The idea of Rome in Fascist art and architecture : the decorative program of the Palazzo dei Congressi in EUR, Rome

This paper engages with the notion of interspace by examining an understudied and unpublished cycle of mosaics and frescoes destined for the main hall of the Palazzo dei Congressi in Rome’s south-western suburb of EUR, a major building project by Roman architect Adalberto Libera. It first provides a socio-historical and aesthetic background to the building of EUR as Rome’s international exposition of 1942, which aimed to celebrate the achievements of Italian (and fascist) civilisation. It then focuses on the concept of Romanità (or Roman-ness) as a mythical and idealised past that was engaged on a number of levels as a teleological foundation for the advent (and eternity) of fascist rule. This past was adopted, interpreted and made manifest at the urban scale in the master plan of EUR, at the architectural scale in the buildings and at the interior scale in the decorative programs incorporated in each. It argues that the Palazzo dei Congressi allows us to gain further insight into the notion of interspace as it exemplifies this on a number of physical, symbolic and temporal levels. Physically, in the urban space, architectural form and interiors; symbolically, in the content and compositional layout of the mosaics; and temporally, in the use of historical elision and conflation between mythical pasts and idealised present.

Not-I/Thou : the other subject of art and architecture

Not-I/Thou: The Other Subject of Art and Architecture is a series of essays delineating the gray areas and black zones in present-day cultural production. Part One is an implicit critique of neoliberal capitalism and its assault on the humanities through the pseudo-scientific and pseudo-empirical biases of academic and professional disciplines, while Part Two returns to apparent lost causes in the historical development of modernity and post-modernity, particularly the recourse to artistic production as both a form of mnemonics and periodic (and renascent) avant-garde agitation. In-between these twin systems of taking the measure of things, Art and Architecture, as forms of speculative intellectual capital, emerge from the shadow-lands of half-conscious and half-unconscious forces to become gestures toward a type of knowledge that has no utilitarian or generic agency. Defying the tendencies of such discourses to fall prey to instrumental orders that effectively neuter the inherent radical agenda of both, Art and Architecture are represented in this series of essays as noetic apparatuses, operating at the edge of authorized systems of knowledge, quietly and secretly validating and valorizing the shadowy and recondite, collective and personal operations of intellect in service to no particular end.