Fascist Constructs: Economics, Aesthetics, and the Making of a New Via Roma in Turin

Histories of Fascist-era architecture in Italy have traditionally focused on the connections between architectural theory and political discourse. Most of these studies emphasize the use of political language in architectural writings, and many are limited to the symbolic imperial center: the capital city of Rome. This dissertation differs in its approach by examining the period’s architectural production through an economic rather than conceptual lens. The study is premised on the notion that the Fascist effort to redesign Italian society was not a strictly ideological process. Instead, it posits that practical financial considerations played a significant role in the regime’s architectural interventions. Put simply, the regime needed money to achieve its political aims—in particular when those aims involved the destruction and construction of Italy’s built environment. To this end, the government relied on elite financing, cheap labor, and broad economic restructuring to incentivize commercial activity and to support struggling domestic industries. Importantly, the web of Fascist economic policy, industrialism, and modernist architecture converged in Northern Italy. While Rome served as the functional and symbolic center of the Italian government, it lacked the economic strength of Italy’s North. Turin, in particular, was home to some of the nation’s most powerful financial elites who both lobbied for pro-business policies and funded the regime’s construction projects. The reconstruction of Via Roma, the central commercial street in Turin, is the focus of this study, as it is a prime example of the ways in which the regime’s economic maneuvering influenced its architectural interventions. The new Via Roma was the regime’s most significant construction project in Turin, taking roughly a decade to complete. The period of the road’s reconstruction—from roughly 1931 to 1938—overlapped with the period of economic fascistizzazione in which the regime attempted to gain control of the national economy. Central to this study, therefore, are the Fascist government’s two primary economic programs of corporatism—a foundational concept in Fascism’s economic platform—and autarky—adopted explicitly in the late 1930s. Corporatism was proposed as an autonomous system for the regulation of capital and labor, while autarky emphasized war-readiness and self-sufficiency. The regime embraced these two systems as complementary programs for the expansion of state controls over the Italian economy. This dissertation shows that the regime’s attempts to merge these two economic systems resulted in significant aesthetic changes in Turin’s built environment. The regime’s efforts to navigate existing financial systems while also attempting to revolutionize Italy’s economy resulted in a scarcity of national bank reserves, a trend towards industrial monopolization, widespread unemployment, austerity measures for the working classes, and an increasingly elaborate welfare system. In the case of Turin’s Via Roma, these conditions brought about changes in architectural patronage, labor demands, material availability, and of course, design. Over the years of the street’s renewal, Fascist officials approved the construction of various buildings in different styles: first an array of neo-baroque palazzi, followed by a modernist steel-frame skyscraper, and finally, a master-planned collection of austere stile littorio buildings, examined in Chapter Two, Chapter Three, and Chapter Four, respectively. The result was a mix of distinct architectural styles, each linked to a key moment in the regime’s economic history. By drawing connections between architectural design trends and economic policy, this dissertation presents a new way of framing the longstanding question of the regime’s aesthetic shift from openness to uniformity. In short, this study explores Italian Fascism not merely in terms of political doctrine, but also as an economic reality—through the physical construction of the Fascist state.

Advisor: Fuller, Mia