| Abstrakt: |
From 1898 until 1941, the domestic architecture of Asmara reflected the indeterminacy of the Italian colonial, and subsequently Fascist state. Modern architecture in Asmara is most intriguing when it intersects with autochthonous forms that punctuate certain spaces and buildings. The deployment of these elements is equated to the long-standing visual and architectonic mastery of foreign lands and cultures. Architectural historians have offered very little in the way of visual or textual description of the interiors of Italian colonial or Fascist buildings except to note their stolidity and recapitulation of modernist architectural principles. By examining the definition of unseen private spaces in the colonial setting, I attempt to explicate the forging of a colonial modernity on an urban scale. The first half of this essay approaches the development of the colonial interior from a literary and philosophical perspective; in the second half of the paper, I trace the presence of Italian, and more frequently after 1930, Eritrean women among the colonial and Fascist interiors of Asmara. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
