ARCHITECTURE AND THE STATE: FASCIST ITALY AND NEW DEAL AMERICA. (VOLUMES I AND II)

Historians typically regard Roosevelt's New Deal and Mussolini's Fascism as different political systems--one repressive and totalitarian, the other free and democratic. But Italy and America suffered from the Depression, and the Roosevelt Administration's building and construction campaign resembled those Benito Mussolini launched in Italy for similar reasons. Both constructed new towns, public buildings, and low-cost housing in unprecedented numbers. Only Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia engaged in such programs during the 1930s. Why did democratic America pursue programs which corresponded to those of totalitarian states? This study examines three types of public building programs and asks: how were the new town and urban public housing programs in the two countries similar and different? What political and representational goals did the public architecture serve?In purposes, methods, and types of building, New Deal programs differed little from those of Fascist Italy. Both governments directly intervened in the lives of their tenants to an unprecedented degree, and the character of the intervention in America paralleled that which occurred in Italy.Examined in conjunction with those of Fascist Italy, New Deal building and architecture programs are far more conservative, even reactionary, than historians have assumed. The Mussolini and Roosevelt administrations engaged in parallel quests for legitimation in a time of economic crisis, both chose pre-industrial rural communities as ideal social models for the future, and both cloaked their public buildings in an architecture designed to awe with its monumentality and to promote stable cultural images in a time of great uncertainty.The firs two chapters discuss the purposes and styles of public buildings both served legitimizing functions, but the architecture chosen to accomplish this differed dramatically and tellingly in the two countries. Chapters three and four evaluate the new communities programs, which involved the governments in constructing models for ideal communities of an unexpected character. Chapters five and six examine the types, sizes, styles, operation, financing and location of low-cost projects.