Archinect - News

German far-right politicians want to declare Bauhaus led modernism in the 'wrong direction'

2024-10-26T08:00:00-04:00

The German far-right AfD party has attacked the original Bauhaus as a pernicious example of design, saying it led the project of modernism in the "wrong direction." Their statement, which echoes the disdain put forth by Hitler and the Nazi party, comes from an official motion in front of the country’s parliament asking for an official reappraisal of its legacy in advance of the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus Dessau in 2025/26.

They say: "The emphasis on sobriety and minimalism often led to impersonal architecture that is perceived as cold, unwelcoming and unattractive." (h/t ARTnews)

The episode brings to mind the outrage of the architecture community in response to then-President Donald Trump's planned executive order in favor of classical architecture, the tenor of which (e.g., that it restores America's grandeur) is akin to the views advanced by Viktor Orban and many other modern adherents to a more discreet form of fascism.

Nazi bunker to become new hotel in Hamburg

2019-10-22T18:30:00-04:00

"A former Nazi bunker in Hamburg, built by forced laborers to shelter tens of thousands of Germans during Allied air raids in World War II, will soon house hotel guests," reports The New York Times (NYT). Fit with a five-story terraced roof garden, the hotel will house 136 rooms, and is due to open in mid-2021.

The bunker was one of thousands built by the Nazi's during the war. A spokeswoman for NH Hotel Group, the organization designing the new space, told NYT that the group is "aware of the history of the building" and that they "would like to send a positive signal to the city of Hamburg.

Thomas L. Doughton also spoke to NYT, expressing how "part of the concern with some people in Hamburg, as well as in other locations in Europe and elsewhere is that the real significance of some of these sites will become lost."

The hotel will include a 560 square foot exhibition space to commemorate the structure's past, seeking not to "hide the history," but instead "to make it more visible."

...

2.7-mile-long abandoned Nazi resort is getting transformed into luxury housing

2017-07-14T19:53:00-04:00

Capable of holding more than 20,000 residents, Prora was meant to comfort the weary German worker who toiled away in a factory without respite. According to historian and tour guide Roger Moorhouse, it was also meant to serve as the carrot to the stick of the Gestapo — a pacifying gesture to get the German people on Hitler's side. But then World War II began, and Prora's construction stalled — until now.

Named Prora and located on a beachfront of Rügen island, the structure was commissioned by Adolf Hitler as the world's largest tourist resort three years before Germany invaded Poland in 1939. In those three years over 9,000 workers were involved in the construction of the 2.7-mile-long building.

"But as the Third Reich began its devastating march through Europe, workers returned to their factories and Prora fell by the wayside. It became a shell of building, a failed Nazi dream left to decay for the next several decades ..."

Prora in 2014. Image via wikimedia.org

However, in 2013 a German real-estate company Metropole Marketing bought the rights to refurbish Prora and build it up as luxury summer homes and a full-time apartment complex. While some of the units are already on sale with prices ranging from $400,000 to $725,000, the restoration is planned to be completed by 2022.

"While these amenities are certainly appealing, given the location's history and its distance from Berlin ...

Living under the shadow of Albert Speer, Hitler's most famous architect and his dad

2017-05-08T13:08:00-04:00

[Albert] Speer, Jr., an eighty-two-year-old with a perennially serious expression and a fondness for energetic hand motions, is one of Germany’s best-known urban planners. He has risen to the top of the German planning world over the past fifty years, thanks to his reputation for sustainability and “human scale” architecture, and despite being the son of Hitler’s favorite architect [...] To his irritation, Speer, Sr., has long cast a shadow over his career.

"If Speer, Sr.,’s work was a reflection of the Third Reich’s values, Speer, Jr.,’s is a manifestation of Germany’s postwar identity: a country that has tried to atone for its past by becoming an international advocate for human rights and environmental sustainability, a country that is attempting to make up for its mistakes by becoming more thoughtful and humane (albeit while often advancing its own financial interests)."

Philip Johnson, the fascist

2016-04-19T13:30:00-04:00

Johnson returned home certain his life had been transformed. He found in Nazism a new international ideal. The aesthetic power and exaltation he experienced in viewing modernist architecture found its complete national expression in the Hitler-centered Fascist movement. Here was a way not merely to rebuild cities with a unified and monumental aesthetic vision for the Machine Age but to spur a rebirth of mankind itself. He had never expressed any interest in politics before. That had now changed.

"Over the next two years, Johnson moved back and forth between Europe and New York City. At home, he mounted shows and promoted modernist artists whose works he considered the best of the new. All the while, he kept an eye on the Nazis as they consolidated power. He had slept with his share of men in the demimonde of Weimar Berlin; now he turned a blind eye to Nazi restrictions on homosexual behavior, which brought imprisonment and even death sentences."

Read the rest of this fascinating excerpt from Marc Wortman's forthcoming book, 1941: Fighting the Shadow War in Vanity Fair. For more on Philip Johnson, check out these links:

Controversy over Hitler's Prora beach resort continues

2015-05-26T15:15:00-04:00

Axel Bering and Michael Jacobi, the main investors behind the Prora project, claim they could not care less about a building once being dedicated to Hitler. [...] He and his partner, Michael Jacobi, both confess that because they had to comply with German regulations, their investment carries some Third Reich architecture qualities. They did, however, add a balcony, but otherwise they see Prora as a nice beach town and a solid investment.

Artist impressions of various sections of the Prora colossus and their new make-up (source: Seebad Prora):

Previously

Vacation resort developers help complete Hitler's vision

2014-12-18T13:33:00-05:00

Built by the Third Reich in the run-up to World War II, the Strength Through Joy resort was a Nazi vision of tourism’s future. Happy, healthy Aryans would stay and play at the 10,000-room complex on the Baltic Sea, eating, swimming and even bowling for the Führer. Think Hitler’s Cancun. [...] a group of investors in this seaside town is now doing what the Nazis never could: realizing the site’s final stage of transformation into a vacation wonderland.

Previously

Proposal for the future of Auschwitz-Birkenau

2014-11-11T14:51:00-05:00

When a well-intentioned Alabama teenager tweeted a smiling selfie taken at Auschwitz-Birkenau, she attracted a deluge of hatred and outrage from across the internet. Lambasted as disrespectful, insensitive and inappropriate, the selfie was later explained as a means of memorializing her visit to the camp for her father, who had passed away exactly a year prior to her visit. Her gesture was by no mean the first or last of its kind, and represents an inevitable schism in memorial politics – as traumas recede from lived-past into historical contexts, how should cultural inheritance be balanced against personal experience? And how can this balance be articulated in the memorial space?

Currently, Auschwitz-Birkenau is memorialized in a variety of ways, but the structures themselves are not being actively preserved. In 1947, the Polish government established a memorial to all victims, and opened an exhibition of prisoner paraphernalia at Birkenau in 1955. Auschwitz I, the original death ca...

Philip Johnson Was a Nazi Propagandist

2014-04-22T21:28:00-04:00

Philip Johnson was a terrible, hateful human being. And he wasn't just some casual Nazi sympathizer whispering, "maybe Hitler has some good ideas" in shadowy bars, either. He actively campaigned for Nazi causes in the U.S. and around the world. Johnson visited Germany in the 1930s at the invitation of the government's Propaganda Ministry. He wrote numerous articles for far right publications. He started a fascist organization called the Gray Shirts in the United States...

Nuremberg to spend €70 million on re-building Nazi rally grounds

2013-09-05T18:50:00-04:00

Nuremberg plans to spend up to 70 million euro restoring the sprawling complex used by Adolf Hitler for his mass rallies, as debate continues in Germany over what to do with Nazi-era architecture. “This is a job of national importance, we cannot take it on alone,” said Ulrich Maly, the Social Democrat mayor of the Bavarian city, who added he would ask for federal funds to complete the project.

Luxury Flats Planned for Derelict Nazi Resort

2013-05-27T19:08:00-04:00

With so much discussion going on with former Nazi Party relics these days, German developers are trying to revive a valuable real estate, the Nazi built Prora resort complex which served to Hitler's upper ranks. Once it is fixed and put on the market, it will be called "Sea Symphony" with a slogan, "Awakened with a kiss and beautifully renovated."

Der Spiegel

Hitler's Classical Architect

2013-05-24T16:43:00-04:00

The unbending axis of architectural apologetics made for Speer is a double one...This defense, of course, is exculpatory only if it fails to make any distinction within the field of this expression or to consider any integral relationship between form and function. The more outré defense of Speer insists that he is not simply tarred with modernism’s anti-classical brush but that he was an excellent architect, full stop.

In the June 10-17, 2013 edition of The Nation, Michael Sorkin asks Why is Léon Krier defending anew the work of the Third Reich’s master builder?

Talk about adaptive re-use: Baltic style

2011-07-07T21:08:00-04:00

Prora was designed to accommodate 20,000 people in one go. Hitler was convinced Germany lost World War I because its population lost its nerve. His idea was to create cheap package holidays to wed the nation to Nazism and to shape happy, strong, well-rested new generations capable of winning the next war.

Germany's newest youth hostel offers access to one of the best beaches the Baltic has to offer. Sunseekers are flocking to the place, which is booked out for the summer season and is already receiving bookings for summer 2012. The hostel stands just meters away from one of the best beaches the Baltic Sea has to offer, but is located in a building with a deeply troubled past. The 400-bed hostel, which calls itself "the longest youth hostel in the world," was opened on July 1 in a gigantic former Nazi holiday hotel that stretches for 4.5 kilometers (2.8 miles) along the coast of the island of Rügen at the resort of Prora.