2. Fascists and Rationalists

Michelucci was born into an artisan family of architectural ironworkers and the family foundry made an important impression upon him (he worked there before affirming his vocation, returning to help for a short while after the war). As a result, his belief in a "modernism" which did not dismiss craftsmanship was instilled at an early age and was to condition his thinking for the rest of his life.

At the same time Michelucci's Tuscan birthplace of Pistoia, despite its size, was a lively artistic and literary town in the first decades of the twentieth century, to the extent that in 1913 the futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti held a conference on Futurism which the young Michelucci attended.6 A keen advocate of the modern spirit, Michelucci involved himself in the debates amongst artist's groups whilst at University in Florence and Futurist publications such as the Pistoian "Bianco e Nero" (in which issues such as traditionalism vs. progressionism were voiced). And it was precisely this futurist fervour that incited Michelucci to participate in the First World War.

The Rise of Fascism

In 1919 the "war-mongering" Futurist manifesto lay in tatters and Italian architecture was "born and painfully developed"7 in a climate, for the most part Anti-Futurist. Returning from the war, Michelucci would have experienced the economic depression and the rise of Socialism which terrified industrialists, landlords and the conservative middle classes with strikes. In this social climate, the figure of Benito Mussolini, attracting support from those fearful of a "Bolshevik" revolution, rose from obscurity in 1921 as the leader of a political movement known as "Fascism" that was to dominate the political and cultural scene for the following twenty years.8

In approaching the subject of the relationship of modern architecture to Fascist Italy, it is important to keep in mind the evolution of Fascism itself. From Mussolini's seizure of power with a triumphant "March on Rome" in 1922, and the subsequent destruction of the democratic state with a totalitarian regime in 1926. Ethiopia was invaded in 1935, and an Empire declared the following year, but the demise of the regime began with Italy's somewhat reluctant entry into the Second World War in 1940. Mussolini was ousted in 1943 but German occupation followed until liberation in 1945.

This serves as a reminder that, with the nature of Fascism constantly changing, the meaning of "collaboration" with Fascism changed as well, so the earliest encounters between architects and the regime should not be prejudiced with the knowledge of events that had not yet taken place.

Claudia Conforti remarked that after the Second World War major changes in attitude towards Fascism occurred and the importance of Michelucci's projects for the regime were suppressed if not "silently censured".9 Generally people or movements who had flirted with the regime were disapproved of. Throughout the 1930s however, architects on the whole had tacitly accepted the regime by participating in projects to glorify the Fascist revolution.10 As Ernesto Rogers explained in 1961,11 the majority belief at the time was: "Fascism is a revolution, modern architecture is revolutionary, thus it must be the architecture of Fascism."12

Michelucci was to be intimately involved with some of the most important Fascist projects from 1932 to 1940 and whether he was a "Fascist" or not (he was actively involved with the local PNF party in Pistoia in the 1920s)13 may seem of little consequence to us now. However it certainly mattered up until the 1960s to a generation of younger architects, which explains in part the "silent censuring" of his early projects.

The Emergence of Rationalism

1926 saw the establishment of "Gruppo 7" who coined the term "Rationalism" in favour of "Modern",14 which they felt had been abused by predecessors such as the Futurists. The movement quickly gathered momentum and after a successful first exhibition in 1928 "went on the offensive"15 at the Second Italian Exposition of Rational Architecture in Rome in 1931, with two clear intentions. Firstly they argued for an official identification of Rationalist architecture with Fascism, claiming: "Our movement has no other moral consequence than to serve the Revolution in hard times", asking for "Mussolini's faith" to realise this.16 Secondly and more contentiously however, they attacked recent projects that had met with their disapproval in a "panel of horrors" alongside the exhibition of their own work, proving to have serious consequences for the polemical cause of the young movement and creating a bitter atmosphere in Rome.

At the inauguration of the exhibition on the 30th March 1931, Mussolini was handed a manifesto revealing profound personal reasons that were prompting many of the Rationalists to take Fascism seriously: "We are fifty young architects who, in the midst of the incomprehension and the systematic opposition of those who will not assign work to us, have only constructed six houses in four years."17 One of those houses, the Villa Valiani was by Michelucci (who at forty was hardly "young"). Nonetheless, the inclusion of the exhibit by Michelucci represented an act of solidarity, rather than an active participation with the Rationalists.18

The "panel of horrors" which satirised the recent work of architects including Marcello Piacentini led to a scandal, and the Rationalists, in failing to win official recognition from the state, were forced into a compromise. Ironically this entailed a merger of the Rationalist movement (MIAR) with Piacentini's own Fascist Architect's Syndicate. The very architect they had attacked would provide them with support, but on his terms now.

Marcello Piacentini was to become the "official" architect of the establishment and wield increasing power until the final collapse of the regime in 1943. As a result many historians have since painted him as an archfiend.19 This however is for the most part an unfair portrayal and Michelucci himself formed a long working friendship with Piacentini, after their initial contact in the mid 1920s.

Piacentini had argued in 1923 for an architecture that fused tendencies arising from a response to new materials and customs, with a traditional more contextual response.20 A view that met with the accordance of Michelucci, who was soon to offer his own contextual response, when towards the end of 1932 he led a group who were judged, by a panel including Piacentini, as the winners of a national competition for the design of a new station for Florence.

Earlier in 1932 Michelucci had published a series of essays in Domus illustrating the notion that tradition transforms itself through an abstraction of formal qualities that bear a resemblance to the past. Entitled "Contacts between Ancient and Modern Architecture" Michelucci argued that there existed a sympathy between old "minor" architecture, "simple forms, not born from a decorative concept, but determined by the requirements of life" and the modern spirit "ordered by an absolute sincerity of expression". And for Michelucci the lessons gleaned provided a context for Rationalist architecture: "a new, a true image of architecture; it makes us feel part of a context, it orients us."21 And it is the phrase "determined by the requirements of life" in particular that suggests that Michelucci had already begun to formulate some of the ideas that he voiced after the war.

The competition for a new railway station for Florence (right and below) had arisen, after the influential figure of Romano Romanelli had discredited a previous design. He argued that for the delicate location behind the church of Santa Maria Novella it should have the "most inconspicuous, the least offensive, and the least visible form possible", whilst at the same time suggesting the "idea of the train or of mechanics".22

Michelucci led the group, and he was credited with the project, but in reality it was Italo Gamberini a student of Michelucci's, whose thesis project formed the basis of the competition entry.23 The "Tuscan Group"24 comprising of Michelucci, his teaching assistant and four graduating students (including Gamberini) achieved Romanelli's criteria with a low horizontal building, of parallel lines of slightly raised stone work and a dramatic cantilevered canopy. At the same time it achieved the required sense of dynamism, and the most contextual solution of all the competition entries, employing large walls of pietra serena reminiscent of those of the Florentine convent of San Marco that Michelucci had published earlier that year in the Domus articles, and had praised for their "large, pure,"25 simple surfaces, with few openings.

The Rome Projects

During and after the station competition Michelucci fraternised to a greater degree with the Rationalists, co-organising the third Rationalist exhibition in Florence in 1932 with Adalberto Libera. And later that year, along with six others including Giuseppe Pagano, Michelucci was invited by Piacentini to collaborate on the new Rome University campus design (Città Universitaria). Piacentini, Arts Secretary of the Italian Academy since 1929, had been selected by Mussolini to direct the project, and established a design criteria, with a desire to guarantee a visual unity with the individual buildings. In doing so Piacentini consciously defined the modernism appropriate for the Fascist state. This was based upon the stripped classicism of his own Post Office building in Brescia. (Below right- Piacentini's library, Michelucci's Mineralogia building in the background).

Michelucci had already moved to Rome in 1926, partly motivated by his friendship with Piacentini that had begun back in 1923, when he had praised Piacentini's work in a magazine article. The influence of Piacentini had been particularly evident in a series of sober Neo-Classical country villas that Michelucci worked on during the early 1920s, which reflected a vernacular "Novecento" style. The importance of this move to Rome was described by Michelucci as "of the deepest, the utmost importance... At first I had been convinced that Florence had all the elements to be defined as the city, a beautifully constructed city. I had this conviction." However, for Michelucci, it was Rome that "revealed architectural space."26

In 1934 Mussolini defended the modernists who were bombarded by a wave of hostile criticism in the Chamber of Deputies regarding two recent state competitions, including Florence station.27 This was not necessarily representative of Mussolini's views on Rationalism but of the special status he accorded to the station, representing his modernising drive, believing it to be "a mirror of the progress of the nation."28 Pagano however viewed Mussolini's invitation of those architects involved in the projects to the Palazzo Venezia29 in Rome, as a sign that finally, Rationalist architecture had been accepted and that Michelucci was recognised as a leading member of that movement.

Michelucci, on the other hand, whilst involved simultaneously with the University buildings and the construction of the station, began to detach himself from the latter, criticising that the station "lacked the architectural discipline of the Città Universitaria".30

His disconnection from the project was further evidenced by the greater involvement he devoted to the station's Royal Pavilion (below right), which was closer in character to the University buildings (such as his Mineralogy Institute (above left and right) (1932-35) with Travertine marble as opposed to the pietra serena of the station).

Michelucci's reservations were then further confirmed by the expression of subsequent projects, such as the Town Hall in Arezzo (1936-39) where he illustrated his unwillingness to interrupt a dialogue with tradition, justifying statues which he placed on its roof as functional not decorative. He seems to have been searching for a "third path",31 between Piacentini's reductive monumentalism and the virulence of the Rationalists with their abstract rhetoric, by distancing himself from the achievements of the station.32 All this seems to indicate that Florence station was in a fact an anomaly for Michelucci, the product of a collaboration with his former students, and not the most representative project of his early career.

Indeed Michelucci had vehemently argued against minimum space ideals associated with Rationalism in the 1930s, believing it was the right of every person to a suitable environment. At the end of the decade, in a letter dated 21st December 1940, Michelucci wrote to a friend Roberto Papini. He wrote, "according to spiritual needs the most rational of the architectural works is the most beautiful in which the spirit rests, and not in those architectural works which are industrially perfect because such perfection is surpassed every day and therfore not perfection".33 It was this course that he was to pursue.

In January 1937, after the completion of the university, Piacentini commissioned a group (once again including Pagano) to produce a plan for an ambitious new city, to the south of Rome called "E.U.R."34 This was to stage an International exhibition scheduled for 1942, to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of fascist rule. However as the decade had progressed (particularly after the Ethiopian war and the declaration of Empire) the mood had turned increasingly towards overt allusions to Imperial Rome, and Piacentini had reflected this with his own eclectic "stile littorio" (Lictorial style) developed through the University project.35 This involved a "gradual drift towards heavy, oppressive classicism as a metaphorical celebration of the new Roman Empire".36 Bruno Zevi later remarked that with this developed of an official style in 1934, "the possibility of modern architecture in Italy was brought to a close".37

Initially Pagano reported that the group worked together in a spirit of great optimism and innovation, but as time passed Piacentini took an increasingly tight hold on the project until the group were dismissed in 1940. With his dismissal Pagano turned on Piacentini, condemning him as an "artificial Vitruvius",38 and attacking all those who had accepted the drift into classicism in an article entitled "Can we save ourselves from false traditions and monumental obsessions".39

Michelucci however remained intimately involved with the project until its demise (once Italy entered the war). His own design for an open air theatre was never completed, and what was built was demolished after the war. His "Palace of Water and Light" competition entry also for E.U.R. while never built, is still regarded by Francesco Dal Co as one of his best projects of the decade.40

Within the polemical climate of the 1930s Michelucci had managed to maintain an unconstrained position, a balancing act between Rationalist culture and the academic and authoritarian culture of Piacentini. Later in his life Michelucci remarked peculiarly that, "I was on excellent terms with Piacentini, who was an intelligent architect. With him I formed a genuine friendship, although there was no possibility of our agreeing on matters of architecture".41 It can only be concluded that this was Michelucci's own criticism of Piacentini's later position, and so it was that from Piacentini's shadow, more than anyone else's, that he emerged after the collapse of the regime.

This emancipation allowed Michelucci to return once again, after many years of what can only be termed as a "digression", to the aspirations of his youth: a modern architecture from within which "tradition" could find new means of expression, a reconstitution of architecture, ambiguous, elusive and multiplicitious.

After 1941 and the collapse of E.U.R., Michelucci returned from Rome to Florence (with his wife Eloisa) and stayed with Eugenio Ventura's family at the Angiolieri tower near to the Ponte Vecchio.42 It was here that it seems Michelucci sensed a need make clear choices and was to abandon the ambivalent and experimental approach his projects had taken to date.