The Hero of Doubt: Selected Writings by Ernesto Nathan Rogers Edited by 1851 alumna, Roberta Marcaccio
The Hero of Doubt: Selected Writings by Ernesto Nathan Rogers
Edited by Roberta Marcaccio
ISBN: 9780262049047 Pub date: January 21, 2025 Publisher: The MIT Press 384 pp., 7 x 9 in, 44 b&w illus.
The British-Italian architect, editor, proselytiser and educator Ernesto Nathan Rogers (1909-1969) made key contributions to expanding the appreciation of the modern movement in postwar Italy and beyond. Rogers shifted mainstream discourse, challenging the break from history espoused by his contemporaries, for whom the modern movement was a kind of epic phenomenon divorced from the past and exempt from criticism.
Rogers was well-known for his pivotal role within the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM), his collaborative practice with Milan-based BBPR and his parallel careers in teaching and writing. During his ten-year tenure of Casabella the journal became the principal record of architecture culture in Europe and beyond, and Rogers used it to broadcast his highly controversial ideas of continuità (historical continuity) and preesistenze ambientali (pre-existing conditions), which he saw as antidotes to the anonymity of a fast-spreading 'international style' and the uncritical embrace of technological progress.
Yet, despite these very public roles, and despite his powerful influence on more prominent figures who went on to shape postmodern discourse on either side of the Atlantic — such as Aldo Rossi, Robert Venturi and Alison and Peter Smithson, to name a few — Rogers remains relatively unrecognised in the historiography of twentieth-century architecture.
To remedy this oversight, 'The Hero of Doubt' makes a curated collection of Rogers's writings available to an English-speaking audience for the first time. Newly translated from Italian, edited and with an introduction written by Roberta Marcaccio and a critical essay by the eminent scholar Joan Ockman, the texts in this volume cover a period of 33 years. They span from Rogers's initial adherence to fascism and his subsequent struggle as a Jewish intellectual after the proclamation of the Racial Purity Laws, to his poignant post-war reflections on issues of urban reconstruction, his critique of the masses of standardised houses built in the UK, and his preoccupations with the education of the architect and, more broadly, her role within society.
Rogers's absence from the canon is partly due to his refusal to compose a systematic narrative of the modern movement, favouring instead the immediacy and informality of journal articles, lectures and epistolary exchanges. While such formats allowed him to reach a wider audience, in the long run, their fragmentary nature camouflaged his heroic effort to ‘humanise’ the modern movement and open it up for criticism, causing his oeuvre to be overlooked. This was very much the case after 1959, when the eminent British critic Reyner Banham, writing from the pages of the Architectural Review, dismissed Rogers as out of step with his time and the cultural revolution brought about by mechanisation and enthusiastically embraced by Brutalists, Metabolists and Neofuturists.
The debate continued at the Otterlo CIAM in 1959, where BBPR’s newly-built Torre Velasca — an eclectic structure which ‘culturally summarised’ Milan’s historical atmosphere — was attacked by Peter Smithson as a ‘formalistic exercise and a dangerous model for imitation’. Rogers defended the building saying that the ideas it expressed were indebted to the British-American poet, critic and publisher T S Eliot, for whom ‘the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but also of its presence’. But his Anglo-Saxon interrogator remained unconvinced.
Today, nearly 60 years after Rogers’s death, now that the dust has settled on the polemics that undermined his reputation towards the end of his many careers, 'The Hero of Doubt' seeks to celebrate this complex and controversial figure so that his voice, and his doubts, can reverberate and reach new audiences.
This project has been made possible by generous grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the Architectural Association, School of Architecture.