Weatherhead Center: Cultural Politics: Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Date: 

Tuesday, March 28, 2017, 6:00pm to 7:30pm

Location: 

CGIS Knafel Building (K262),Bowie-Vernon Room, 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA

 

For more information, see the WCFIA website.

Speaker:

Jeffrey SchnappAffiliated Professor, Department of Architecture, Harvard Graduate School of Design; Professor of Romance Languages & Literature, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University.

Contact:

Heather Conrad
hconrad@wcfia.harvard.edu

Chair:

Panagiotis RoilosFaculty Associate. George Seferis Professor of Modern Greek Studies and Professor of Comparative Literature, Harvard University.

Abstract:

Though my larger topic is the fate of modern monuments that have outlived the regimes by and for whom they were built, my talk will be built around a single case study in which I was centrally involved: that of Bz ’18-’45: one monument, one city, two dictatorships, a documentation center developed under the Monument to Victory in the Northern Italian city of Bolzano that opened to the public in July 2015. The Monument to Victory, designed by Marcello Piacentini at the behest of Mussolini and built between 1926 and 1928, was the first great monument of the Italian fascist regime. It inaugurated the new columnar order--the "lictorial column"-- that would later become ubiquitous and marked Piacentini's elevation to a role akin to that of Albert Speer in Nazi Germany. ‘Uncomfortable (Revolutionary) Monuments’ tells the tale of the Monument itself and of its reintegration, by means of the design of a critical, archivally informed recontextualization, into the urban fabric of contemporary Bolzano.