The Architecture of Tourism in Italian Libya: The Creation of a Mediterranean Identity

Abstract

In a December 1937 article entitled “Visione Mediterranea della mia architettura,” architect Florestano Di Fausto speaks of his approach to an architecture for Italy’s Mediterranean colonies—an architecture which he asserts had always been, and should continue to be, based upon a careful reading of the local architecture. In an impassioned discussion of his sizable body of work constructed in the Aegean islands of Rhodes and Kos, as well as Libya, he emphasizes the deliberate process of design by which he developed a reciprocal relationship between these projects and their historical and environmental contexts. Underscoring the organicism of this relationship, Di Fausto asserted that in carrying out these projects: “I did not place one stone without filling myself with the spirit of the place.”¹ However, this contextual approach was not deployed at the expense of the modernity of his buildings, which he argues were informed by “the fundamental character of clarity and structural organicity, of sobriety and simplicity of form, of perfect adherence to function.”² Ultimately, Di Fausto asserts that his projects were a dialectical mediation of imitation and innovation, arguing that a contemporary architecture could be grounded in its physical context and related to a set of building traditions without losing its sense of modernity. Although this theoretical approach applied to much of his work in Libya, it was particularly pertinent to his tourist projects, which balanced the need to reflect the local culture with the desire for a metropolitan level of comfort.