(This excerpt takes neary three minutes to read.)

For Rava, colonial “adventures” required a special “attrezzatura” (equipment) adapted to itinerant life but also conveying the distinctive features of Italian modernity, namely elegant and functional design.¹¹

Therefore, “rational comfort” was as necessary as “the decorum which is indispensable to maintaining a complex […] hierarchy (the necessary basis of the colonial structure) and to maintaining, in the face of the natives, the privileges […] and prestige of the race of the dominating people,” as Rava wrote, echoing the aforementioned review of XX Battaglione Eritreo.¹²

For Rava, buttressing the [Fascist] occupation’s racial hierarchy required that those in charge of ordinary colonial administration and military repression availed themselves of furniture and design objects (carpets, textiles, pots, and cigarette cases) that conveyed their racial supremacy over the local population through their use of well-designed and stylish modernist objects. Even their temporary quarters should convey a cohesive, recognizably Italian identity.

[…]

When discussing colonial architecture in Libya, Rava stressed the ancient Roman roots of indigenous North African traditions to justify Italy’s occupation of Libya as a “return” to lands formerly “Roman” and therefore “Italian.” The same argument could not be extended to the invasion of Ethiopia, which had not been part of the Roman Empire (and was the only African country, other than Liberia, never to have been colonized by Europeans).

In the case of Ethiopia, [Fascist] architectural discourse instead argued for the need to design spaces that explicitly enforced racial hierarchies by separating Italians from Ethiopians, regulating and controlling relations between colonizers and colonized.²⁷

As Rava declared in the first Italian conference on Urbanism (1937), this differentiating approach to design was possible only when Italian architects actually spent time in the colonies: they needed to have a “colonial conscience,” a “colonial culture,” and an understanding that “colonial architecture means imperial affirmation.”²⁸

Colonial architecture in Ethiopia was tasked with “sustaining that complex and vast scale of hierarchies which is the basis of colonial life, and to preserve, in the face of the natives, the high and even ostensible privileges, and the prestige of race of the dominating people.”²⁹

Rava would reuse this exact wording in the catalogue for the “Mostra dell’Attrezzatura Coloniale,” because in his view these racial hierarchies needed to be inscribed in the permanent as in the transient lodgings of Italians in Africa, in villas as well as tent encampments.³⁰

Yet in addition to racial difference, Rava insisted that colonial architecture in Ethiopia should also enforce class differences. Rava defended an “art of luxury” that served “the higher classes of fascist Italy” and the “new aristocracy of intelligence” fostered by the régime.

Such “aristocracy” he considered an expression of the “highest level of life” reached in Mussolini’s Italy and a justification of its “empire on the world.”³¹ (Such élitist rhetoric contrasts with the democratic forms that his portable “attrezzatura” would adopt after World War II, but also reemerges in some of its uses, as I discuss in the last section of this article[.])

For Rava, it was important to underscore that the life of colonial officials was ruled by race as much as by class:

It is crucial, for architects who plan colonial buildings, whether public or private, to belong to “that” deprecated class called “gentlemanly,” or by others improperly, “bourgeois”: for the most resourceful architect will never be able to draw a good plan for a house of masters, in which one lives and hosts as a gentleman […] if one is not familiar with polite society.³²

[…]

For Rava, preexisting European camping gear and portable furniture—rather than African practices, tools, or techniques for crafting transportable items—could be easily adapted to itinerant (male) Italian life in the colonies. He believed that their quality and elegant design were a celebration of Italy’s imperialism and proof of Italian superiority vis-à-vis the colonized.

(Emphasis added.)