Building Transatlantic Italy

Architectural Dialogues with Postwar America

Paolo Scrivano

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317170822
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: History of Architecture

At the end of the Second World War, America's newly acquired status of hegemonic power- together with the launch of ambitious international programs such as the Marshall Plan- significantly altered existing transatlantic relations. In this context, Italian and American architectural cultures developed a fragile dialogue characterized by successful exchanges and forms of collaboration but also by reciprocal wariness. The dissemination of models and ideas concerning architecture generated complex effects and frequently led to surprising misinterpretations, obstinate forms of resistance and long negotiations between the involved parties. Issues of continuity and discontinuity dominated Italian culture and society at the time since at stake was the possible balance between allegedly long-established traditions and the prospect of a radical rupture with recent history. Architectural culture often contributed to reach a compromise between very diverging attitudes. Situated in the larger realm of studies on Americanization, this book questions current interpretations of transatlantic relations in architecture. By reconsidering the means and effects of the dialogue that unfolded between the two sides of the Atlantic during the postwar years, the volume analyzes how cultural and formal models were developed in one context and then modified when transferred to a new one as well as the fortune of this cultural exchange in terms of circulation, amplification, and simplification.

1
Italy and America, Before and After the War

On April 3, 1948, the American President Harry Truman approved the European Recovery Act, the bill that instituted the European Recovery Program (ERP), later known as the Marshall Plan.¹ The name derived from its proponent, Secretary of State George C. Marshall, who had worked since the early postwar years with various government officials to form a program that would provide economic assistance to European countries.² The plan was administered by the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA), an agency that reported to the Department of State and the Department of Commerce, and remained operative until 1951.³ Italy became one of the major recipients of the Marshall Plan’s funds, receiving more than 950 million dollars in aid within two years of the constitution of the ERP, an amount almost corresponding to 11 percent of the total allocated to the 18 participating countries.⁴ The program pursued far-reaching objectives and ensured both the provision of technical and financial assistance and the supply of basic products: help made available through the ERP included food, raw materials, and fuel. These actions were intended to respond to Italy’s state of emergency at the end of the war but a further motive that animated US intervention was to win the favor of the Italian public. For this reason, American officials promoted ECA activity systematically, as the elaborate and highly choreographed ceremonials that accompanied the arrival of the so-called “ERP ships” well illustrate.⁵

As part of a larger pan-continental project, American involvement in Italy’s reconstruction reflected a climate pervaded with deep expectations for political and societal change. The ERP’s proponents envisioned not only the physical rebuilding of Europe but also, if not chiefly, the constitution of a framework of financial and productive systems compatible with the economic model of the United States. With great clarity, the document signed by President Truman considered “the restoration or maintenance in European countries of principles of individual liberty, free institutions, and genuine independence” directly correlated to “… the establishment of sound economic conditions, stable international economic relationships, and the achievement by the countries of Europe of a healthy economy independent of extraordinary outside assistance.”⁶ Long before the recovery of the economy, its restructuring was the main goal of America’s postwar intervention in Europe. According to the experts of the time, this objective could only be achieved through a rapid expansion of the free market and a general improvement of industrial productivity.⁷ Yet, a fully integrated approach to the problems that affected postwar Europe remained an unfulfilled aspiration. Despite US expectations, each European country added autonomous elements to the process of reconstruction and to the start of economic growth. By all means, the increase of productivity remained the key issue. During the years immediately following the war, low productivity indexes were the weak point of most European countries’ economies, including Italy: in fact in 1945 Italian industrial and agricultural outputs had dropped respectively to 29 percent and 63.3 percent of their 1938 levels.⁸

The end of the Second World War rendered evident pre-existing questions and, in this respect, the Marshall Plan seemed to offer the opportunity to fulfill long- coveted ambitions on the European camp. To be more precise, postwar American intervention in Europe responded to a twofold logic, entrenched in both sides of the Atlantic: on the one hand it aimed at facilitating the return of the Old Continent to the world market; on the other it contributed to build a strategy whose objective was to contrast isolationism and nationalism in the United States and abroad.⁹ ERP’s merit was that it accelerated the removal of protectionist boundaries between European countries, facilitating market expansion and accelerating economic growth. In Italy, as it has been noted, the Marshall Plan helped “stabilize” modernization, favoring the circulation of people, goods, money and ideas.¹⁰ Italy’s productivity problems, however, had deeper roots. For example, the modernization of the industrial apparatus had been constantly invoked throughout the first half of the twentieth century in political and economic milieus and the existence of a link connecting productivity, industrialization, economic development as well as social transformation had been accepted long before the war. Much of Fascism’s early support derived from a widespread anxiety for modernization among the Italian political and economic elites and, in part, the middle class. In this context, the United States had become a privileged source of reference, though—as we shall see—not the only one. Similar to the rest of Europe, Italy had seen a surge of interest for themes intimately associated to American culture during the 1920s and 1930s: issues such as the increment of productivity, the rationalization of production and the technological innovation of the industrial apparatus turned into common parlance in business and entrepreneurial circles, in line with what has been defined as the European “infatuation with Fordism”.¹¹

Not surprisingly, it was the world of engineering that was first seduced by the image of American modernity. An emblematic case is that of engineer Francesco Mauro. With his writings about the rationalization of production, Mauro played a crucial role between the 1920s and the 1940s in raising Italian awareness about American industrial systems.¹²President of the Italian Association of Engineers since 1919, he was among the founders of the ENIOS, the Ente Nazionale Italiano per l’Organizzazione Scientifica del Lavoro (Italian National Corporation for the Scientific Organization of the Work), whose journal, L’Organizzazione Scientifica del Lavoro, published regularly on Taylorism and Fordism. Some of these writings often took the form of travel reports, documenting studies of the American system of industrial production conducted by Italian delegations and ENIOS members: Mauro himself traveled to the United States in 1927.¹³ Seemingly in tension with that part of Fascist ideology that rebuffed any change of the traditional structure of the society, his writings unveiled a keen concern about the need to rationalize production while at the same time increase the workers’ purchasing power through a higher wage policy. Convinced of the weakness of Italy’s process of modernization, Mauro saw in these initiatives the indispensable step to develop and sustain a strong internal market.

Around the same time as Mauro, Antonio Gramsci had also arrived to similar conclusions, albeit from a rather different ideological perspective. The Italian philosopher expounded his theses in the Prison Notebooks begun in 1929 in the prison of Turi, near Bari, in particular in Notebook 22, significantly titled Americanism and Fordism.¹⁴ Gramsci was well informed of the progressive introduction of Fordism into Italy between 1910 and 1920, specifically in Turin and Milan. He was also aware that a business and entrepreneurial class in rapid evolution had consciously pursued the importation of this model. The granting of the first collective work contracts during the early 1910s revealed the gradual understanding of the dynamics of the job market by a number of Italian industrialists and, in Notebook 22, Gramsci referred to FIAT’S offer of higher salaries to subtract manpower from other car manufacturers and strangle their competition as an example of Italy’s changing labor relations.¹⁵ He also pointed out, however, both the limited implementation of Fordism in Italy, a timid and relented adoption of transatlantic theories explained by the relative technological backwardness of some sectors of the Italian industry, and the partial permeability to imported knowledge that characterized most of the country’s ruling elites. With his analysis, Gramsci highlighted the fact that the advent of Fascism had not only put a gag on democracy but it had also jeopardized the attempts to disseminate the principles of industrial rationalization. As he wrote in Notebook 22, in Italy during the 1920s and 1930s there had been “… the beginnings of a Fordist fanfare” followed by “… a conversion to ruralism, the disparagement of the cities typical of the Enlightenment, exaltation of artisanat and of idyllic patriarchalism, reference to craft rights and a struggle against industrial liberty.”¹⁶ In effect, the introduction of Fordism and Taylorism had been contrasted by Fascism’s adoption of the socio-economic principles of corporatism: intended as political doctrines rather than technical theories, Fordism and Taylorism collided with the Fascist effort to reconcile capitalism with social consensus, a goal that was pursued by limiting external competition and increasing the strength of the internal market and by removing class conflicts (for instance with the creation of Fascist workers’ unions).

The mixed reception of Fordism and Taylorism reveals how problematic the view of the United States was from the standpoint of Italy; it also indicates that the fascination for America was far from univocal. In fact during the prewar years Americanism coexisted with its opposite, anti-Americanism.¹⁷ More than a few Italian intellectuals feared the dangers that, in their opinion, accompanied the adoption of American models of economy, technology and, above all, life. The strapaese movement and its mastermind, the writer, journalist and painter Mino Maccari, symbolized this stance when they protested—as Ruth Ben-Ghiat has pointed out—“the transformations being produced … by the convergence of consumer capitalism and the centralizing tendencies of the Fascist state.”¹⁸ Advocating for a new political order based on ethnic identity, these positions reflected the status of Italy as a mainly rural society, where “communitarian” values still prevailed over “societal” ones. Expectedly, during the 1930s praise and disapproval of the United States developed alongside similar sentiments for the Soviet Union, as the imagery of many Italian intellectuals became filled with visions of the two countries, b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Italy and America, Before and After the War
• 2 America’s Landing in Postwar Italy
• 3 Actors and Instruments of the Italian-American Exchange
• 4 A Path Paved with Obstacles
• 5 Making “a Little America of Italy”
• Conclusion
• Index