The Evil Genius of Fascist Design: How Mussolini and Hitler Used Art & Architecture to Project Power

"When the Nazis came to pow­er in 1933, they declared the begin­ning of a "Thou­sand-Year Reich" that ulti­mate­ly came up about 988 years short. Fas­cism in Italy man­aged to hold on to pow­er for a cou­ple of decades, which was pre­sum­ably still much less time than Ben­i­to Mus­soli­ni imag­ined he'd get on the throne. His­to­ry shows us that regimes of this kind suf­fered a fair­ly severe sta­bil­i­ty prob­lem, which is per­haps why they need­ed to put forth such a sol­id, for­mi­da­ble image. The IMPERIAL video above explores "the evil genius of fas­cist design," focus­ing on how Hitler and Mus­soli­ni ren­dered their ide­olo­gies in art and the built envi­ron­ment, but many of its obser­va­tions can be gen­er­al­ized to any polit­i­cal move­ment that seeks total con­trol of a soci­ety, espe­cial­ly if that soci­ety has a suf­fi­cient­ly glo­ri­ous-seem­ing past."

"Fas­cis­m's visu­al lan­guage has many inspi­ra­tions, two of the most impor­tant cit­ed in the video being Roman­ti­cism and Futur­ism. The for­mer offered "a long­ing for the past, an obses­sion with nature, and a focus on the sub­lime"; the lat­ter "wor­shiped speed, machines, and vio­lence." Despite their appar­ent con­tra­dic­tion, these dual cur­rents allowed fas­cis­m "a pecu­liar abil­i­ty to look both back­ward and for­ward, to sum­mon the glo­ry of past empires while promis­ing a rad­i­cal new future.""

Fascist regimes cultivated a monumental visual identity to mask political instability and assert enduring authority. The Nazi claim of a "Thousand-Year Reich" and Italian fascism's multi-decade rule reveal the gap between theatrical permanence and political reality. Visual design and architecture became tools to legitimize power by invoking glorious past empires and promising transformative futures. Roman romanticism contributed nostalgia, reverence for nature, and the sublime. Futurism contributed a cult of speed, machines, and violence. The fusion of backward-looking myth and forward-looking technological zeal enabled fascism to appear both ancient and relentlessly modern.

Read at Open Culture