Follow this tag to curate your own personalized Activity Stream and email alerts.
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... View full entry
"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... View full entry
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. — Artsy
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-AvivWhen... View full entry
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.
— dw.com
[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.
— the New Yorker
"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... View full entry
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 New York Times
"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:Dispatch from the Venice Biennale: a... View full entry
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. — Vanity Fair
"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... View full entry
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... — Los Angeles Times
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. View full entry
