In November 1936, Antonio Muñoz published an interview with Le Corbusier in L’Urbe: Rivista Romana, a monthly periodical on the city of Rome that Muñoz himself directed. Then head of the Fascist Roman government’s Department of Antiquities and Fine Arts, Muñoz played a critical role in the transformation of Rome under the regime, spearheading the sventramenti, or demolitions, that gutted the city.

Titled “Le Corbusier Talks about Roman Urban Planning,” the interview is peppered with drawings that render visible Rome during its Fascist-era overhaul alongside Le Corbusier’s own sketches of Ancient Roman ruins. The title image of the interview, however, presumably depicts Le Corbusier himself and, in the process, situates him in this volatile urban landscape (Figure 1).[1] We see the caricatured architect fervently listening to his Roman guide, whose outstretched arm signals a city under demolition. We see barricaded work zones preventing passersby from accessing the sliced open historic urban fabric. And we see silhouetted figures piling remnants of buildings onto trucks and into wagons. It is a scene of flux adjacent to the densely stacked structures that provide a backdrop for our protagonist, their fate foreshadowed by the surrounding housing in the process of being razed to isolate the nearby Mausoleum of Augustus. We thus return to Le Corbusier, who stands with clutched hands and wide eyes gazing at a carved-up Rome.

Figure 1. Pio Pullini, *Demolitions at the Mausoleum of Augustus* (*Demolizioni all’Augusteo*), ca.1936, ink on paper, GS 6848, Archivio Fotografico, Museo di Roma, Rome. © Roma Capitale, Sovrintendenza Capitolina ai Beni Culturali. This drawing served as the title image of Antonio Muñoz, “Le Corbusier parla di urbanistica romana,” *L’Urbe: Rivista romana* 1, no. 2 (November 1936), 28.

Was this the same gaze with which he stared at Algiers?

It might seem odd to ask this question, but Le Corbusier’s vision for Rome, which he mentions in passing to Muñoz during the interview, bears a striking resemblance to his Plan Obus (1930) for the French colonial city.

Architectural historians often avoid dealing with form for fear of applying an outdated mode of analysis, but form tells us something.

While lamenting the fact that Rome’s seven hills no longer stand out due to the elevation of the ground, Muñoz asks Le Corbusier how an “interesting urban motif could be drawn from those heights.”[2] “I will answer immediately,” Le Corbusier responds, “the hills could be connected with large bridges, like enormous walkways, with the antiquities left below.”[3] Surprisingly, neither Le Corbusier nor Muñoz linger on this vision. Muñoz does not even ask for elaboration; he simply poses the next question.

But I would like to linger here.

What does it mean to envision modern Rome as a sequence of elevated walkways extending from one hilltop to the next? What does it mean to envision modern Rome as divorced from its historic urban fabric? And what does it mean to envision modern Rome as operating from above, with Ancient Rome frozen below? Wasn’t this the same vision that Le Corbusier had for Algiers?

Indeed, Le Corbusier’s fleeting solution for Rome is steeped in the colonialist logic of his unrealized Plan Obus for the colonial capital (Figure 2). Scholars tend to draw parallels between the architect’s Plan Voisin for Paris and the Fascist regime’s redesign of Rome—both razing the historic urban fabric and leaving only select monuments, like the Eiffel Tower or the Colosseum—but the facility with which Le Corbusier views Algiers and Rome with the same colonialist and formalist logic is significant. In turn, we find distinct colonialist parallels with the Fascist regime’s visions for the Italian capital.

Figure 2. Le Corbusier, Plan Obus, Algiers, Algeria (*Urbanisme*, *projets A,B,C,H*, *Alger*), 1930. © F.L.C. / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2025. Photograph by Lucien Hervé. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2002.R.41). © J. Paul Getty Trust.

Like his vision for Rome, Le Corbusier’s Obus plan vertically splits Algiers in two: a European city operates from above and the Indigenous city (ville indigene) exists below. The dynamism of the modern European city is articulated by curving housing blocks and administrative towers that connect to one another by a large bridge, like an enormous walkway. As the architect explains: “This artery will be separated entirely from the [I]ndigenous town, by means of a level difference.”[4] In the process, this artery and its connected megacomplexes, as the rendering details, cast shadows on the Indigenous city below. In verticalizing the so-called cordon sanitaire, a “hygienic” greenbelt used to divide urban areas, Le Corbusier segregates the cities both physically and metaphorically, with, as Zeynep Çelik offers, the “dominating above and the dominated below.”[5]

This ideology of hierarchy and supremacy—concretized by the shadowed casbah—continues the logic that underscored Hubert Lyautey’s colonial urban policies as governor general of Morocco (1912-25). Drawing on Napoleon III’s nineteenth-century policies for Algiers, Lyautey advocated for such segregation through the guise of the competing pressures of preservation and modernity: to conserve and even “rescue,” to use Lyautey’s words, the medinas from the modern European cities.[6] These principles—already realized by Henri Prost in Rabat and Casablanca and formalized during the 1931 International Congress on Urbanism in the Colonies—drove the planning of French colonial cities to preserve North African medinas as picturesque precolonial monuments to a timeless, unchanging Arab-Muslim culture. Here, colonizers deployed historic preservation to appeal to and sympathize with indigenous North Africans: segregation as “respect,” to follow the colonialist logic—a “respect” that resulted in economic benefits for the French by way of tourism.[7]

It might seem more obvious to swing back to Rome via the branch of tourism, but I’d rather hover, for a moment, on the notion of preservation and on the implication of timelessness, on the modernist idea that historic urban fabric is or should be frozen in time, or the implication that historic urban fabric can never be modern or modernized. To do so, I will return to our interview:

“Rome,” Le Corbusier explains to Muñoz, “is crushed by the weight of its past.” As he continues:

Now the past, I say, commands you to create the new. Your city is not, however, destined to be a modern city as I intend; for its historical value it occupies a special situation… No, I prefer the ancient monuments how they were before, isolated from modern life; the things of the past are part pilgrimage, object of study, of devotion, of respect, of critical examination. These functions require calm, solitude; they demand a certain time for reflection; placed next to modern life they suffocate; they need to be liberated.[8]

Le Corbusier thus wanted to preserve Rome’s historic urban fabric just as he wanted to preserve the casbah—on strikingly similar terms and with strikingly similar solutions. For Le Corbusier, Algiers’ casbah was also not destined to be “modern,” and he similarly deemed it as special. He likewise believed that the Indigenous city should be isolated from the European city, which is to say, from “modern life.” And like Rome, Le Corbusier celebrated the casbah for its cosmopolitanism and record of history and change, as Çelik has recognized, implying that its isolation likewise enabled its critical examination.

This tie becomes even more evident if we consider Le Corbusier’s previous writing on Rome, an excerpt with which Muñoz starts this very interview: “Rome is a picturesque landscape. The light is so beautiful it ratifies everything. Rome is a bazaar where everything is sold. [...] In Rome, ugliness is legion.”[9] In first describing Rome as a “picturesque landscape,” Le Corbusier romanticizes the city’s historic urban fabric. More critically, in using the metaphor of Rome as a “bazaar”—a term that references North African and Middle Eastern marketplaces specifically—he frames the city with the Orientalizing language and imagery popularized in Orientalist literature and travel accounts, his own included. He in turn criticizes Rome for its abundant “ugliness,” which he explains is due to the ancient city’s crowdedness, its papal-era pompousness, and for being “too piled up” in general.[10] Yet he then praises the boldness, unity, and simplicity of its ancient monuments—the antiquities he wishes to remain preserved in their own lower city. In short, his paradoxical descriptions of Rome recall his descriptions of Algiers, as he renders both cities as idealized sites of extreme contrast.

As he continues, in conversation with Muñoz:

In matters of urbanism, it is fantasy to reconnect to the past; modern civilization is the civilization of the machine; clinging to a stifling past is like being a tourist in dead countries. The mechanized civilization is made of gestures, of new modes, it is not a continuation of that past. Continuity can only exist in the alternation of different forms.[11]

Le Corbusier concludes by restating a previously posed question: “You ask me if it wouldn’t be better to leave the old Rome intact and build the new one separately, in complete freedom?”[12] “Yes,” he responds, and goes on to discuss his (rejected) proposal for the development of Rome’s periphery: a towers-in-the-park project of high-rise buildings that enabled views of the surrounding hills.[13] From this conversation we arrive at his “urban motif” for the city center: connecting Rome’s famous seven hills by elevated walkways, leaving the ancient city below.

“Architectural historians often avoid dealing with form for fear of applying an outdated mode of analysis, but form tells us something.”

Le Corbusier thus applies the same logic to Rome that he has applied to Algiers. In both cities, he does not believe it is possible for modern interventions to engage with their historic urban fabrics. Instead, he advocates for their isolation. This practice of preservation as isolation in turn promoted tourism—a practice key to both French colonial cities and Fascist Italy in their promotion of nationalism and colonialism, not to mention the resultant economic benefits. The logic of Le Corbusier’s respective visions for Algiers and Rome, then, is equally colonialist. Moreover, it aligns with the logic that already undergirded the Fascist regime’s vision for Rome.

Indeed, Fascist-era debates over Rome’s risanamento (reclamation or renovation) can be easily interpreted on colonialist terms, as the regime was in the process of self-colonizing Italy, as Mia Fuller has pointed out, and above all Rome as the capital city. For the Fascist regime, Rome’s crowded historic urban fabric threatened the trifecta of hygiene, aesthetics, and morality. The casbah of Algiers was criticized by the French colonial administration on the same terms, as it lacked “material and moral hygiene.”[14] Moreover, Benito Mussolini derided the to-be-demolished housing of Rome’s city center, particularly along the slopes of the Capitoline Hill, as giving the area an “African appearance.”[15] Simultaneously, the regime denigrated the inhabitants of such working-class housing as having a “southern character”—after all, “Africa begins at Rome,” as the racializing early twentieth-century slogan goes.[16]

Now, I am not claiming that Le Corbusier was well-versed in the socio-spatial, racial, and geopolitical debates about the regime’s redesign of Rome that extended across the offices of the city’s Fascist government (or Governatorato), but I draw a contextual parallel here as a means to articulate how comfortably these visions and logics of purification—both racial and architectural—align. This parallel provides us with yet another example of the deep entanglement of colonialism and modernity, and the recognition of how colonialist logics were applied to the projects of metropoles—particularly Fascist ones. “Fascism,” as Aimé Césaire reminds us, “is colonialism turned inwards.”

Interestingly, Algiers comes up later in the interview, but no connection is made back to Le Corbusier’s vision for Rome. Instead, Muñoz (erroneously) connects the Plan Obus to the projects submitted for the competition to design Rome’s Palazzo del Littorio, the National Fascist Party headquarters. Muñoz turns to Algiers when he recalls an idea that Le Corbusier developed in Urbanisme, published some ten years prior: “the man walks straight…the donkey zigzags.” Reflecting on this aphorism, Muñoz asks the architect why the streets undulate in his master plan for Algiers. Le Corbusier responds: “Because I had to, and wanted to, adapt to the form of the location; to the undulating lines of the cliffs along the sea.”[17] Muñoz takes Le Corbusier’s response as an opportunity to criticize young Italian architects: “And to think that here many good boys (bravi ragazzi) have fallen in love with those S-shaped plans without knowing the reason, and wanted to adopt them for the Palazzo del Littorio on the Via dell’Impero, where there is neither sea nor cliffs.”[18]

The first competition for the Palazzo del Littorio (1934) was geared toward the younger cohort of Fascist architects, as scholars have noted—the bravi ragazzi Muñoz references. Sponsored by the National Fascist Party, Rome’s Governatorato, and the Accademia d’Italia, the competition called for the creation of a palazzo that expressed the grandeur and power of Fascism in order to both renew nationalism and continue the Roman tradition. Above all, as the competition announcement details, the building was to express the longevity and universality of Mussolini’s era.[19] The headquarters was to house the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution (Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista) in addition to National Fascist Party offices, including the press and propaganda office, archives, and offices for Fascist youth and university groups. Also required was an adjacent memorial dedicated to fallen Fascists, the Sacrario dei Caduti Fascisti, which would serve additional religious functions such as the celebration of mass.[20] The Palazzo del Littorio—situated along the newly created Via dell’Impero (or Avenue of the Empire, today’s Via dei Fori Imperiali)—was thus envisioned to hold a primacy of place in terms of both function and form, serving as a last monumental gasp before the Colosseum itself.

Architettura, the journal of the National Fascist Syndicate of Architects (Sindacato Nazionale Fascista Architetti), published a special issue on the competition in 1934. Of the 43 submissions featured in the issue (out of over 100 total competition entries), about a quarter of the published projects involve exaggerated curves that, for Muñoz, evoked the Obus project. Of these so-called S-shaped plans, the first stage competition entry by Mario Ridolfi in collaboration with Vittorio Cafiero, Ernesto La Padula, and Ettore Rossi stands out (Figure 3). Running parallel to the Via dell’Impero, the Ridolfi group inserts a sinuous slab that slinks its way toward the Colosseum, contrasting the aggressive diagonal cut of the adjacent avenue. While Muñoz connects this dynamic curve to Le Corbusier’s undulating structures that echo the Algerian coastline, these young architects were not looking to Le Corbusier, or at least not to Algiers, but rather to Rome itself.

Figure 3. Mario Ridolfi with Vittorio Cafiero, Ernesto La Padula and Ettore Rossi. First stage competition entry for the Palazzo del Littorio and the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution in Rome, in Via dell’Impero (*Concorso di primo grado per il Palazzo del Littorio e della Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista a Roma, in via dell’Impero*), 1934. View of the project model toward the Colosseum, photographic reproduction, 23.8 x 18 cm. © Rome, Accademia Nazionale di San Luca. Fondo Ridolfi-Frankl-Malagricci, www.fondoridolfi.org.

Indeed, the architects make this local reference clear in their project summary (Figure 4). The summary broadly addresses the designers’ desire to create a project that was modern, varied, and classical in its form. To achieve this result, they aimed to produce a “universal work” that reflected “fervid contemporary activity” while adhering to the fundamentals of beauty, which they define as: “simplicity, unity of mass, [and] purity of line unfolding along an axis of symmetry.”[21] The text frames comparative visuals that juxtapose representations of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Saint Peter’s Square with a plan and project model of the competition entry. While the text does not address the visuals, the images speak for themselves: the renderings of the Baroque project each emphasize a single “arm” of Bernini’s colonnade, going so far as slicing Piranesi’s engraving of Saint Peter’s Square in half and pairing it with a similarly oriented photograph of the competition model. Centered on the page, this decisive pairing reveals Bernini’s colonnade as the inspiration for the project’s S-shaped form. The competition entry, as the visuals argue, echoes one arm of the colonnade, which likewise frames the surrounding urban fabric, making spatial distinctions between the sacred and the profane. In the Fascist project, the sacred area is that of the Sacrario, which the palazzo embraces like Bernini’s colonnade embraces the Vatican Obelisk.

Figure 4. Mario Ridolfi with Vittorio Cafiero, Ernesto La Padula and Ettore Rossi. First stage competition entry for the Palazzo del Littorio and the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution in Rome, in Via dell’Impero (*Concorso di primo grado per il Palazzo del Littorio e della Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista a Roma, in via dell’Impero*), 1934. Project summary (*Relazione sommaria*), photographic reproduction, 17.3 x 12.2 cm. © Rome, Accademia Nazionale di San Luca. Fondo Ridolfi-Frankl-Malagricci, www.fondoridolfi.org.

Interestingly, this reference was not included in the heavily illustrated five-page spread of the competition entry in Architettura. But, as the (unpublished) project summary reveals, Ridolfi et al. were drawing on Rome’s Baroque past to express a modern yet universal vision for this most critical of projects for the regime. Thus, Ridolfi’s S-shaped plan found its origins not in the sea or cliffs that shape Algiers, nor in the work of Le Corbusier, but in Rome and Bernini. The project makes Bernini’s piazza modern (and Fascist): instead of arms bringing Catholics into the Church, the sinuous bend of the Palazzo del Littorio embraces Fascist martyrs, pulling Fascists into the revolution. In broadening the view of the Colosseum, the project unites the regime with Ancient Roman imperialism by using the spatial logic of Baroque-era imperialism. So perhaps Muñoz is not wrong in making a connection to Le Corbusier’s Plan Obus: the colonialist logic embedded in that plan is expressed in the competition project; it just derives from an earlier precedent.

The interview abruptly ends after the brief exchange about the inspiration for the S-shaped plans, and Muñoz concludes the article by narrating his return to the ongoing conference that brought Le Corbusier to Rome—the Accademia d’Italia’s sixth Volta Congress. L’Urbe was not finished with the interview, however.

A short article at the end of the journal’s April 1937 issue addressed the Italian response to the interview, offering insight into Italy’s architectural climate and, by extension, the geopolitics of the moment. As noted in the reflection piece, L’Urbe received copious letters from both admirers and adversaries of Le Corbusier following the interview. Neither party was pleased. Admirers believed that Le Corbusier was not exalted enough in the article, whereas adversaries lamented that he was given too much importance.[22] In fact, the editors of Architettura contended that asking foreigners for their opinions on Italian topics had “gone out of fashion.”[23] And indeed it had: By 1935, the League of Nations had sanctioned Italy for war crimes following its invasion of Ethiopia, and the country was practicing an economic policy of autarchy. Intensified by the sanctions, this policy required the utilization of materials produced within Italy and its colonies, restricting the use of products like steel and reinforced concrete, resulting, as Brian McLaren has examined, in an embrace of traditional, which is to say, Italian construction methods. Dismissing Le Corbusier’s claims on the basis of his foreignness reflects the simultaneous cultural autarchy and increasingly xenophobic trajectory of the period—a trajectory fomented by economic necessity and perpetuated by increasingly racialized Fascist ideology, culminating in the promulgation of the Italian Racial Laws in the fall of 1938.

Le Corbusier’s own response to the interview, directed at Muñoz and quoted in the article, is likewise telling: “Your article is well written; it is not the work of a man absolutely convinced of the necessities of modern architecture, but that is your business, and I am careful not to intervene on the subject.”[24]

Acknowledgements

The research for this article was supported by the Syracuse University School of Architecture. I would like to extend my gratitude to the archivists and staff at Rome’s Accademia Nazionale di San Luca and Museo di Roma-Palazzo Braschi. Special thanks to Erin McKellar.

Citation

Anna Mascorella, “Rethinking Le Corbusier’s Vision for Rome: On Colonialism, Modernity, and Fascism,” PLATFORM, October 27, 2025.

Notes

[1] Pio Pullini, an artist and illustrator on the editorial staff of L’Urbe, often repeated characters from his watercolors depicting quotidian scenes of contemporary Roman life in his cartoons for the journal. Angela Maria D’Amelio has noted that the figures represented in this cartoon (Figure 1) were the same as those in one of his paintings created in the same year, which pairs two figures wearing similar clothes and striking similar poses directly in front of the Mausoleum of Augustus. It seems that for this illustration, however, Pullini has altered the features of the character on the left to recall those of Le Corbusier, including making the figure slimmer and changing his hair and jawline. Nevertheless, we are left with some inconsistencies: Le Corbusier did not sport such a moustache, for instance. The implication of the image, however, placed as it was directly above the article’s title, is that the architect is depicted. See Angela Maria D’Amelio, “L’attività artistica romana di Pio Pullini,” in Pio Pullini e Roma: Venticinque anni di storia illustrata 1920-1945, eds. Maria Elisa Tittoni, Simonetta Tozzi, Angela Maria D’Amelio (Rome: Gangemi Editore, 2010), 18. The watercolor in question, L’Augusteo (1936), is in the collection of the Museo di Roma: see Pio Pullini e Roma, plate 23.

[2] Antonio Muñoz, “Le Corbusier parla di urbanistica romana,” L’Urbe: Rivista romana 1, no. 2 (November 1936), 35. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.

[3] Le Corbusier, quoted in Muñoz, “Le Corbusier parla di urbanistica romana,” 35.

[4] Le Corbusier, quoted and translated in Zeynep Çelik, “Le Corbusier, Orientalism, Colonialism,” Assemblage, no. 17 (April 1992), 69.

[5] Çelik, “Le Corbusier, Orientalism, Colonialism,” 69.

[6] Zeynep Çelik, Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations: Algiers under French Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 39-40.

[7] Çelik, Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations, 39-40.

[8] Le Corbusier, quoted in Muñoz, “Le Corbusier parla di urbanistica romana,” 32.

[9] Le Corbusier, quoted in Muñoz, “Le Corbusier parla di urbanistica romana,” 29.

[10] Le Corbusier, quoted in Muñoz, “Le Corbusier parla di urbanistica romana,” 29.

[11] Le Corbusier, quoted in Muñoz, “Le Corbusier parla di urbanistica romana,” 32-33.

[12] Le Corbusier, quoted in Muñoz, “Le Corbusier parla di urbanistica romana,” 34.

[13] Le Corbusier, quoted in Muñoz, “Le Corbusier parla di urbanistica romana,”34-35.

[14] Joseph Sintes, “Le Quartier de la Marine et la Casbah,” Les Travaux nord-africains, 31 December 1932, quoted and translated in Çelik, “Le Corbusier, Orientalism, Colonialism,” 71.

[15] Letter from Benito Mussolini to Roman governor Francesco Boncompagni Ludovisi, 1 February 1932, busta 839, fascicolo 500.019-1, Segreteria Particolare del Duce, Carteggio Ordinario, Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Rome.

[16] On Romans’ “southern character” see Joshua Arthurs, “Roma Sparita: Local Identity and Fascist Modernity at the Museo di Roma,” Città & Storia 3, no. 1-2 (2008), 193.

[17] Le Corbusier, quoted in Muñoz, “Le Corbusier parla di urbanistica romana,” 37.

[18] Muñoz, “Le Corbusier parla di urbanistica romana,” 37.

[19] “Bando del concorso,” Architettura: Rivista del sindacato nazionale fascista architetti 13, Special Issue: “Concorso per il Palazzo del Littorio” (1934), 4.

[20] “Norme particolari del concorso,” Architettura: Rivista del sindacato nazionale fascista architetti 13, Special Issue: “Concorso per il Palazzo del Littorio” (1934), 7.

[21] Mario Ridolfi, Vittorio Cafiero, Ernesto La Padula and Ettore Rossi, “Relazione sommaria,” Concorso di primo grado per il Palazzo del Littorio e della Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista a Roma, in via dell’Impero, 1934, CD40.01f, Fondo Ridolfi-Frankl-Malagricci, Accademia Nazionale di San Luca, Rome.

[22] Antonio Muñoz, “La nostra intervista con Le Corbusier,” L’Urbe: Rivista romana 2, no. 4 (April 1937), 47-48.

[23] Antonio Muñoz, “Con Paul Valéry a Santa Sabina e sulla via Appia,” L’Urbe: Rivista romana 2, no. 4 (April 1937), 35 n. 1. As this citation reveals, the response to the interview also found its way into the footnote of another article in the same issue. Muñoz goes on, in the footnote, to point out the irony of the editors’ statement, given the frequent interviews with “illustrious foreigners” in Italian periodicals at the time.

[24] Le Corbusier, quoted in Muñoz, “La nostra intervista con Le Corbusier,” 48.