Excavating the Corporate City

In late 1933, five of the leading proponents of architectural rationalismÑthe engineer Gaetano Ciocca and the members of the architectural firm Banfi, Belgioioso, Peressutti, and RogersÑpresented a "totalitarian" city plan for the Northern Italian city of Pavia that sought to transform Pavia into a model fascist city, laid out according to the criteria of rationalism and functionalism. But, in so doing, they also sought to excavate PaviaÕs archaic Roman city plan. This essay explores how modern architectureÕs pursuit of a zero degree of representation and construction, its revolt against merely ornamental forms of historicism, its blank slates and utopic grids, closes the door on antiquity only to reopen it once again in the mode of an archeology of archaic structures. It is thus not by accident that in his 1923 Towards A New Architecture, Le Corbusier placed the lesson of Rome at the center of his plea for an architecture of engineers. The lesson of Pavia will take the argument one step further: namely, that there exists a distinctively avant-gardist antiquarianism that, instead of imitating the past, makes it new.