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Modernity in the Balance: Italy’s Equilibrium 25
Controversy about the new urban street introduced to separate residential
blocks required revisions in the approval granting process. Muzio responded
with a flattened Palladian arch gateway joining the two building segments.
The scandal this tame but unprecedented novelty ignited was short-lived, with
Marcello Piacentini speaking in defense of its new urban aesthetic that echoed
the metaphysical expression of a De Chirico painting in a new mural style. Soon
similar simplified Classical expressions with increasingly monumental massing
would come to be the dominant look of conservative Modern Italian architecture
known as the Novecento.
Further north in Como, Antonio Sant’Elia’s hometown, Giuseppe and Attilio
Terragni’s Novocomum apartment building provoked uproar when the project
completed in 1929 was again significantly different than the one approved by
municipal authorities. This time the proposed façade resembled a Novecento
composition with each of its 6 stories outlined by stringcourses and stacked to
align windows in a streamlined Classical surface. Instead, the resulting apartment
building had an abstract and colored stucco skin with oval corner towers of
glass cut into massive multilevel voids. The geometrical language evoked
foreign Constructivist trends and produced a Modern machine for living that
dramatically contrasted with its neighbors. The designers argued the virtues
of its interior emphasis on Modern utilities with qualities and furnishings for a
more hygienic and comfortable lifestyle for its dwellers. Dramatic photographs
of the Novocomum shot upward using its forms to frame the sky, abstracted the
structure from its context and repositioned next to Como’s gothic cathedral, were
immediately published and traveled in exhibitions establishing it as the chosen
symbol of Italian Rationalism. 18
Each of the two young Italian movements staked their claim on orderly,
technologically advanced urban architecture. Both Novecento and Rationalist
architects sought to be Mussolini’s state architecture, and waged skillful battles
for the attention of il Duce. Fascism required not just massive construction of
new buildings, but new building types, and the expression of these new types
for new functions posed the chance to create new symbols of the regime’s
accomplishments. The modernization of Italian life required transportation and
communication hubs, especially train stations, and government office buildings,
such as new post offices, administrative centers, and party headquarters. New
university facilities and Olympic stadiums in Rome had few corollaries in Milan or
other urban centers. Construction would become one of the most overt signals
of the regime’s power, progress, and effectiveness. 19
New forms of mass housing were necessitated by two demographic shifts. First,
urban centers grew as industrialization brought more workers to the city. Mussolini had
created elaborate social programs simultaneously for both rural and urban populations.
Secondly, he built new towns in the freshly drained marshes south of Rome, then
relocated poor agrarian populations to that region from less fertile lands in the north.