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Should a modern democracy preserve an architecture and landscape designed to glorify the 20th century’s most infamous dictator? And, if the answer is yes, how?
The city of Nuremberg has grappled with these questions for years. It is now about to embark on an €85m plan to conserve the vast Nazi party rally grounds designed by Adolf Hitler’s architect Albert Speer.
— The Art Newspaper
The enormous former Nazi party rally complex, with its Zeppelin Grandstand centerpiece, has been decaying for decades but—preserved and presented in the appropriate manner—could serve as a highly relevant educational landmark. "We won’t rebuild, we won’t restore, but we will conserve," The... View full entry
Can the relationship between architecture and politics ever be summarized by a well-organized diagram? San Francisco based writer Julia Galef recently offered a proposal on Twitter for distinguishing the four main political groups by their architectural preferences in a familiar format in the... View full entry
In “The Man in the Glass House,” Mark Lamster’s brisk, clear-eyed new biography of Johnson, we are asked to contemplate why the impresario of twentieth-century architecture descended into such a morass of far-right politics—and how, given the depths to which he fell, he managed to clamber his way not just out of it, but to the top. [...] Johnson managed to abjure his past and, on the march toward an exceptionally successful career, leave it behind. — The New Yorker
The New Yorker reviews the new Philip Johnson biography, The Man in the Glass House by architecture critic and professor Mark Lamster, and examines how Johnson eagerly embraced Fascism before WWII and still rose to great fame as America's iconic 20th-century architect. "Indeed, it is difficult... View full entry
Italy’s far-right Lega party, which won almost 18% of the vote in the general election on 4 March and could form part of the next coalition government, wants to turn a former Fascist party headquarters in Como, in the Lombardy region, into northern Italy’s biggest museum of Modern art, architecture and design. — The Art Newspaper
As reported by The Art Newspaper, the leader of Italy's newly empowered far-right Lega party, Matteo Salvini, has called in his manifesto, besides the expected anti-immigration, anti-European Union views, to create a grand museum of architecture, design, and modern art in the northern Italian... View full entry
So why is it that, as the United States has engaged in a contentious process of dismantling monuments to its Confederate past, and France has rid itself of all streets named after the Nazi collaborationist leader Marshall Pétain, Italy has allowed its Fascist monuments to survive unquestioned? — The New Yorker
Many monuments and buildings constructed in the late nineteen-thirties, as Benito Mussolini was preparing to host the 1942 World's fair, are still standing in Rome. "In Germany, a law enacted in 1949 against Nazi apologism, which banned Hitler salutes and other public rituals, facilitated the... View full entry
...Mussolini, at least for his first decade in power, wasn’t quite as interested in architecture as his fellow dictators. While enthusiastically censoring film-makers, writers, academics and journalists, he let architects do as they please [...]
The resulting architectural output, between Mussolini’s rise to power in 1922 and the late 1930s, when he began to exert more control, embodies an accidentally healthy pluralism.
— The Guardian
"While Hitler rejoiced in the traditional völkisch kitsch of his imaginary master race, and Stalin revelled in over-iced baroque confections, Mussolini sat back and let historicist revivalism compete with the crisp forms of forward-looking modernism."For more on the architecture of... 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
“There’s still a myth surrounding Le Corbusier, that he’s the greatest architect of the 20th century, a generous man, a poet,” [journalist Xavier] de Jarcy said. That vision, he added, is “a great collective lie.” [...]
“He is someone who thought that reform, social change, could only be made by an authority.” [...]
“That’s why Le Corbusier is interesting, because of his own passions and the way he crosses the passions of the century.”
— nytimes.com
For more on the tug-of-war over Le Corbusier's politics and architectural ideology:Pompidou responds to "fascist" Le Corbusier claimsLe Corbusier "militant fascist" claims overshadow 50th death anniversaryIs Le Corbusier the real grandfather of hip-hop? View full entry
