The Way of the Irenic: Architecture, Compromise, and the Italian Welfare State (1944-1985)

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation at a time inaugurates the field of architectural irenics and rewrites the architectural history of Italy’s First Republic. It accomplishes both by depicting that history as a succession of compromises brokered around buildings and urban plans with the purpose of settling ever-changing democratic conflict. It claims that architecture was in part responsible for sustaining the sociopolitical comity that blessed Italy, like most of Western Europe, between the end of the Second World War and the 1980s. Architecture contributed to that endeavor by spatially and materially inflecting the egalitarian and stabilizing ambitions of the welfare state, that is, of the organizational apparatus set up to underwrite that comity. Almost unheard of in architectural history and undertheorized even in political philosophy, compromise sits nevertheless at the core of democratic practice. Compromise is both a method of governance and its outcome; a process aimed at excluding violence from the resolution of conflict that brings contending parties to willingly meet halfway. Often discussed as a function of parliamentary arithmetic or of ruling coalitions, this thesis posits that cultural products intervene in its actualization, architecture notably. How may architecture catalyze compromise? How does it codify it? How is compromise achieved when the object in dispute is architectural? The dissertation addresses these questions through the detailed examination of three significant cases. During reconstruction, between the mid-1940s and the mid-1950s, historicism in architecture and the visual arts was the correlative of political moderation, which all parties embraced on subscribing the Constitution. The Florence Commodities Exchange, by architect Eugenio Rossi, built between 1949 and 1953 in an area razed by war, was a triumph of that twofold compromise: between tradition and modernization, and between labor and capital. Through the building, Florentine Christian Democrats sought to redeem the damaged city and the broken civitas by constructing a commonwealth on the reliable foundations of the city’s glorious past and of social-Christian values. The research then moves onto the Appia Antica lands between the 1950s and the 1970s to assess the endless succession of clashes and compromises around their protection. Urban explosion endangered well-being in the city and accordingly called for a more proficient welfare paradigm, which the center-Left alliance between Christian Democracy and the Socialist Party introduced from 1962. That paradigm was planning. In their transparency and verifiability, democratic town plans vowed to be the acme of compromissionist methods. The Appia greenbelt’s peripeties in Rome provide a concentrate of planning’s slow emergence in Italy as the best guarantor of new-generation, sociospatial rights. Finally, the summer festival Estate romana between 1977 and 1985 crowned the creative unfolding of welfare architecture with neorationalist edifices paradoxically fitting for wondrous experiences. Rome’s city hall organized the egalitarian celebrations to wrest the public sphere from speculators, from terrorists, and from abducting mass media. Salvaging Italian democracy and securing civil togetherness was what with irenic bona fides the Italian Communist Party pursued when it offered to consociate with conservative forces under the Historic Compromise. But because the city was the place of strife, only architecture could supply the aesthetic concretion that that grand strategy otherwise lacked. In the conclusion to the dissertation, I claim that the Western European welfare state was the historical formation that came closest to realizing a “beautiful democracy.” Such culmination was possible then due to the sustained practice of compromise. I call beautiful democracy the social state that as a matter of course procures its citizens aesthetic pleasure in the form of irenic bliss –the irenic bliss of compromise. As this dissertation shows, welfare-era compromise was a combined aesthetic and irenic practice that found a privileged site in architecture. On the sporadic occasions that it came into being, the beautiful democracy did so through the juste milieu architectures of the welfare state.