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Following Italy's unification in 1861, architects, artists, politicians, and literati engaged in volatile debates over the pursuit of national and regional identity. Growing industrialization and urbanization across the country contrasted with the rediscovery of traditionally built forms and objects created by the agrarian peasantry. Pride in Modesty argues that these ordinary, often anonymous, everyday things inspired and transformed Italian art and architecture from the 1920s through the 1970s. Through in-depth examinations of texts, drawings, and buildings, Michelangelo Sabatino finds that the folk traditions of the pre-industrial countryside have provided formal, practical, and poetic inspiration directly affecting both design and construction practices over a period of sixty years and a number of different political regimes. This surprising continuity allows Sabatino to reject the division of Italian history into sharply delimited periods such as Fascist Interwar and Democratic Postwar and to instead emphasize the long, continuous process that transformed pastoral and urban ideals into a new, modernist Italy.
The complex and shifting relation between regionalism and modernity With its search for purity, honesty, modesty, and ‘fitness of purpose', the late 19th and early 20th century concept of architectural regionalism is seminal to the modern movement. In later historiography, however, regionalism in Europe was neglected and even labeled ‘backward'. The origins of this drastic change of perception can be traced to the 1930s, when regionalism as a positive form gradually turned into a ‘closed' form of regionalism, a folding back on one's own region as a defence mechanism in an economically and politically turbulent decade.
Bringing to light the debt twentieth-century modernist architects owe to the vernacular building traditions of the Mediterranean region, this book considers architectural practice and discourse from the 1920s to the 1980s. The essays here situate Mediterranean modernism in relation to concepts such as regionalism, nationalism, internationalism, critical regionalism, and postmodernism - an alternative history of the modern architecture and urbanism of a critical period in the twentieth century.
Architecture and the Novel under the Italian Fascist Regime discusses the relationship between the novel and architecture during the Fascist period in Italy (1922-1943). By looking at two profoundly diverse aesthetic phenomena within the context of the creation of a Fascist State art, Billiani and Pennacchietti argue that an effort of construction, or reconstruction, was the main driving force behind both projects: the advocated “revolution” of the novel form (realism) and that of architecture (rationalism). The book is divided into seven chapters, which in turn analyze the interconnections between the novel and architecture in theory and in practice. The first six chapters cover debates on State art, on the novel and on architecture, as well as their historical development and their unfolding in key journals of the period. The last chapter offers a detailed analysis of some important novels and buildings, which have in practice realized some of the key principles articulated in the theoretical disputes.
This monograph offers the first-ever, full-length analysis of the most irreverent book of Italian Futurism: L’anguria lirica, printed in 1934 on tin metal sheets, with design and poetic text by Tullio d’Albisola and illustrations by Bruno Munari. This study, which features the unabridged reproduction of the pages of the tin book, accompanied by the first English translation of the poem, aims to disentangle the complex relationship between text and image in this total artwork. It shows how the endless series of material transformations at its core – of woman into food, of love into desecrating religion, of man into machine, of poetry into matter – fostered a radical change in poetry-writing, thus breaking away from a stagnant lyrical past.
"With an unrelenting barrage of record-breaking temperatures dominating the headlines, an enigma arises--despite the flames licking at our feet, most people fail to fully grasp the gravity of environmental overheating. What acquired habits and mechanisms grant us the capacity to turn a blind eye with an air of detachment? Heat: A History shows how scientific methods of accounting for heat and modern forms of acclimatization have desensitized us to climate change. Ubiquitous air conditioning, shifts in urban planning, and changes in mobility all served as temporary remedies for escaping the heat in hotspots such as the twentieth-century Middle East. However, all these measures have ultimately fuelled not only greenhouse gas emissions but also a collective myopia regarding the impact of rising temperatures. Identifying the scientific abstractions and economic and cultural forces that have numbed our responses this book charts a way forward out of short-term thinking and towards meaningful action"--
How has migration shaped Mediterranean history? And what role did conflicting temporalities and the politics of departure play in the age of decolonisation? Using a microhistorical approach, Migration at the End of Empire explores the experiences of over 55,000 Italian subjects in Egypt during the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Before 1937, Ottoman-era legal regimes fostered the coupling of nationalism and imperialism among Italians in Egypt, particularly as the fascist government sought to revive the myth of Mare Nostrum. With decolonisation, however, Italians began abandoning Egypt en masse. By 1960, over 40,000 had deserted Egypt; some as 'emigrants,' others as 'repatriates,'and still others as 'national refugees.' The departed community became an emblem around which political actors in post-colonial Italy and Egypt forged new ties. Anticipated, actual, and remembered departures of Italians from Egypt are at the heart of this book's ambition to rethink European and Mediterranean periodisation.
Makers of 20th-Century Modern Architecture is an indispensable reference book for the scholar, student, architect or layman interested in the architects who initiated, developed, or advanced modern architecture. The book is amply illustrated and features the most prominent and influential people in 20th-century modernist architecture including Wright, Eisenman, Mies van der Rohe and Kahn. It describes the milieu in which they practiced their art and directs readers to information on the life and creative activities of these founding architects and their disciples. The profiles of individual architects include critical analysis of their major buildings and projects. Each profile is completed by a comprehensive bibliography.
First published in 1998. Design reform in the fields of architecture and the decorative or applied arts became objectified through writings published during the period of 1885 to 1910. This investigation includes, but is not limited to, Art Nouveau in France and Belgium, and the arts and crafts movement in England and the United States. Even though the similar processes of creativity and shared goals of Art Nouveau and the arts and crafts movement have long been recognized, attempts to explore their origins and their points of interrelation with the broader scope of art history have been largely unsuccessful—until now.
The eighth volume of the International Yearbook of Futurism Studies is again an open issue and presents in its first section new research into the international impact of Futurism on artists and artistic movements in France, Great Britain, Hungary and Sweden. This is followed by a study that investigates a variety of Futurist inspired developments in architecture, and an essay that demonstrates that the Futurist heritage was far from forgotten after the Second World War. These papers show how a wealth of connections linked Futurism with Archigram, Metabolism, Archizoom and Deconstructivism, as well as the Nuclear Art movement, Spatialism, Environmental Art, Neon Art, Kinetic Art and many oth...