Archinect - News

Nuremberg plans to convert monumental Nazi-era relic into a concert venue

2021-12-17T17:53:00-05:00

One of the most significant pieces to the architectural history of Hitler’s reign is now set to be converted into a concert venue in a controversial decision currently making waves in the second-largest city in Bavaria.

DW is reporting that the infamous Nuremberg Congress Hall building, which is part of Hitler’s planned Nazi party rally grounds complex, will serve as the new temporary home of the Nuremberg State Theater following a city council decision Wednesday.

The cultural venture would join another recent adaptive reuse plan from MVRDV that will transform a portion of Berlin’s erstwhile Tempelhof Airport into a local film academy campus.

The Ludwig and Franz Ruff-designed building’s construction was never completed as Nazi officials struggled to finance it and other ambitious construction projects in the build up of armaments for World War II. The building is currently administered by the Documentation Center Nazi Party Rally Grounds (Dokumentationszentrum Reichsparteitagsgelä...

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."

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How did Tel Aviv become the site of so many Bauhaus buildings?

2018-12-28T14:41:00-05:00

The Tel Aviv coastline is crowded with a mishmash of skyscrapers, Ottoman-inspired villas, and four-story cubes painted a sunlight-reflecting shade of white. But in a place where stylistic jumble is the standard, one strain stands out as the defining architectural aesthetic and a beloved household name: Bauhaus.

Design fans may know to pin Tel Aviv as an architectural destination for its unlikely connection to the Bauhaus movement, which originated in Dessau, Germany, but few know why the style traveled over 2,000 miles during the 1930's.

Krieger House | Courtesy the rothschild 71 hotel, Tel-Aviv

When the Nazi party gained control of Germany, the Bauhaus School was one of several creative institutions to be shut down, causing its faculty to disperse across the globe. While some of the more famous names from the school, such as Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer found a foothold in America, several of its students found opportunities in The White City.

According to Artsy, "The 700 total students that enrolled at the Bauhaus during its short 14-year existence dispersed globally, too, including four architects—Arieh Sharon, Munio Gitai Weinraub, Shmuel Mestechkin, and Shlomo Bernstein—who moved to British Mandatory Palestine in the 1930s. There, they found a rare opportunity, a modernist archi...

Architect, son of Hitler's architect, Albert Speer Jr., dies at 83

2017-09-19T12:38:00-04:00

Albert Speer Jr, the son of Adolf Hitler's chief architect who had his own accomplished architectural career but struggled to distance himself from his father's legacy, has died at the age of 83. The architecture firm he founded, Albert Speer + Partner GmbH, said Mr Speer died on Saturday in Frankfurt.

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)."

The architecture of death: examining the gas chambers of Auschwitz

2016-06-15T13:02:00-04:00

On a recent afternoon, the historian Robert Jan van Pelt was standing in a quiet room at the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale, explaining the significance of an unassuming steel-mesh column that visitors to this sprawling survey of global design might walk right past. “This is one of the most deadly things so far created,” Mr. van Pelt said. And it was the handiwork, he noted, of an architect.

"The column — painted, like everything else in the room, a pristine white — is a reproduction of one of the eight chutes used to lower Zyklon B poison pellets into gas chambers at Auschwitz."

For more from the 2016 Venice Biennale, check out these links:

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:

Historic Santa Monica home served as a refuge for intellectuals fleeing Nazi Germany

2015-06-23T16:06:00-04:00

In the 1930s and '40s, the Mabery Road house in Santa Monica Canyon belonged to Hollywood screenwriter Salka Viertel, who made her house a home not only for her family but for hundreds of refugees, some very famous and others unknown... While anti-Fascist volunteers were spiriting people out of Europe, Viertel in Santa Monica was taking them in... She helped to rescue, among many others, the German Expressionist writer Leonhard Frank, the Dadaist poet Walter Mehring, and Alfred Döblin...

The historic home is currently on the market, with an asking price of $4.5 million. It was also the childhood home of noted author Peter Viertel.