Building Transatlantic Italy : Architectural Dialogues with Postwar America

At the end of the Second World War, Italian architects began to pay increasing attention to examples imported from the United States, with the American model becoming a reference for many Italian designers, planners, and critics. This book questions how effective the circulation of US-originated knowledge was: regarding the Italian-American exchange, identifying what was exported from America is as interesting and significant as recognizing what was received or rejected. This investigation into the Italian-American exchange in architecture and planning is situated in the larger context of post-war dissemination and diffusion of American cultural models.

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.