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The “polite vernacular” in modernist rural landscapes and its challenges to architectural history

par Fisher, Axel ;Capresi, Vittoria
Référence SAHGB - Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain’s 2017 Annual Symposium “Beyond ‘by’. Towards an inclusive architectural history?” (3 June 2017: London, UK)
Publication Non publié, 2017-06-03

Communication à un colloque

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Résumé :

Throughout the 20th century, many modernist architects have sought inspiration in vernacular architecture, in an attempt to address the tensions between the local and international dimensions of their activity within a world undergoing rapid change, yet still largely bound to tradition. However, never as much as in the large-scale campaigns conducted throughout Europe and beyond to reshape entire rural landscapes, were such tensions more evident, and more challenging to architectural history. Episodes in recent history, such as the reclamation of the Pontine Marshes under Mussolini, the Zionist colonization of Palestine under British Mandate, the Italian colonization of Fascist Libya, or the agricultural recolonization of inner Spain under the Francoist regime, all entailed the construction of new villages and towns, including residential buildings, but also "technical" buildings (farms, barns, silos, etc.) as well as "communal" buildings (for religious, political, educational, and recreational purposes). Some of these buildings were designed by architects, faced with the challenging opportunity to experiment with modernist architectural style to produce, at least apparently, a “truly authentic” modern vernacular. And other buildings remained “anonymous” productions, although they helda non-less important role in the modernization policies they embodied. Mainstream architectural history has dedicated little, if any, attention to large-scale modernist architectural production in the countryside, mostly focusing on the trajectory of single architects or single experiments, leaving us unprepared to face a number of epistemic and methodological challenges: should polite "modernist" architecture inspired or mimicking vernacular architecture be approached as an “authorial” product or rather as vernacular artefacts themselves? Fed by an ongoing EU-funded research project (“MODSCAPES: reinventions of modernist rural landscapes”, 2016-2019), this paper proposes to track the entangled relationships between the polite and the vernacular in the above mentioned case studies, focusing on the advancementsbrought to the debate by a seldom attempted comparative approach to the topic.