e.u.r. :: ideal city for politics

EUR stands for "Esposizione Universale Roma" or the Rome Universal Exhibition, and was built in the 1930s under Mussolini, in the Italian rationalist style. Here it is a pared down revival of classical architecture, fascist in that the planning is rectilinear and axial as was classical roman town planning, but scaled for the automobile. It is close to the aesthetic architect Albert Speer was championing in Nazi Berlin, the Olympic Stadium there a realized example. Pictures can not do justice to the dwarfing effect on the human in this scale of architecture.

EUR is architecturally ordered in plan, but at street level exhibits disorder and unnavigability. The street belongs to the car. Cars clutter the streets, parked in medians and along each block. Sidewalks end suddenly in a sea of cars, and the pedestrian is left to find his own way through, sometimes walking on the street itself in order to find where the sidewalk picks up again. 

Blocks are large, and buildings do not engage the street. The facades are set back from the street, creating an unactivated strip, and resulting in long, uninterrupted stretches of fencing. There are few people on the streets at all. 

The most famous building of the lot, the Palazzo della Civilta Italiana or the "Square Colosseum" has a traffic barrier and fence around it. It is not possible to walk up to the building, or even to fully circumnavigate it. The back feels like the front, and the front drops off in a wealth of steps wide enough for the million man march, to another cross street and then the freeway.

In the shallowest of analyses, EUR is a corporate office park pretending to be a city (it does have a residential component). Upon further reflection however, EUR provides a glimpse of what european cities might have looked and felt like if the other side had won WWII. Would an entire city in this style change who we are as people?