Building for the State: Ten Styles from Italian Rationalism to Soviet Modernism

Start with the idea. Rationalism grew mainly out of Italy in the 1920s and 1930s on the belief that reason could resolve the problems posed by the real world, set against nineteenth century historicism. The atlas notes that the word is often used loosely for the wider International Style, so this stop names the broad current before the political episodes that follow.

Gruppo 7, formed in 1926 by seven young architects including Giuseppe Terragni, Luigi Figini and Gino Pollini, argued for logic and rationality rather than a break with tradition. Terragni built the Casa del Fascio in Como between 1932 and 1936, and the Esposizione Universale Roma district was begun in 1936. All of it developed under the Fascist government.

Here the rationalist vocabulary meets state power. Between 1922 and 1943 Mussolini's Italy blended Rationalism with classical Roman elements, favoring symmetry, simplicity and monumental scale, and marble and travertine meant to last for centuries or to leave impressive ruins. Mussolini described the result as conveying continuity with ancient Rome.

The same regime exported its taste. Colonial building began with the founding of Italian Eritrea in 1885 and was at first heterogeneous, with an orientalist inflection. Later the Fascist administration pushed for a distinct style joining Italian design with appropriated local forms, and by the early 1930s various incarnations of Rationalism dominated across Italy's colonies until defeat in the Second World War.

Not every government that wanted classical dignity wanted ornament. Stripped Classicism, also called Starved Classicism or Grecian Moderne, keeps the massing and scale of classicism while removing applied decoration, so the orders are only hinted at. The atlas records that both totalitarian and democratic regimes adopted it for official buildings.

From 1933 to 1945 Germany and its occupied territories followed Albert Speer, appointed by Hitler in 1934 to oversee major building projects. The style had three forms: Speer's stripped neoclassicism for state and party buildings, a rural and alpine vernacular for housing, and a plain utilitarian approach for infrastructure. It was set deliberately against the functionalism of the Bauhaus, which the regime condemned.

In the Soviet Union the shift went through a transitional style. Selim Khan-Magomedov used the term Postconstructivism for the years 1932 to 1936, with building continuing to 1941, when former avant-garde architects moved toward neoclassicism with square, lean columns lacking capitals and no friezes or cornices. Other scholars, including Dmitry Khmelnitsky, argue that state pressure shaped it more directly.

The Stalinist style, or socialist classicism, led Soviet and other socialist countries from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s as a visual embodiment of the triumph of the socialist system. It is marked by emphatic monumentality, strict symmetry and classical orders, with abundant decoration that paired classical forms with Soviet symbols such as five-pointed stars, ears of corn and the hammer and sickle.

The break came in 1955 with a Central Committee resolution titled On the Elimination of Excesses in Design and Construction, which replaced Stalinist ornament with functional austerity in reinforced concrete. The movement ran to 1991 and shares ground with brutalism, though it added marble, sandstone, mosaic panels and bas-reliefs. The term itself only became common in the early 2010s, partly through Frederic Chaubin's photographs.

The path ends away from the state. La Tendenza, an Italian movement of the 1960s and 1970s led by neo-rationalists such as Carlo Aymonino, Giorgio Grassi and Aldo Rossi, answered the functionalism that had dominated Italy and explored memory and the historical city instead. Manfredo Tafuri, who took the chair of Architecture History at the University Iuav of Venice in 1968, was a significant influence, and a 1973 Milan Triennale exhibition gave it recognition.