Two years ago, while traveling through northern Italy, I found myself unexpectedly drawn to the Fascist architecture that pervades Milan and Trieste. Much of the country’s public infrastructure had been built under Fascist rule, including many of its train stations, power plants and post offices. Positioned at the heart of several Italian cities, still-standing buildings possess a peculiar authority that I found difficult to resist. What struck me most, however, was not simply the survival of these structures in pristine condition. In Germany too, ministries and public institutions continue to occupy buildings inherited from the Nazi era; the difference was in how they were integrated into the present. In Berlin, such architecture often (though not always, one thinks of Tempelhofer Feld) feels densely tainted by history, overshadowed by an enduring sense of rupture, catastrophe, and guilt. In Italy, where Fascism lasted longer, wartime destruction was less severe, and the postwar narrative differed in its details from Germany’s, Fascist architectural legacy appears strangely continuous with everyday life. It is less questioned, less quarantined by historical explanation, and more thoroughly absorbed into the civic landscape.

Eventually, somewhat embarrassed by my fascination, I confessed what I took as a personal weakness to an Italian communist academic. She laughed immediately. “That,” she told me, “is every leftist’s guilty pleasure”. Her light-hearted response made me feel less uniquely compromised; not so much as though I had stumbled into a private political lapse as into a familiar, if rarely discussed, state of intellectual confusion: the unsettling experience of responding aesthetically to a built environment born out of destruction. One encounters a similar ambivalence in responses to colonial architecture, including the enduring fascination with Italian colonial modernism in Eritrea or German colonial romanticism in Qingdao, China.

The appeal is not difficult to identify. Totalitarian and colonial buildings often confront the viewer with overwhelming scale: vast plazas, towering facades, cavernous interiors clad in stone and marble. Their clean geometries, rigid symmetry, and monumental proportions project an intoxicating sense of order, permanence, and control. Fascist architecture, within which Italian colonial architecture must also be counted, was designed precisely to collapse the distinction between admiration and submission. It sought to make power appear natural, historical, and preordained. Standing beneath those immense colonnades and exaggerated volumes in northern Italy, I understood the sensation immediately.

Against Rehabilitation

My reaction was hardly unique. Architectural discourse has long sustained a similar ambivalence, one marked by a willingness to isolate aesthetic achievement from the conditions of its production and to admire the elegance, rigor, and discipline of these buildings, even while acknowledging the brutality of the regimes that conceived them. The attraction I felt was therefore not entirely personal, but cultivated and inherited, part of a broader fascination with authoritarian power translated into stone, reinforced concrete, and plaster. It is this cultural inheritance, and its slow seeping into the everyday language of urban appreciation, that explains the peculiar normalisation of totalitarian aesthetics within architectural education and popular culture alike: their gradual rehabilitation, not only as formal exercises in proportion, material, and scale, but as objects of detached visual attraction that train the eye to unsee what they were built to enforce. This is where Antifascist Architecture by Daniel Jonas Roche and Andrew Santa Lucia enters the picture.

The book begins with a question at once simple and destabilising: why has fascist architecture been so meticulously documented, theorised, published and enshrined into the canon, while its antifascist counterparts remain scattered, half-visible, resistant to classification? The asymmetry is astounding. Alongside illustrations by Lane Rick, the authors, one an architect and professor, the other a journalist, locate the origins of this imbalance in the remarkable speed with which Italian Fascist and German Nazi architects such as Giuseppe Terragni and Albert Speer were rehabilitated within postwar European cultural discourse. Their work was gradually reintroduced into a supposedly de-fascisised and de-nazified public forum as though it could be approached primarily through aesthetics and taste, while the political worlds that had sustained it were handily eclipsed. And even when these conditions were acknowledged, they were often carefully cordoned off from judgment.