the exposition’s architecture, offered by the Architektonische Rundschau, was undertaken within the framework of national styles. This German periodical praised D’Aronco’s architecture for freeing itself totally from academicism while exhibiting

“spirit, talent, and verve.” Yet the architecture suffered from a major fault: D’Aronco’s excessive use of painted ornamentation where threedimensional modeling would have been more appropriate to strengthen the overall spatial effect and to emphasize the constructive logic of the

39 | Arte Nuova: Turin, 1902

building. These remarks were specifically addressed to the interior of the central rotunda. The shortcomings of D’Aronco’s architecture were not,

though, seen as unique to this architect, but rather as reflecting both Italian character and Italian art. D’Aronco’s buildings lacked “what is lacking in the Italian way of life: the subordination of minor things to guiding principles.” Reviewing recent and older Italian monumental sculpture and funerary architecture, this article found “formal disorganization” resulting from a love of overly rich decorative appearances and hence the failure to subordinate details to the whole.”? The debate about national versus international character could become so convoluted that the very terms of the argument could be reversed and even undermined, sometimes unwittingly. Gustave Soulier does not appear to have been aware that he was negating the premises of his nationalist

argument when he observed, “This architectural style on Italian soil is doubly false, because it is already artificial even in Austria. It would be difficult to find a better example of forms imposed by the personal taste of a leader of a particular school.”®° If the Secession style, though, was not ethnically Austrian, then how could it be alien to Italian ethnic character? Might the new style, although originating in northern Europe, be even better suited to the south? The potential contradictions of the nationalist arguments as applied to new style were quickly grasped by Thovez, who responded to Verneuil and anticipated Soulier in precisely

these terms:

There is much to say about the all too often invoked national genius. If Verneuil, for example, had to explain why the style that suits the Austrians is inappropriate to the Italians, he would be singularly embarrassed. Physical reasons of climate? Certainly not, because in fact the architecture in Otto Wagner’s school, with its orientalizing characteristics, is better suited to a southern country than a northern one. Reasons of decorative taste? Even less so because the geometric elements that furnish the basis of Viennese decoration . . . are infinitely closer to Oriental, pre-Hellenic, and Hellenic art than to German medieval art. . . . What ties does [the Viennese style] have with earlier Austrian art? None. A critic with a modicum of culture and a little imagination could even, in fact, demonstrate that it is much more suitable to the Italians. .. . The only way to get out of this fix in which the critics of modern art place themselves is to remember that in all times there have been intrusions and assimilations of decorative elements. Those who take pride in narrating the expansion of Gothic and Renaissance commit a strange error of logic by denying that the same can occur for modern styles.*! The reversal of values that could find in the new Secession architecture

forms more appropriate to Italy than to Germanic lands actually had occurred while Thovez’s article was probably in press. In July 1902 a critic for the Milanese newspaper I] Tempo criticized the Italian Villa Lauro at the Turin exposition as “hardly suited to the conditions of our climate through its external features,” in contrast to the Austrian villa (figure 12), which seemed eminently Italian: “The Austrian villa, with its multiple terraces, its logical openings, intended not only to decorate the facade, but also to give air, light, and sun to the internal rooms—for this reason [is] suited for one of our lakes or for the divine Ligurian coast.”

40 | Modernism before World War I

The important issue here was not so much national identity, but rather an organically conceived building suited to its site: “The Austrian architect has conceived his villa absolutely outside of any convention by seeking to make the exterior correspond only to the interior and by subordinating the decorative to the constructive.” This building, praised according to

the terms of the reasoned picturesque, which is the subject of chapter four, was “perhaps the only complete organism in the entire exhibit.”

It was rare at this time to find a critic who could discuss the new | architecture without attempting to link it to national character. For William Scott, however, reporting on the exposition for the Journal of the

Royal Institute of British Architects, the principal task for the contem- | porary architect was to move with integrity from a meaningless tradition- | alism toward modernity. Hence the buildings by D’Aronco and Rigotti |

were praised for their architectural quality without any mention of na- | tional character: “The result is more than merely satisfactory; it is really

successful. . . . It is something gained to the progress of architectural development to have produced a building so well adapted to the purpose it had to serve, and so comparatively free from the shackles of tradition.” As for the Austrians: “Altogether this section is undoubtedly one of the best, and it is with a quite legitimate pride we may note a kinship in the designs with much that for some years past we have been accustomed to see nearer home. In this case at least our influence has been for good.” For Scott, “national pride” in contributions to the creation of a modern art was more important than national identity and especially a national

identity grounded in the past.®

Arte Nuova and the So-Called Liberty Style

Despite the promise of the First International Exposition of Modern Decorative Art, it did not spawn a unified architectural movement.* Rather, Italian architects applied Art Nouveau in as many ways as there were names for this new style: “Arte nuova, stile nuovo, stile moderno, stile Liberty, stile floreale, in how many different ways is this new aesthetic movement indicated!”85 In Florence Giovanni Michelazzi executed a few

works of great vigor in sweeping linear lines after the manner of the Belgian architect Paul Hankar.®* In Milan, Giuseppe Sommaruga, with the Palazzo Castiglione (1901-3, figure 14) and Giulio Arata, with the Palazzo Berri-Meregalli (1911-13, figures 15, 16) mixed varying degrees of academicism with what the Architektonische Rundschau might have criticized as immoderate applied ornament, featuring floral motifs and classical putti. This abundant floral decoration would become a characteristic feature of what might more appropriately be termed Stile Floreale or Stile Liberty than Arte Nuova.*’ In the end, most of the Stile Floreale architecture in cities such as Milan and Turin was academic building whose style of ornamentation was changed from a classical to a floral vocabulary. One notable exception in Turin was Pietro Fenoglio’s Palazzina Fenoglio-La Fleur (1902), which has been recognized in recent years as a work of distinction.*8

4] | Arte Nuova: Turin, 1902

if i 4,iilPO - , : one “a r a“ ~f leeli Oe eechild wee,' +“ ye so”?

Sr pm ee - «——ae a ie voiSoeee a ee ee Be ‘eg —_ be SS eae .wt. . ae Wae.. ee | CL iS ee ee « Chay &, oe P oo. eS CL & ihee # Mf : 5 ae ae aH al of oY.3 ee mie“”es- f-et“4 keane % A.32—oe a Hoen Sl +. te5: Sn meena : ,ee © Zs * wif heed "a %3 is Seal or oo © ait eS Oe eR pet fe : \ ee to oe, % ws + tS ee gn hee Cage a agit. . i a af oy Ee “ e wy Bada Yesvos, : 4 ~ « . ;Se Fs % Py F " . — ‘“ ¢ % at Py a ig . . > 3 *% ‘ z a sae ‘ >» | —_— = *% eit ee alae. “Be. _———_— = la A. | ‘ 7 F Aes, A eh od a.. Bi M,. ; ue ee eg ee aa : ™ bg iké ’ 4 a BR ‘yea Le, Pas 4 See “ me. eT ‘ 7 a RN 5 a % ’ = ae = ; e 4 4 Pia a é %, S % e: / Md = i * * & b ; tf a 2 ; Pe * . 2 ‘ * x Pe * %. cy >. > * ~~, ys ? Ae : BY P he Se ee. cane “ ty ta, _— ' #3 ey te , \ As, a a SP a ie * Cr _ 2 ~ ee oe a * : eS A ™ 4 ; Fd : ed =e raat nae ee : ~ ad € ae . ee ; . cr,™ '>¥ .. Be Oe 4. >-* ee “.” 7‘ Si cata SS SVN STN ry o Ray phe. Sy iy May ~S tag Pete. sage, | aed i 4 Mts aay B : eget, oe a RNS < San = | i | . tw i. eo ee, te a > eae 4 € aus 7 4 . RY=aYe . i aoaTay iy aBy~ Ph, 7 * aa *ySy iatae ‘i,NE aesye ‘ 4agrene‘ ‘ee, bi ‘wy —"e“me te ss : i. a ges. oFge , is; so

* vs *. — eae eu & m ' a P : Re ie. > % i = a ee PaeeR i. Ke , ye " » : ten ee ; > ~_ ' mt 1 ag ig ta , i sa” es “EN 21 Oe sy | CRS ig Se a oo i VA, . ty bee. Gf Ss, mee i se tt > Sle, Se ee A) ™ o : ; x 4 a ‘ re — x a Rp: wing” ~ ; ha ‘. ee “ bees SS a, Be 3 a is. es os

Psi ~~ N~— or TION ty ' 3of -a Pes ee yg, tg aa Wee.” ™ .xa,+s . ¢j »ee ¢Se% 4(aia % Es, *xqee 3AE ted, a, aa% Ce ~:oe »Bo ben ‘& ; £oe ¢ 3.%, ie i», &oe %,mata $We a*e, taaay ”| ie—. .te 2ae he ye 'iss:&‘:ee. 7 :ad ile ity SS te, leiyee

y > eas ae 2 =fh... _oe ~. ‘WE eg &‘ nity, aySK pes cae .*= :: 7Y ee bk iEee . ke. *eeeeNey, -SS ag Booa my A Be was “a, :::.Sere : 24 he7"va oy AN leaeeee aainiaes — Poe . —_ > sy = | : oka eae SN * “SS i '. hah ~The ty Mey et

“% ‘a GN 7 3 4 ‘ “ey a, ~~ a 5 Fi > tet tea /:aa> VPA 5 J a, c Rn . = —a 2 ay “ Woop . . k , *% ] ortES a ye=~ H BS °‘%.55 ~>= a —e,. ee. ® % Ne: - '.~*~ am 4.By - ePa ae —_ “vs 3 = a he, %. . ‘ a : ; Sep oe ie > ok Wes, ; . 3 an / .; er . —, * a , }My be, *“ oo - sl—Ne_ xaEVat em~ vA a iaWig, 4a

ie hy — = =I “ae 3 os -ae i¥. a é ae see * = “s we — . wt y er’ a: ts 4 * ? = Wee ~ sd ee te . P) > . ' => ~ —_—" *.% Wy, it A . is : 5 4 ar Ge’ if » ‘ was . —_ ; 24e% . eM, Rs be . * , “ p ty ‘\* a SAS et Birk, ¥ * oo 4 eee . /. : Nitin, P a ~ we é * — ‘ ee Oe ky. oe ae: X : $ : Bier wntinctnapey cosine , seas ;é. PR —_ * ‘ Se i ae wil Co : rs ee Be ee ee bs ,i . en ee le SS ae ae ~ cere ee ’AA % wo Reoe => #9 a,fee %, ™ 2~: Ba Ssae nd -. 4— a };,fsy . 7 — ~ 8! in LSI — . $igsths

wer} MF day = — af - “Be¢.“ pot ,heayf= a = he. ° : 7 * | « 3 _} iA3 |: aT . ’ ry hy.Ry7WE ‘ “ ‘ ~ ie. wh a re, _a 2oS ——_,

, — TT” a : ty % ‘a ” '> . —— * ee yo . . ‘ * — te 4 lit : (a tt : Ts _—.; ea |

| : | aon ee] | - :Pa POM os 2 % 4 fe | = ~~ a ae 2 a ae | 4 " ‘ = se. . oil. ‘ ¥ i —— 7 . — 7>rer a — im he te, ity . wh ware." ;* 7 st “Ss Nog a — = >ee p> ¥. i© ** — Se ln satiate Sve, ' : Oe 4 SRO ge7«.os ‘ _ ‘r‘¥we ca F BSS = — aeP eomy > 4 i % f& . TV ‘ Pree °; .2 77 ~~, . ~ % ° 7 ® bh Tt T“Boy . we ’-*7a2 .“rar ™, “"' a | Ig, % .gt . oe ; NS ‘ a er = ‘ AS it.:ba* Vere » ,he ; sw" SO,ee OPT Ns »- oe Sky Ty A ‘ Meee oO BE Caer me | as | o% —* » 7 . . = 5 : bd : . wes 3yp. i, ~ Wet - . OSes , , 4* oeay. ae Ne baYEE ee oe . ; 4A . %‘; oe . ‘ - earey

- ~ * on We ‘ ' . _ «

:>. -’’~ft,~‘; :' -.a.‘~. a.

P 4 ; : ad >4? ioe \ 7 ¥ ie © * ‘e a | >). ' o % a t a + ¢ " e : . : » ; t : 4 4 ’ ne +. vee » ’.2 sy hy. 7 eed ¥ > ‘ad ¥ *me 7A, a .r *gOn.4wat

ee i a ee ale els Pm a . £.... Bi ' ¥ a, > - oe we es

The promise of the 1902 Turin exposition was briefly sustained, however, by the work of several architects scattered throughout Italy. D’Aronco himself continued the Arte Nuova style of the 1902 Turin fair in his buildings at the Esposizione Regionale held in Udine (1902-3), his competition design for the cemetery of Mantua (1903), and in a few other projects and small buildings in Constantinople over the next few years. Much of D’Aronco’s work in Turkey until the First World War combined an Arte Nuova sensitivity with a respect for local vernacular traditions. Yet for his major architectural commission, the Palazzo Comunale in his native Udine, which occupied him between 1908 and 1929, D’Aronco built a Renaissance revival building, which in 1932, nearing death, he termed “a great disgrace.”®° In addition, Ernesto Basile created several buildings in his native Palermo that had a distinctive Arte Nuova character. As early as 1899-— 1900, Basile decorated the interior of the Grand Hotel Igea in an Arte Nuova manner.”° His pavilion for the Esposizione Promotrice di Belle Arti (Palermo, 1900) and his buildings for the Esposizione Agricola Regionale (Palermo, 1902, figure 17) presented a combination of simplified volumetric forms and whiplash lines. At the 1902 Turin exposition, Basile exhibited a series of rooms furnished with designs for the firm GoliaDucrot of Palermo.”! The Villino Fassini and his own Villino Basile (figure 18) followed in 1903 with an architecture that emphasized simple white volumetric forms with relatively unadorned openings for windows, which harmonized with the current interest in freeing Italian architecture from historical revivals. At the Villino Basile, green shutters within red frames

formed the type of vivid color contrasts so typical of the Arte Nuova work by Olbrich and D’Aronco.”* The Venetian architects Giuseppe Torres and Guido Sullam created several works that rank among the more notable achievements of Arte Nuova.”? In September 1908 L’Architettura Italiana published photographs of Giuseppe Torres’s Garage Marcon (figure 19), recently built near the train station in Mestre, as well as drawings of two houses, the

Casa del Poeta, intended for the shores of Lake d’Aleghe (Belluno, Agordo), and the Casa del Silenzio (figure 20), a low-cost villa for a

location near Treviso (Venice). These two villa designs are a good example , of what might be called reverse borrowing of the type that Thovez noted

when countering charges about the Austrian character of the architecture | at the 1902 Turin exhibition. In effect, Torres’s two villas utilize a favorite

aesthetic of the Wagner-Schule that appears to have been inspired by

Mediterranean architecture. The Casa del Poeta and the Casa del Silenzio | are designed in the manner of Otto Schonthal’s project for an artist’s

house (Aus der Wagner-Schule 1900), Wunibald Deininger’s study for a | summer Villa Fel. Batsy (Der Architekt, 1901), and F. W. Jochem’s “House for a Scholar in Rome” (figure 21), dated “1904 Rome” (Der Architekt, 1906). The limpid prismatic forms, flat roofs, slightly rounded : edges, asymmetrical massing, terraces and pergolas, light and clear colors,

and absence of surface decoration make these Wagner-Schule designs

44 | Modernism before World War I

~ ‘ Be osPatt,6pF $fi gg i." ite%PECs aRee: % “eae . Sg 1!Ge aw) aeAS -.saints J ee SS 7% ZeSpe NS a)ae eaePe eee ae ee ~ coe ee ’ - ial

pw skusead i ; * ie, oe “tha se aenten ees tod 1903. . —-

=" es . n Ee Mae ° isieCOR , 7 are aRS tx Semen al = 4. ban! he ac Ae aa . ee 18 . ” es Pos ef ? 7. memenemmeeen be _——— ban.}cen ne TERT al Pitty -. SNe ~ 7 ne

Ernesto Basile, Villino Basile, Palermo, siti : : Pierce

-“¥foa S&S ay

“i

— se q; P * . . % ; :f ,y¢Fy ee ihe v °; .' a= }} Lol cei aS Prey ae im, >a. eeoe) Soke OFS ae an “es := : 0 ee SD ae SR eae = ees = y eee ok tae 2 ' — ue 74 hen e ie a" —owraiee, 8ee, te tt4 fdy She Se Hittin ‘ aS: : EBas ¢ || | pees ¢ a = hs “ POR % = ‘ea ck ks . ~s

, j_ ne | Bee eter | = ‘% ee te ee ; Fag o> | 4s Lie it AEE Bae ae ten + s . 7 7 : 77y ‘i | ; “Ne L Li i 5}we,* et ,* nae, :- ) ; i a# :;

: a eee i

, 4, -¢a#hs :*, aeG 5 ‘i : of = . ; +?re 4he ‘¥ % Za ry elerRy Z *. ae .: iia.-Sk ae 2 alla ae 7 , _: ——~ . _ cme : . os — i 28 Be OM 2g ete whee te oo 2 e. He t St Lg bit “ rkh ee! Re te: Se oo mn tfe Ae th .; sa:.:eR aan ee sae eee mee oS TAR ; chs: ee eee, ee ney oy Fe he a, eee a ‘eo ) rns, fe Be es Saree SY ae ee Brine FS sy pier ee tc. Me ec , : [~~ =) | : Ms rose ae? OTe eee le ‘ : ‘ ~~ Ps ¥ oS, # ps i . fom f F “? aaa . a ; oo * ” eal ae ad ial : Sal we eo8 - ae om eS “ee :Cae an! 5! iia popsee x.Bae: oree ae eae Toe ——— ee ees a a age ac Pee oe Ve CL ee a oO eee ee ee : : gob OR, ee ong . “¢ «d ™ Pie a : tr }, : © a

a pts 3) b 3 +R, 7 * a | -%, es * Pr a Pi ya a vd ee ate ol —_ i .

i Se RE oss o re med ee ey eS ee a \ pee we

| 2 “ meoe ’ pv ore cane tinyeesacrore a it: - hay Bey enn tO 2 a +" es. ¢ f -chek f t * , o®. SIGE Nepegyer — >esfe Sree tee. TORE

45 | Arte Nuova: Turin, 1902

19

’,

Giuseppe Torres, Garage Marcon Mestre, 1907.

wy % = fi = sae . A: ee Ae % : BePar " ae “e uate So

i

(SER = | | , ere or ee : det es 4 Baal. le ae ee

ae) Jai Raee 88lsI

ig SO eo ide nett PAee tuteee eee17) 4 -&ex id ee - hy . mae ih See AS ” ie Nem Oy pai b pomarete " , ’ # ee an i , its Ee Se ae ay rn eae : | @u Sah gtk,

; Pr chet One a eee ; | =a i*‘ ba . arn py HMA ‘a Bin!ar wighs =Bee 34% .*. ~* sa aOe ee Kas: nk So oe ‘ a*i inBaie _—. as

iPotiath ri beer“we ba mn fae j*; :7 eo a i .4e aut oe ht oe aoeape ; i+ “a mi*3 ‘3Emae # : TYITTT

a) Sa ane 4 os ec te vgsee Oe . #, ee? Fee = eg ee sp ac,79 Nea

ee f or F ae a 2 we S58, PRO ae = Sg 2 ee eal tae MA hal ee i :

, ? LY hse eee pe ae ge pe ee ee Pe ae Fatt oA te Pa Pe aA * gf iE 3 ‘j

“ye* fom ‘z P,“ae 8 oh ~oly cd nae

3 ( x P Ai ie aa ‘ m= a . a ae a My, a + “f ¢ ee Pe

=* ‘pm-og &- = —— = oe oe= fLA =@2eeaus

& “—e

=&=s -. a\> ee SSS SS REE if ty “=f ‘Se BEEESES & 4 q

a. “=; oc 4 ;“‘

éA” .S a , | a 4 po r )7 8 & ELT ea eae | 7 ~ ve & a 5 t w ..,|‘ay ty | Ms = —— 1 4 ™% : > ~~ i —s) te a Rf 1 ‘ Cia) i eo Ec / \e e/ ‘ + a] ¥. . WEY i. ; 4 “ 4 5 a be & — 3 e éLy ¥# } ey I a ay q Ay S fe *— a e e 4 t La < &. a . ie : ; ? o o 4 ‘ AD ho » @ GE 4 eS 2 al 74 7 Po : =. oy rm i 7 NN — i“ |Z Z;""OS; tay ~; ag ‘ets .>

by Ah wt : eRTRS eyy : for , ia inns :; oo oT pe ;1)fé, Ro. ”em se a Scholar inKe i10 shAse phen!) SAS. ae wT oe \aws :aat =ae F eee *¢ : ora omeLE Mero OP «¥ =< ; a 7— SSE “Iadas- eeee‘ Puwo : TA=ne > -\: ~ -~ f° Vg Y PPT en / “ xX Fad a! . * ater’ & 4 “ Pata 5 +5! c wos a en iete’ s 7, ee

rm < Mt . > A ba fe : ee, te Patter a ees ci of ete pall ey aot = aan! Sat

no ‘ te, = oh cee oe .~ 4 ae se eee re oat ~~ ‘d, Rec : * ae a x

ts aeR eeue Ww 4i;mh ae iSi exe a *ee Se lt ont Be &' iseee ee eeoacP LP ete! ‘>¥et, : >OO _. : ee ~*~ lay aeile Swgt tae“et i sieee a‘ * a i, he + ws , ’ 3 ” =: iat a ®: : Se ak ; Ns | ay

- § i ine . ss - : 4 ae ; “ 3% aes aay +9

= oF eens be ES) Ee aiteae ae Me 4Lage * met i;—_ enaegh omaebe: oles — :®Set ’ atotans Ae-eee “ x S. -“353

Pa ier ee De ee dh Mice a Mest: gee fat emo w ve es tenga FP Re LOE we id Pe Re atl ewes

ge "2aeYoo ae "aee ot sa aR Per eee ory 42eeIS‘pg wate te‘Pee od ’ara i«ot :3 j¢é“eee ¢Set 9eetone ~: ‘mefx - '.ok Ce ee +| & a2. a"Say wet- 1 Se ks 2 : Aube 2 ¢? an te: ieais “ d Mety ie BEA aidi

b cass pS, ateetee —? * Soe "ErSg >Tae ar “4Oa! aeOL es gf fe pe.eeekeaaa jaeeetout otmen we ga Puke Sel FR OEtteg eA ge + tins aaa ADELE 0 PS oie ON hy ed IN VD EE ee etErigtes uA tes FOSS Se ates Pe

::5:

Antonio Sant’Elia, Funerary chapel (project), c. 1912.

A) | yah ;

Sant’Elia: From Arte Nuova to Futurism

>. :tk : ‘% > Ce . $s : i \ ; i al 4 ee ¢ | "a . §i': :ad Le ~ :"2 , gn ‘ “ he, " id o » y >,

. a5 ae mg 2 “”% ¥ : 9‘ ‘ ee ~ atsui ’”

Antonio Sant’Elia, Monumental building See Pale, Begs. SS se Sg

(project), c. 1912. Bevo he. Us ee ‘

a

~ is une ; 5 * id» - PF i a3 7 vr." Me -ihe Ft : ; e ¥ _

ae,Fs fi PO et it ;-reeG a£% ae 3. Bid i ER ;“ed ce;Sik rg‘va. 4‘ae , istwv" P 7_++,. ra Se

; ry;4OF rs & 1348 ats " Sf :yei=336 * es iy ; & )ed5y~—oats! ibe | an if i ae oe Te ro af tue a8

” “Ps< dé 0FiSeer ufand ashe" anes te oabea4a.% “th bs : er: (tes ; vfmA td 7rhe Be/ |7¥§q»ae >| ;i& Pe wae > me. ’ a Setar 2 54) 3d Rery + j s * s j q ; ea LE fipatee ysJfCoe aess +2% oe SS f Pay ite 4 " Sf : — :oo tn, ‘ Vlad YP a }- : Tt -ien ig le 4 ‘ ne

; ee ti aoe ; {i aeey iA De -PZiy ries : :. |>;ate 2+ee -ryt a Vy ‘ eh Sade P ; , Fa i : eedCae ee} s1 Oey? oil ya nt ‘ Det oes i 2 atl OP TO 7 , i \ pa GU roe eh ; ; M . ein ade Kgl on | . ‘ TP 4 Sips a ié,

geet a a a an :

SoS ym1eet Oe ast |& LpgiA’ 1 TO jiewai raie=f,

4 , a i t 4 ‘} * wor “ te 5 oe walt bk: . . ' ers. : «*

56 | Modernism before World War I

Biblical Babylonia in Modern Architecture The juxtaposition in the Wagner-Schule of the geometric designs illustrative of a rationalized modern constructive system that addressed the problems of the modern metropolis and the soaring, stepped-back fantasies intended to promote creativity reflected a fundamental aspect of latenineteenth- and early-twentieth-century progressive architecture: the coexistence of a quest for “realism” in construction and materials with a search for fresh sources of inspiration in non-Western art. In 1904 Heinrich Pudor called the appropriation of Eastern art by the leading progressive European architects the “Babel-Bibel in der modernen Architektur,” Biblical Babylonia in modern architecture.'? A brief consideration of this phenomenon will help elucidate the fundamental unity of Sant’Elia’s work. The combination of rationalism and exoticism in progressive Western architecture dates back at least to Louis Sullivan’s Transportation Building at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Its “most successful feature,” to borrow Montgomery Schuyler’s characterization, the “famous Golden Doorway,” and more generally the richly colored, complex surface ornament, was distinctly Islamic in influence. At the same time, Sullivan’s was “the most ambitious of all the great [fair] buildings,

for it is nothing less than an attempt to create a plaster architecture.” Schuyler noted, “In the Transportation building alone has it been undertaken architecturally to treat the material of which all the buildings are composed.”!4 Frank Lloyd Wright, it will be recalled, made his way to his revolutionary Prairie style via the influence of the Japanese exhibit at that same fair.!5 For Heinrich Pudor the Japanese and New Eastern influences that he found in so much of the latest modern architecture belonged to the same phenomenon. Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow school, Josef Hoffmann, Joseph Maria Olbrich, August Endell, and Eliel Saarinen were all on his list. Nor was Pudor alone in stressing the exotic basis of Western progressive art, for he himself drew upon an article in Dekorative Kunst (April 1898) that had stressed the importance of Japan and India on English decorative arts, of India on the Scots, and of Java on the Dutch. In that same year Der Architekt published the prize-winning essays from a contest on the theme of “the old and new directions in architecture.” Adolf Loos, who was awarded a second prize, stressed the importance of recent archaeological publications on contemporary architecture: “as a result, little by little, an interest is being reborn in the Egyptians, the Etruscans, and for the cultures of Asia Minor, etc. This interest is already apparent in the decoration of the Wagner-Schule.”!¢ These articles help place in context what might have seemed like isolated remarks or circumstantial stylistic references to Oriental architecture in

Italy at the turn of the century. Orientalism was a common way to rejuvenate an architecture deemed to be mired in the deadening revival of historical Western styles. This Orientalism was much in evidence at the

57 | Sant’Elia: From Arte Nuova to Futurism

two major exhibitions of the new architecture. Just as Enrico Thovez commented upon the “squat masses somewhere between the Egyptian and the Babylonian” of Olbrich’s entrance pavilions to the 1901 Darmstadt

exhibition (figure 13), so too were the Italian critics unanimous in discerning a similar Eastern influence in D’Aronco’s entrance to the 1902 Turin exposition (figure 10). Sacheri applied an archaeological eye when he described D’Aronco’s pylons as “of an Egyptian character” and the projecting roof as “Japanese.” To Melani, it was the “brilliant coloring” that made the entrance “heartily Oriental.” Yet Frizzi was not so sure that any specific stylistic attribution could be assigned: “What style is it? Nobody has responded to this question with certainty. Most settle the matter with the vague and generic phrase Oriental style, whereas others find Egyptian influence, the personification of the two Sphinxes. Others speak of the Japanese.” Whatever the designation, the exoticism certainly was Satisfying. Vittorio Pica found the entrance pavilions “rather pleasing

to the eye because of their profile of an Egyptian character skillfully modernized” and vividly colored. Arduino Colasanti was similarly attracted by these “two Oriental pylons.” Finally, Ugo Ojetti found the “Egyptian pylons” at the entrance simply the introduction to an entire complex of exhibition buildings inspired by “exotic styles.” ?!’ Austrians were not alone in noting the link between Orientalism and the Wagner-Schule. Thovez’s remarks on this subject made as part of the debate about national identity were quoted in the previous chapter. Two

years before Pudor’s article on Biblical Babylonia, Reycend had commented: The dominant character of the Viennese school is a character of simplicity of masses that, in its origins, is evidently Oriental. Against the habits of

its country and the vertical structure of Gothic architecture, it opposes the horizontal structure of Babylonian architecture: buildings with terraces, large surfaces without ornament, facades without cornices, linear ornaments with volutes and triglyphs, tapered pylons, flat roofs.'8 For Thovez, this rich source of inspiration for modern architects, so much closer to the Latin than the Northern European spirit, should be available to Italian designers as well as those of the Viennese Secession. Addressing the charge that D’Aronco had plagiarized the design of his entrance pavilion from Olbrich’s entrance to the Darmstadt exhibition (figures 10, 13), Thovez countered: “One could say in D’Aronco’s defense

that he was not forbidden to borrow the Oriental elements of which Olbrich manifestly availed himself, the idea of an entrance flanked by pylons.” Besides, argued Thovez, the common source of these entrance pylons, the paired human-headed winged bulls that flanked the entrance to ancient Assyrian palaces, was an appropriate choice for the city of Turin, whose coat of arms is a bull. Thovez noted that D’Aronco himself had previously used the bull as an identifying symbol on a design for a new bridge over the Po River.!? The influence of the Near and Far East was especially apparent in turnof-the-century Italian funerary architecture. Gaetano Moretti’s Crespi Mausoleum (Crespi d’Adda, 1897-1906), with its Eastern flavor, became,

58 | Modernism before World War I

in the words of Daniele Riva, the “great prototype of all Liberty Style cemetery architecture.” This was followed by E. Pirovano’s Bergamo Cemetery (1897-1913) and Giuseppe Sommaruga’s Faccanoni Mausoleum (Sarnico, 1907—8).2° The tradition was continued by Sant’Elia in his competition entry of 1912 with Italo Paternoster for the new cemetery of Monza (figure 29), which placed among the finalists in the third and final

round before being eliminated. The jury specifically commented on the stylistic inspiration: “In this project the Commission recognizes a special

mark of originality, however much it might be inspired by Oriental forms.”?!_ More specifically, Giulio Arata noted that in this project Sant’Elia “elegantly combined the rigidity of Egyptian forms with the fantastically disordered forms of India.”?2

Eastern architecture, though, was not confined to the domain of the cemetery. Gaetano Moretti’s electric power station of Trezzo d’Adda (1906) had battered tops and decorative patterns freely adapted from Indian architecture.2> Gino Coppedé’s vast ensemble of temporary architecture for the Esposizione di Marina ed Igiene Marinara (Genoa, 1912) employed a variety of Eastern styles, with Indian-like stupas as paired towers at the center and the corners of the monumental entrance front. The press reacted to these fair buildings by dubbing them both Oriental and ultra-modern.** The young architect Edoardo Baroncini displayed his “beautiful watercolors” from a trip to India at the first architecture exhibit sponsored by the Associazione degli Architetti Lombardi (February 10— March 10, 1914).25 Baroncini’s watercolors, with their dramatic chiaroscuro and striking composition, often looking up diagonally from the same low vantage point that had been favored by the Wagner-Schule and that characterized Sant’Elia’s architectural projects, were well received. So too were his public lectures.2° Over the following years, Ulisse Stacchini, who had won the 1912 competition for the Milan train station, successively altered his project by introducing freely adapted Eastern ornaments.?’ Both Antonio Sant’Elia and Mario Chiattone, who shared a studio in Milan, drew inspiration from Eastern architecture for the design of building types deemed representative of the current age. The monumentality of Chiattone’s design for a department store (figure 30) bespoke this building’s significance as an informal place of assembly for the modern crowd as well as its role in displaying both the new architecture and the decorative arts. Similarly, Sant’Elia’s proposal for the new Milan train station (figure 31) reflected not only the importance of the train station as the new city gateway, but also the status that a station for a commercial center such as Milan was expected to convey. As Giuseppe Lavini, editor

of L’Architettura Italiana, explained in 1912 at the time of the competition:

Now it is not possible to think of a simple shed for a building of sub-

stantial mass and importance that is a train station for a great city, symbolic monument par excellence, since it responds to the most characteristic phenomenon of modern life, intense movement, which represents a solemn invitation to a metropolis and should give the visitor a first impression of well being, wealth, beauty, and refinement of taste.?8

59 | Sant’Eha: From Arte Nuova to Futurism

Cue EM et Re Seepeapeeeseee Eepeat es z ” —_— bettinnctennammetnge oe. BE ete ee ON J ge Ye ae oe ? Re a8 > CRE Ye < > Seeaoe7 - $? ¥ 5Scat - b ax % r4 * PROS eee. o GEE Re ets.’ Peer es” 3 yO Yo os aa Bee Secs eae ae : By ee ee hg PR ee i es hat Fe aii Sy “ he ed ee as Re RS ees : re bss Btn Bas FY ke See

BON noes vag caeiss ) Cue ee th Soe tee, eons en eee Be PO De Bor Rg See pie Si, io eee

RO oe OS eReReNeg cats $4 Re Ge Se ne Nae Rae Sa ee eee Sot eae Ge Se

‘ P tee SE “4 * B ee. ies . Ve ae % 3 5 pee és ? ‘ Se ce . ast Ba Pea as as See e a ae 1 “

MESys > vee. bs = S iy nO Roa Se SERE ae eK ée 4SRE ; % 5MR NES3inn Bios, We SetteRoe aan Seay eh RE ign re Oe Pear. REE I CAPO ' i :aRRO ORE ASBeCAR ESE ae RIE SEO aN,RE es BREE haces erie 4 Ko eT o‘eBESAR i s =; ‘Bs, Re & Be ee: BoOese ES Son ere aes weeoyere OR Fs OES la igs RA ee RE BSCane ‘ : ae3 ae oa iepeaeMESS SR GRO ORR EESgSAE NE Beats F. Mae SE: “A Se fe NoMibemmes 5s SO 8 - RE Se, 4 Pe ee peamenere 5 Ses Re fh Ree +6)

, Beas os ee pk Se RRO wie Big noe Re ge ee Oe Le RCE ES ee Oe hau tines OO AES

Maer Jom) i WAN eeeaeeet estae pee | Me Be ON ee ae eae hg pa a a e/a | MER ee ret ser eg ee hed —

* Axes 3 ERR NR $ > 4 et Sages: See oe $ ; : < 5% thes XS MOO Oh ee tee 4

rom ty. si Sees ay ” / = a ~aM C3 if ee oe ee % be eet nes 33 PS B4 $ i ad er ce 4 ig ig . Sear SEGRE ee: pe SEE Sil apes on AY t , 3: ‘my Ta °2§ae 3SeeEMR see : eee: es ERPee ee RS ie cle serieSee . : ® ; Sees, “Seni {ie hae tae}MS Re ae5d0 Re AOCIE eo RMS itheBS RRaaRIN tees :Sig ee ‘S: SF ee : ; ee we' Ye ae es ethecghe NT GPN EIS ORR aMeee Cheemene Ce Mee eeKee r % ;ba- Rt Ngai RC Se ae 2 same OS 3: Se. ae Se Se mae: Ee rong pee See ES Be RE Sa, ON aires Ri Pe ei r% F Mig es a cos eT ae ; bh Ke tet SRA EALOR ERS IS Cone a Sg po Sea cece SS IS tia Wana a Se ns Po Sic Beet ee itioeeee Sd b mfFX oy = t F BR ae OTe es Bey : SS FOSS ates ea BORIS Paes IS baRI ing ae peaeesORO, tancod >tsager axe i. Mey ii :;t sy SERS eee eaer1h Pe aaERNE teeerygeBOS, Eas os , Sage af ae ae Mpa - ietry? tS @hgewreets iE eed " 4 ng Fig Fe yk $Pe taea-rasen-cagmaiial 4. en ae re ph b Beebe ae: es amen cnn

ie