Design for a New Century: FIAT, International Expositions, and the Stile Liberty
Peter Clericuzio, Syracuse University
12:30pm | Thursday, April 10, 2025
Stronach Center, 8th floor Schermerhorn Hall | Refreshments Provided
The key moment of modernism in Italy, long cited as coinciding with the birth of Futurism in 1909, deserves to be reconsidered. A better date would be a decade earlier, with the rise of the country’s auto industry and its entwinement with the Stile Liberty, the Italian strand of Art Nouveau. This phenomenon was made possible by Art Nouveau's favored status at turn-of-the century international expositions, including the Turin Exposition of Modern Decorative Art in 1902. The Liberty style was quickly adopted as a kind of corporate emblem by FIAT (later Fiat), which employed the style in all aspects of its design over the next two decades, from its graphics in advertising to its exposition stands to its factories and the new garages that it began building around the country. Fiat's use of the Stile Liberty spurred its use by executives throughout the automotive industry as well as those in agriculture, shipping, textiles, utilities, and of course railways, who employed it at nearly all Italian expositions preceding World War I and even in their own residences. The adoption of the Liberty style on such a scale for critical sectors of the Italian economy thus ensured its survival as an emblem of national modernity until the advent of Fascism in the 1920s.
Peter Clericuzio teaches architectural history in the School of Architecture at Syracuse University in upstate New York, where his research has traditionally focused on architecture in Francophone countries and in North America, with an emphasis on the relationship between the built environment and design, cultural geography, and collective and historical memory. He is the author of Building a Regional Modernism: Art Nouveau Architecture in Nancy, 1898–1920, currently in press with McGill-Queens University Press in Montreal, and the co-author (with Jon Mogul) of Myth and Machine: Art and Aviation During the First World War (Miami Beach: The Wolfsonian–FIU, 2014). He is currently finishing the manuscript for a second monograph, tentatively titled A Sustainable Modernism? Le Corbusier and the French Reconstruction, 1945–52, to be published by Lund Humphries. The present project is a part of new research Peter is conducting in the spring of 2025 as a Weinberg Fellow in Architectural History and Preservation at Columbia's Italian Academy for Advanced Studies.
NB: because entrance to campus currently requires a Columbia ID, please reach out to Matthew Lopez ([email protected]) by Monday, April 7 if you require guest access. Due to campus restrictions we are unable to honor last-minute requests.
