![]() ![]() The key is not in the decor-the Nazi paraphernalia-but in the language of the architecture itself. The language of authoritarian power insists on the insignificance of the individual. What, then, defines an authoritarian architecture? A classic image is found in a scene from Bernardo Bertolucci’s film “The Conformist”: a lone man stands behind a desk in a vast marble hall behind him, slick, massive stairs lead up to a dark opening. (Hitler, in fact, hung a full-length portrait of the anti-Semitic Ford in his Munich headquarters.) The total banality of the camps adds to their horror. Look at the architecture of the death camps-a conveyor belt of work and death modeled on the assembly-line techniques of Henry Ford, once so popular among planners. The fact that architecture is a tool that can serve evil or good seems undeniable. Why can’t needy children today live in such hopeful monuments, one wonders. ![]() Years after the war’s end, the colonia evokes a hopeful innocence, not images of phalanxes of children with stern faces doing perfectly synchronized jumping jacks. With each step, they pass into a more natural world. Once children reach the open field, they shower in the open air and nap under straw-covered shelters. One of the best, the 1938 Colonia Elioterapica is a building designed as a series of screens: Children pass through the solid mass of the entry pavilion to an open refectory to a free-standing bar of terraces for sleeping. In 1984, a small show of Fascist children’s colonie-state-sponsored summer camps for children-at London’s Architectural Association made that exact point. In fact, some architects were able to create humane-even uplifting-spaces under the Fascist banner. Misguided or not, their motives were not always so clearly self-serving.Īs Marcel Breuer-one of the show’s architectural emigres-put it: “In spite of the undeniable influence of politics on every sphere of life and thought, no one can deny that each of these spheres has a highly important unpolitical side to it.” If Johnson was content to retreat into the realm of aesthetics, Le Corbusier and Mies believed that architecture could actually reform man-and that good architecture could be a positive force anywhere. Nonetheless, what is hard to comprehend today is the faith these architects had in the ability of their work to reform, even in the most horrendous context. We are reminded of one of former Nazi-sympathizer Philip Johnson’s ugliest remarks: “I’d work for the devil himself if he’d let me build.” ![]() Others were just as susceptible: In 1941, the great French Modernist Le Corbusier unsuccessfully courted Marshal Henri Philippe Petain in a quest to build megalomaniacal urban schemes for Vichy France. Mies van der Rohe, one of the centerpieces of the architectural section of this show, entered Nazi-sponsored design competitions-the Modernist language of the Bauhaus was seemingly as easily applied to Fascist as to Weimar buildings. Many compromised themselves in search of work. What shocks us is that many fascist buildings were uplifting, while sometimes the most innocuous projects can reflect a language of power and oppression.Īrchitects have always had a Faustian relationship to power: Architects cannot build without a patron. Buildings, in fact, convey the values of their builders, whether those values are authoritarian or not. But the moral ambiguity of many Modernist architects obscures another point: The work they created was just as morally complex. ![]()
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