Piacentini

Alice Davis Hitchcock Award for 1992, Society of Architectural Historians.
Most Outstanding Book in Architecture and Urban Planning, Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division, Association of American Publishers, Inc., 1991.
International Architecture Book Award, American Institute of Architects, 1992: "This is magisterial history with a grand sweep, an eye for detail and a determination not to simplify.  If Modern architecture in Italy over five generations was complex, paradoxical and full of counter-tendencies in any one architect, then these are lovingly pulled apart and exposed.""

The subversive architecture of Giuseppe Terragni - Politicization of architectural discourse in Fascist Italy


Introduction - The architectural discourse in Fascist Italy
A new building typology: the Casa del Fascio
Giuseppe Terragni’s Casa del Fascio in Como
Socio-cultural excursus: architecture and politics in
post-World War I Italy
Futurism and Novecento (1914-1930)
New architecture and the Regime
Rationalism and the “gruppo 7”
Conclusion - A universal poetry

"The demolition of the Matarazzo mansion on Avenida Paulista is an example of a lack of awareness and coordination of cultural heritage preservation mechanisms, to a certain extent attributable to insufficient research on buildings of a great architectural worth. In a metropolis like São Paulo that is so rich in 20th century architectural  gestures and symbols, this question could appear to be of minor importance. Nevertheless, and despite the everyday loss of architectural objects of great cultural value, it is important to gain better familiarity with them in order to avoid the complete disappearance of their memory after their physical destruction. This article discusses the design process of the mansion renovation between 1938 and 1940, which gave us the image of the building that lasted until its demolition. The study puts this architectural work into context and removes any doubt about Tomaso Buzzi’s authorship of this project. Buzzi is an architect who has only recently become the focus of intense study in Italy and hopefully will be better known in Brazil."

A large part of the fascist ‘third Rome’ remained on paper – whether because time or funds ran out in the early 1940s or because projects were defeated in competitions, sidelined by various more pragmatic considerations, and thwarted by Mussolini's volatile attitude to architecture and urban planning. In order to trace the fragments of this other fascist, Rome this article focuses on four projects that were never to be realized: Brasini's plans for the historic centre of Rome in the 1920s and his later project for the Mole Littoria in 1937; Mario Palanti's ideas again for a Mole Littoria between 1924 and 1932; and the Danteum project by Terragni-Lingeri in 1938–39). Each of these four episodes contains revealing stories of visionary interpretation and unfulfilled ambition, underpinned by powerful sacralizing and universalist narratives. All four projects share a crucial point of reference: they were conceived and proposed as solutions to the completion of the Via dell'Impero – the landmark avenue that ran from Palazzo Venezia through the Fori to the Colosseo and was inaugurated with unparalleled fascist pageantry in 1932. Owing to their proposed location, they became intricately linked to the ongoing debates of the mid-1930s about the location and style of the Palazzo del Littorio and, more broadly, about the role of a ‘modern’ architecture in the historic core of ‘Mussolini's Rome’.