News from Asia - Pioneering knowledge of the early Asian Modern Movement through European specialized magazines

In the first half of 20th century, early Modern Movement and its core values travelled worldwide, from West to East and backwards, by means of articles and pictures published in architecture magazines showing fusions and conflicts during cultural communication. In the interwar period, some magazines in Europe specialized in spreading Modern Movement. A western-centric or euro-centric approach and, in some countries, the growing of nationalisms oriented editorial choices and limited a worldwide perception of Modern Movement, nevertheless some sporadic news on what was going on in Asia spread through the most advanced periodicals. The paper investigates the European knowledge of the Asia early Modern Movement in architecture and interior design mainly focusing on writings published on the Italian Casabella and the french L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, directed by the architects Giuseppe Pagano and André Bloc respectively. The two magazines, in fact, were those offering an international press review section: L’Architettura mondiale and Revue des Revues. Articles, captions and sidebars underlined, for both western and eastern architects working in Asia, the adherence to the western models or an authentic eastern approach able to integrate features of local architecture to modern design. In those magazines Japan was the most represented country and all architectural typologies were mentioned, from private to public, including religious buildings, but the debate western-modernity versus eastern-tradition mostly polarized on housing interior design. On one hand, journalists appreciated the courageous rebellion undertaken by Japan to forget its “folklore” and old architecture in order to enter modernity, on the other hand, the combination of the traditional Japanese style and the western one was admired and experimented even by European architects. Through the debate on Japanese modernity, the authors called into question the values of the western approach to Modern Movement, and asked themselves the crucial question: What is national and what is international?