![]() Novecento and Accademico architects - historicists - would continue to make such remarks through the 1930s, in the context of statements that what Italian colonial buildings should do was "speak" clearly of modern Italy and/or its Roman heritage, unambiguously proclaiming the colonizers' origins and superiority. Palazzo del Parlamento (Parliament) in Benghazi, Libya (1921-1923, Architect Carlo Rossoni). Another architect, Salvatore Cardella, soon made similar remarks with respect to North Africa.īanca d'Italia (Bank of Italy) in Massawa, Eritrea (1925-1928, Architect Giuseppe Cane). In 1925, just when archaeologists were defining what was historically and aesthetically "worthy" in Tripoli and Rhodes, Giovannoni first commented that Italians had begun to copy native buildings in Rhodes, and should break this nascent pattern. The complexity of the question emerged in stages. In sum, if solving the problem of "Italian modern" in the metropole meant figuring out the place of history in modernism, the question here was to define the exact emphasis architects should place on differences between Italians and the colonized within their colonial modernism. When Italian architects began to comment on the colonial-modern in the second half of the 1920s, then, the question at stake was whether it was best to transplant European models of any or all historical periods imitate local forms wholesale build fanciful hybrids that belonged nowhere in particular or follow other alternatives which had not yet been devised. As businesses and government invested more in the colonies - especially in Libya's cities from 1912 on - medieval, Renaissance, Art Nouveau, and international "Art Deco" styles continued to proliferate, in tune with Europeans' constructions in Tunis, Alexandria, and Cairo.3 Worse still, to the architects who wrote on the subject, equally inappropriate European "neo-Moorish" concoctions began to appear among the most high-profile buildings in the colonial cities, namely hotels and restaurants (Piacentini, for instance, designed a "neo-Arab" Hotel Roma in Benghazi in the early 1910s4), as well as major banks and government buildings (Figures 5.1, 5.2). We have already seen that Italians bought and replicated local buildings in East Africa, and that their Asmara residences were often out-of-context transplants of European models overall, by the '920s cities in Eritrea, Somalia, and Libya were already showcases of disorganized variety. ![]() More important still, many architects wished to emulate native structural provisions for local climate conditions such as bright sun and intense heat.Įven had they wished to, in any case, architects who theorized colonial architecture could not have sidestepped the question of whether to incorporate local architectural elements, as Italians had been practicing architectural syncretisms for some time before architects began to consider the subject. ![]() At the same time, the incorporation of local ornamental elements also held great aesthetic appeal for many architects. ![]() In the colonies, however, differences of ethnicity, "race," religion, and political-cultural capital could hardly be dissimulated (and it is unlikely, in any case, that Italian colonizers would have wanted them to be). Self-conscious, state-mandated architecture in the metropole took an increasingly didactic turn in the interwar period, attempting to depict a unified Italy by minimizing architectural allusions to internal, regional differences. How did Italian architects' "colonial-modern" differ from their other theoriza-tions? The terms of their colonial-architectural debates were virtually identical with those discussed in the last chapter, regarding all but one issue: difference. Must buildings be dressed up, in a word, as Romans or as Moors?2 he colonial-modern involves creating an effect we recognize as reality, by organizing the world endlessly to represent it.' But it also stands for the place of timelessness, a space without duration, in relation to which the temporal break of modernity can be marked out. The non-West, as its name implies, represents the non-place, terra incognita, the wasteland. ![]()
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