ABSTRACT
The Italian Pavilion at the Paris International Exposition of 1937 presented a unique brand of Nationalism to an international audience by successfully merging international languages of modernism with traditional approaches and techniques through a spatial experience that was born of a unique synergy between architecture and art. A pavilion promoting unity and synergy is of particular interest in the socio-political context of late 1930s Europe where Nazi Germany was rearming, Fascist Italy had recently invaded Ethiopia, and Franco was working hard (with the support of both Germany and Italy) to supplant the Spanish Republic with a fascist regime of his own.2 Paris 1937 quickly went from being a celebration of peace to a forum for the expression of German and Russian belligerence and the glorication of Empire (the French Colonies on the Île des Cygnes), totalitarian rule (Germany, Russia, Italy) or resistance against it (Spain).3 The parade of commodities and consumerism as an aesthetic event had become an aestheticization of politics to fetishize the concept of nation.4
