Upcoming Events
BUILDING ITALY:
The Italian Pavilion at L’Exposition Universelle d’Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne, Paris 1937
by Sasha Goldman, Northeastern University
Register HERE
This event is free, open to the public, and will be held online via Zoom.
Sasha Goldman is an Assistant Teaching Professor and Director of Supplemental Academic Services at Northeastern University. Her research interests vary from those related to her work in the student support space (graduate education, competencies, and credentialing), and her scholarship in her home discipline of art history (contemporary Italian art and exhibition histories). She is the Managing Editor of the Center for Italian Modern Art’s Italian Art Journal and is currently working on a book entitled PhD in Progress. She received her PhD in the History of Art and Architecture from Boston University.
The Italian Pavilion at the Exposition Universelle d’Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (Paris, 1937) serves as a revealing case study of Italian Fascism’s aesthetic and ideological contradictions. Intended to showcase Fascist Italy’s cultural and technological prowess, the pavilion instead highlighted internal fragmentation and international marginalization.
Drawing on promotional postcards, contemporary accounts, and architectural analysis, this paper examines how the pavilion’s design, blending Rationalist modernism with traditionalist Italianità, reflected Mussolini’s policy of aesthetic diversity while undermining the regime’s effort to define a cohesive Fascist style. France’s strategic placement of the Italian Pavilion—separated from major powers like Germany and the USSR—illustrates an attempt to distance Italy from rising totalitarian alliances. However, visual parallels between the Italian and German pavilions, reinforced by French photographic depictions, revealed shared ideological underpinnings and foreshadowed their growing alignment.
Situated within the broader context of Italy’s participation in earlier Parisian world’s fairs, the pavilion’s neoclassical emphasis underscored a persistent rejection of modernist trends in favor of promoting nostalgic Italian traditions. This presentation argues that the Italian Pavilion epitomized Fascist Italy’s struggle to balance its historical identity with its ambitions for modernity. Its muted reception, overshadowed by the ideological spectacle of Soviet and German contributions, reflects Italy’s diminishing influence and peripheral role in the international order. Ultimately, the pavilion encapsulates the broader dissonance within Italian Fascist cultural production, offering insight into its role in shaping Italy’s fraught position in pre-World War II Europe.
ISIE Committee
Lisa Schrenk is Professor of Architectural History at the University of Arizona. She received a B.A. from Macalester College, a Master’s Degree in Architectural History from the University of Virginia, and a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Texas at Austin. In 2006 and again in 2012 she received the Charles A. Dana I Award for excellence in teaching, research, and service Other professional achievements include her recent book The Oak Park Studio of Frank Lloyd Wright (University of Chicago Press, 2021) receiving a coveted star review from Publishers Weekly and her book Building a Century of Progress: The Architecture of Chicago’s 1933-34 World’s Fair (University of Minnesota Press, 2007) named to Choice Review’s List of Outstanding Academic Titles. She received a Fulbright-Hays award to study sustainably development in Brazil and a We the People grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for her research on the Oak Park studio. In 2020 she was named AIA Arizona Community Educator of the Year, in part for initiating and serving as faculty advisor for the University of Arizona’s Women in Architecture Society and for her work as a UA Faculty Fellow. Dr. Schrenk has served on numerous professional committees, including being elected to the Board of Directors for the Society of Architectural Historians and President of the Chicago Society of Architectural Historians. She is an expert member of ICOMOS's International Scientific Committee on the Interpretation and Presentation of Cultural Heritage Sites and serves on Forbes Magazine's Architecture Advisory Board and the Faculty and Staff Council of Semester at Sea. She has participated in several NEH and East-West Center enrichment programs on Asian culture and has lectured on American expositions in China. Her extensive world travel has included visits to sites of architectural significance in over 85 countries, including while a faculty member on two around-the-world Semester at Sea voyages.
Dr. Lisa D. Schrenk
Professor of Architectural History, The University of Arizona
Prior to joining the University of St Andrews, James taught within the Faculty of Humanities and Foreign Languages at Santa Fe College in Florida, USA and spent the 2016 academic year as a lecturer within the Faculty of Humanities at Manchester Community College in Connecticut, USA. He received a B.A. in History and English at West Virginia University before completing master’s degrees in Classics and History at Trinity College Dublin and the University of Cambridge, respectively. His research interests lie in the cultural, social, and diplomatic history of twentieth-century Europe and the United States, with a particular focus on the classically inflected architectural production of the interwar period and its relationship to the construction of national identity. He is especially interested in instances of creative or ideological transfer between states and the spaces or places in which this might have occurred. He also explores the extent to which various interpretations of cultural heritage came to influence the reimagined built environments of Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and the New Deal USA. Through the generous support of the St Leonard’s College International Scholarship, his PhD dissertation further developed these interests under the supervision of the Institute for Transnational and Spatial History. In exploring the ways architectural form and urban design were deployed as tools of diplomacy at the several international exhibitions held between 1933-42, this project recasts the historical role played by the international expositions while investigating potential links between the ambassadorial, domestic, and even imperial elements of state-sponsored design throughout the interwar period.
Dr. James Fortuna
Associate Lecturer, University of St Andrews
Constanza Robles S.
Ph.D. Candidate,
Boston University
Constanza is a Ph.D. Candidate in the History of Art and Architecture at Boston University. She received a B.A in Hispanic Literature and another in Aesthetics from Universidad Católica de Chile. She obtained a certificate in Cultural Management from the same university and an M.A. in Theory and History of Art from Universidad de Chile. Before moving to Boston with a Fulbright Scholarship, she served as Adjunct Professor at Universidad Católica, where she taught the history of modern art and cultural management. Her research focuses on Latin American art of the first half of the twentieth century, particularly on how the notions of Pan Americanism, Hispanism, and Latin Americanism are portrayed in world fairs. She is interested in how the built environment and visual culture of American pavilions articulated regional and hemispheric political, cultural, and economic alliances. She is currently writing her dissertation titled “Visualizing Alliances Through Art and Architecture: Pan Americanism, Hispanismo, and Latin Americanism in World Fairs, 1901-1929” Constanza has presented her work at the 109th CAA Annual Conference (2021), the Symposium on the History of Art Presented by The Frick Collection and The Institute of Fine Arts of New York University (2022), and ISIE’s Inaugural Symposium. She has been recently awarded a Terra Foundation Travel Grant to research the 1922 Rio de Janeiro Centennial of Independence Exposition and the Helen G. Allen Humanities Award by the Boston University Center for the Humanities. In the Spring of 2023, she will serve as a fellow at The Wolfsonian—Florida International University Museum.
Guido Cimadomo is Associate Professor in Architectural History and Composition at the Department of Art and Architecture, University of Malaga (Spain) where he teaches across history, theory and design subjects since 2010. Guido is Architect for the Politecnico di Milano (Italy) and PhD (Int. hons.) for University of Seville (Spain). He is Expert member of the ICOMOS’ scientific committee CIPA for the Documentation of Architectonic Heritage, UN-Habitat UNI focal point at the University of Malaga, and member of the Research Group HUM-696 Utopia. He investigates contemporary urban transformations, with special interest in bottom up processes, tourism pressures, borderland flows and world expositions; and the documentation and cataloguing of cultural heritage, with a special focus on vernacular architecture, as an expression of collective identity.
Dr. Guido Cimadomo
Associate Professor, University of Malaga (Spain)
Charles Pappas
Senior Writer for Exhibitor magazine
Charles Pappas has covered the exposition industry for Exhibitor magazine since 2002 and every world’s fair since 2010. His publications include Flying Cars, Zombie Dogs, and Robot Overlords, a probe of how world expos and trade fairs shaped history, and chapters in Expo 2020 Dubai: The Definitive Edition. Other books include One Giant Leap, a look at the inventions the space race brought us, and It’s a Bitter Little World, a revel in language of film noir. He was a consultant to Expo 2020 (and a regular feature of Expo 2020’s official podcast Inside Expo), speaker for the State Department in Dubai, and currently consults with the Expo 2027 effort in the US. His current research includes compiling information on buildings proposed but never constructed for world expos and examining Hollywood’s lost world’s fair of 1923.
César Corona
Assistant Director of Engagement at USC CPD, and CEO of ExpoMuseum.com
César Corona is Assistant Director of Engagement at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, and CEO of ExpoMuseum.com. He specializes in World Expos, public diplomacy, and governmental transparency. His research on transparency in World Expos received an award by the Mexican Federal Institute for Access to Public Information (IFAI) in 2006. Three years later, his thesis “Public Diplomacy in International Expositions: Mexico and Canada in Expo 2005 Aichi” received an award from the Center for Research on North America (CISAN) of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). He holds a B.A. in International Relations from UNAM and an MPD in Public Diplomacy from the University of Southern California (USC), which he pursued as a Fulbright-Garcia Robles, CONACYT, and Rafael Osuna scholar. While at USC, he was a research intern at CPD under the supervision of Jay Wang, and a research assistant of CPD Faculty Fellow Pamela Starr in the “US-Mexico Network @ USC” in the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. Under a Fulbright-Garcia Robles Public Policy grant, César served as Public Diplomacy Special Advisor for the Office of Strategic Partnerships of the City of Los Angeles. Corona has also interned at the Direction General of Protocol of the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Consulate of Mexico in Los Angeles, and the Bureau International des Expositions (BIE). César has worked for USAID at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico, and in different capacities at Expo 1998 Lisbon, Expo 2000 Hannover, Expo 2010 Shanghai, Expo 2012 Yeosu, Expo 2015 Milan, and Expo 2020 Dubai. He has taught international relations, international communication, new media, and marketing courses at UNAM and the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising (FIDM). He recently authored the “First 100 Days Memo: U.S.-Mexico Policy Recommendations for the Biden Administration,” as a Mexico Initiative Fellow of the Pacific Council on International Policy.
Sarah J. Moore is Professor of American Art History at the University of Arizona. Questions regarding the shifting terrain of identities and geographies animate her work as a scholar and teacher of art in the United States. Her research areas intersect with the global interdisciplinary arena of world’s fair studies, considering in particular pre-World War I fairs in the United States, landscape studies, and ecocriticism in visual culture. Recent publications include: “The Panama Canal as a Hybrid Zone: A Case Study,” in Ecocriticism and the Anthropocene in Nineteenth-Century Art and Visual Culture (Routledge, 2020); “The Great American Desert is No More,” in Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition of 1898-99 (U Nebraska Press, 2018); and ‘Mosquitoes, Malaria, and Cold Butter: Discourses of Health and Progress in the Panama Canal Zone, 1904-1915,” Panorama ( Fall 2017). She was 21/22 Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor at Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan.
Dr. Sarah J. Moore
Professor of American Art History, University of Arizona
Past Committee Members
Flavia Marcello
Co Founding Member
Joseph Simil