seier+seier

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one of the stranger aspects of the german bunkers of the second world war is the fact that they derived their formal language from the modernity nazism was meant to protect against. dynamic shapes, corner windows, exposed concrete, it’s german expressionism the way erich mendelsohn dreamt it.

in LTI, the linguist victor klemperer, described how the nazis were inspired by the expressionist movement in their choice of words and in typography all the while persecuting its members for their entartete kunst. former expressionists either entered the party top or the camps, he said.

erich mendelsohn, who was jewish and thus clearly intended for the latter, made it out of the country in 1933 and worked in england and palestine before settling in the U.S.

among his first american commisions was advising the U.S. army on how to build a segment of a german city. known as “german village”, this area in utah was used to perfect allied bombings, including fire bombing. I believe it is also known as payback.

victor klemperer survived the war in germany and was one of the few jews to do so. his diaries describe how using the allied bombings of dresden as a cover, he removed his yellow star, faked his documents, and left town as a refugee.

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the schwerbelastungskörper shares characteristics with one of the nazi era’s few contributions to modern architecture, the bunker.

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in berlin, all that is left from speer’s hand is a public toilet, some lamp posts, and a really big lump of concrete. not only because his buildings were lost to allied bombs, but rather because he never built all that much except models and mock-ups.

nazi talent was for destruction, not creation.

speer’s biggest oeuvre in berlin: not really a building. the schwerbelastungskörper is basically a huge cylindrical piece of concrete, built to test if the soft berlin ground could support the monumental daydreams of hitler and his architect. it couldn’t, by the way, but history soon made that discovery redundant.

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albert speer, deutsches stadion 1937-1942.

as has often been stated speer’s talent was in organising rather than designing. the full scale mock-up of a section of the deutsches stadion in nürnberg is a good example. hitler’s government never had the money to realize their architectural plans, and speer managed to construct a 1:1 model of a section of the stadion by placing it on a hillside, thus saving the enormous substructure.

photo from “albert speer, architecture 1932-1942”

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a recurring question has to be, can totalitarian architecture be good architecture - in any sense of the word? and I find it strangely reassuring that nazi architecture was so bad.

here is albert speer’s reichs marschall amt, 1939-1942. speer seems to marry roman vaulting with the romanesque to make it more oppressive. the lightness which was so important to the romans is entirely lost in speer’s dark theatre.

the nazis were not great builders, even if that was the image they wished to convey. the stalinists by contrast were prodigious builders, but their wedding cake aesthetics convince few. of course, early soviet architecture was an exception, great things happened on the way to total oppression, no doubt stemming from the socialist sympathies of the avantgarde, but total oppression was always the goal.

model photo from “albert speer, architecture 1932-1942”

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vera mukhina’s 1937 sculpture from iofan’s paris pavilion was recently restored, allowing us a closer look and a better feeling for the totalitarian sense of scale.

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iofan and speer’s buildings in paris were torn down when the 1937 world exhibition ended, but vera mukhina’s giant sculpture survived in moscow. it remains totalitarian kitsch but the effect of the stainless steel is as powerful as ever.

another brilliant photo by igor palmin.

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the cathedral was reconstructed following the fall of the soviet union.

the photo is from igor palmin’s flickr photos from russia and the soviet union. not to be missed.

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iofan’s palace of the soviets was never completed as the soviet union put all its resources into defeating nazi germany in the second world war, but they did manage to blow up the cathedral to make room for it.

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speaking of totalitarian kitsch, boris iofan is best known for his 1936 winning project from the competition for a palace of the soviets, a wedding cake of a house with a lenin sculpture on top. height 415 meters.

there is no denying the fascination of the sectional drawing, though.

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the 1937 world exhibition is still famous today as a architectural pissing contest between nazi germany and the soviet union. architects albert speer and boris iofan faced off in front of the eiffel tower, teaching us about the proximity of kitsch and violence.

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the invasion was not hitler and speer’s first intervention in paris. this is the model of the nazi pavilion for the 1937 world exhibition not far from where the previous photo was taken and not much earlier.

you’ll notice how hitler and speer are struggling to achive the worm’s-eye view that was always the banal and intimidating point of their architecture.

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back from a brief trip to paris, here is a reminder of one side of the architect’s work: hitler and his architect albert speer checking out their latest crime against humanity, the recently fallen french capital.

for a great article about speer, a highly intelligent criminal to whom all architects are related, look here. speer talks of hitler who turns out to have been yet another frustrated architect:

“Hitler was an astonishing walking encyclopedia of architecture. He carried in his head the detailed plans of most of the important buildings in Europe. Look at these sketches he gave me. This is the Pantheon in Paris and Les Invalides drawn by him from his memory of plans he studied before he’d ever seen them. And here is an outsized triumphal arch and domed hall he sketched in 1925 when even he believed his political dreams were over. ‘I wish I’d been an architect!’ he often used to say.”  

rendering done at work a few years ago. the developer wanted to see how their raw, low-cost spaces could be used.