Man, this shows how different the US and Europe can be
Here we consider a government controlling architecture to stay within local and historical styles a left-liberal thing. But although I feel this makes sense in some places (Like who would want to see a modern high-rise in the centre of Florence?) I doubt the likes of Trump could be trusted with this.
Anyway, what is beautiful? A really beautiful building can still look ugly in the wrong place. You can regulate materials, colours, styles, hight, and things like that. Beautiful is too vague for a law.
Doubly ironic of course since in that time period the CIA was actually underwriting Abstract Expressionism as some sort of propaganda tool against the red menace.
Well, I doubt he actually espouses any kind of philosophy, but he is a greedy sack of shit who doesn’t like paying taxes or helping anyone; so that sounds pretty Libertarian to me.
Triply ironic, because Soviet artists had to follow the dictates of socialist realism, producing art that was optimistic, patriotic and aesthetically conservative. Modern art was derided as a product of decadent capitalist individualism.
Fascist architecture in the Italian sense is rather different from the other fascist dictatorships which were consciously classical. Mussolini and other Italian fascists had modernist roots. Hitler, Franco etc. didn’t. It really shows up of you look at 20th century propaganda. There is a bland uniformity of fascist realism and graphic banality about fascist propaganda, in fact most. But half the Italian stuff is great modernist design, as was a load of the early Soviet stuff. It later was suppressed and the great early Soviet modernism died out to be replaced with Soviet realism which is essentially indistinguishable from Nazi realism.
Tl;dr Italian fascism had two styles: modernism and classicism. And even the modernist stuff was often designed to specifically evoke Roman architecture with lots of columns. A new Roman empire as it were.
I mean it absolutely does but on the other hand Bauhaus and Brutalism also have European roots. It’s more that the far right have a problem with progress in general.
According to Vetruvius. those triglyphs, carved out of stone, are meant to suggest the wooden beams used in earlier temple designs.
A Modern architectural vocabulary suggests that this is completely unnecessary. We hare newer materials, why not use them to their fullest potential? A building’s roof does not need to be supported by so many columns. A steel supported wall does not need to be thicker at the bottom that on the top, so all of the rules that are derived from that principle can be discarded. And so on. Arguably, one must have a system based on rules of symmetry, and proportion, but rules that are based solely in tradition can be discarded for something new.
I don’t know how “post moderniist” architecture fits into this scheme, though.
