Fascism - Special Issue: Architectural Projections of a ‘New Order’ in Interwar Dictatorships, May 2018

This article sets out to contribute conceptual clarity to the growing recognition of the modern and futural dynamic behind fascist cultural projects by focusing on projects for architectural renewal under the Third Reich. It starts by reviewing the gradual recognition of the futural temporality of the regime’s culture. It then introduces the concept ‘rooted modernism’ and argues for its application not only to the vernacular idioms of some of the Reich’s new buildings, but also to the International Style and machine aesthetic deployed in many Nazi technological and industrial buildings. The article’s main focus is on the extensive use made in the new civic and public architecture under Nazism (and Fascism) of ‘stripped classicism’. This was a form of neo-classicism widely encountered in both democratic and authoritarian states throughout the inter-war period, and which can be understood as an alternative strand of architectural modernism co-existing with more overtly avant-garde experiments in reshaping the built environment. The case is then made for applying a new conceptual framework for evaluating the relationship to modernity and modernism of architectural projects, not just in fascist cultural production, but that of the many authoritarian right-wing regimes of the period which claimed to embrace the national past while striving for a dynamic, heroic future. This opens up the possibility for historians to engage with the complex cultural entanglements and histoires croisées of revolutionary with modernizing conservative states in the ‘fascist era’.

During the late 1920s and 1930s, a group of Italian modernist architects, known as ‘rationalists’, launched an ambitious bid for convincing Mussolini that their brand of architectural modernism was best suited to become the official art of the Fascist state (arte di stato). They produced buildings of exceptional quality and now iconic status in the annals of international architecture, as well as an even more impressive register of ideas, designs, plans, and proposals that have been recognized as visionary works. Yet, by the end of the 1930s, it was the official monumental stile littorio – classical and monumental yet abstracted and stripped-down, infused with modern and traditional ideas, pluralist and ‘willing to seek a third way between opposite sides in disputes’, the style curated so masterfully by Marcello Piacentini – that set the tone of the Fascist state’s official architectural representation. These two contrasted architectural programmes, however, shared much more than what was claimed at the time and has been assumed since. They represented programmatically, ideologically, and aesthetically different expressions of the same profound desire to materialize in space and eternity the Fascist ‘Third Way’ future avant la lettre. In both cases, architecture (and urban planning as the scalable articulation of architecture on an urban, regional, and national territorial level) became the ‘total’ media used to signify and not just express, to shape and not just reproduce or simulate, to actively give before passively receiving meaning. Still, it was the more all-encompassing and legible coordinates of space and time in the ‘rooted’ modernism of the stile littorio that captured and expressed a third-way mediation between universality and singularity and between futural modernity and tradition better than the trenchant, inflexible anti-monumentalism of the rationalists.

Within the context of Peronist expectations regarding culture, the article examines three cases of architectural and urban projects that displayed various kinds of articulation in terms of promotional policies, state institutions, intervening technology, the urban aspects involved, and the architectural aesthetics proposed. The works are interpreted—with respect to their aesthetic forms and images and the political content they transmit—as materializations of the new order envisaged by Peronism. Each of the case studies highlights different visualizations or aspects of this new order. In conceptual terms, all of the characteristics manifested by Peronist cultural production were also observable in the projects of inter-war dictatorships, especially those of Italian fascism. Clearly, given the period in which Peronism came to power, it is anachronistic to locate the architectural programmes which it hosted within the political categories of ‘inter-war dictatorship’ or even ‘fascism’. Nevertheless, seen through the lens of these two categories, it can be shown that the ethos of Peronism falls within the framework of the fascist era, due to its promotion of grandiose visionary projects for national renewal expressed through the transformation of the built environment on a scale characteristic of the two fascist regimes. Such projects mythically elevated Perón and Eva Perón to the level of leaders of the Argentinian people, whom they both saw as an organic entity, socially harmonious, rooted in the history of the nation and, in international terms, decidedly placed the nation on the road to the “third position” pioneered by fascist movements before 1945 in which tradition and modernity were reconciled in a form of modernism termed by Roger Griffin ‘rooted modernism’.

This article examines the circulation and articulation of fascist ideas and practices among the so-called cooperating nationalist party Partai Indonesia Raya (Parindra) and its youth wing Surya Wirawan in late colonial Indonesia. After the radical nationalist parties demanding Indonesian independence had been crushed by the Dutch colonial government in 1934, only parties refraining from making such radical demands could operate in public. Since their frustratingly weak bargaining position in the political arena was hard to conceal, leading Parindra politicians such as Soetomo (1888–1938) evoked powerful images of a ‘glorious Indonesia’ (Indonesia Moelia) to keep the nationalist project alive. The ideas of Soetomo, who was an expressed admirer of Mussolini, Hitler, and Japanese imperialism, had a considerable impact on Parindra’s political course. Others, such as the journalist Soedarjo Tjokrosisworo were particularly vocal about their fascist sympathies. Tjokrosisworo played an influential role in modelling the ‘scout group’ on the example of fascist fighting squads and other paramilitary units. The article argues that Parindra’s philofascist demeanor was an integral part of a strategy to achieve an aura of power. However, the party’s dynamism and glory was just ‘staged’ to compensate for Parindra’s lacking scope of political action. Generally, the party’s incorporation of fascist elements raises important questions about the relationship between anticolonial nationalism and fascism since the latter entered Indonesia during a time when the nationalist project was still very much in the making.