Friday 3 January 2014

Poundbury's Hidden Reverse

(the below is a review spiked by a prominent architecture monthly, apparently because they'd already published a lot of criticism of the author in question, and didn't want to appear 'obsessed'. Nobody else wanted to publish it, and so here it goes)



Leon Krier, Albert Speer - Architecture (Monacelli Press, 2013)

In his introduction to this new edition of Leon Krier’s 1985 monograph Albert Speer – Architecture, Robert Stern points out, quite rightly, that Krier has never worked for, nor flirted with any currently existing totalitarian regimes; nor is he grandiose as a designer or urban planner. Rather, he bravely tries to tackle the quandary of whether ‘a war criminal can be a great artist’. Skim through the book and you’ll note that Krier’s drawings and graphics are, as always, clever and elegant, and you’ll note an epigraph in big letters: ‘classical architecture and the passion of building are this book’s only subject, its sole justification’. Albert Speer – Architecture consists of a presentation of Speer’s oeuvre, a long essay, ‘An Architecture of Desire’, a historical essay on 20th century classicism by Lars Olaf Larsson, and an introduction by Speer himself. In this new edition ‘An Architecture of Desire’ has been updated, but the both versions are included.

What stays the same is an attempt to explore, as an alternative to modernism, a certain line in National Socialist thinking, which Krier believes he can disassociate from Nazi racism. The SS leader Otto Ohlendorf and the Nazi thinker Gottfried Feder become precursors of Charles Windsor – propagators of a return to small, coherent towns, civic virtues, organic agriculture, restorers of what they called ‘man’s feeling for his homeland’. By contrast, writes Krier, in modern Germany city-dwellers are condemned to live and work in modernist buildings that ‘do not seem to belong to their country’. What has this to do with Speer and his super-urban neoclassical metropolis, Germania, and how is this car-centric moloch to be related to these arts and crafts dreams? Krier himself doesn’t seem to know. His response is to see Germania as a ‘mirror for modernism and socialism’, where they could find their own preoccupations in slightly distorted form. It's a tenuous link - German industry and German industrialists got very rich out of the Third Reich, as Krier himself acknowledges. He asks us incessantly 'what if Hilberseimer or Mies had redesigned Berlin? Wouldn’t that have been worse?' He has no answer to the obvious counter-question: 'so why didn’t they? If they were more Nazi, why didn't the actual Nazis think so?'. 


The speculation continues in a bizarre fantasy where he imagines the implementation of the Morgenthau Plan, a programme entertained for a time by the Allies that entailed the dismantlement of German industry and ruralisation of its economy. In this scenario, the prophets of an agrarian and/or classical Germany like Ohlendorf, Feder and Speer would have been as honoured and respected as Ferdinand Porsche or Werner Von Braun were in the real postwar world. That Von Braun was responsible for mass death is clear, although perhaps not as much as an Einsatzgruppe leader like Ohlendorf, and that is presumably the moral we are to take from this. It doesn’t occur to Krier that Nazism needed rockets and garden cities and standardization and concentration camps, all of which were part of a syncretic and inherently unstable ideology where autobahns and V2s would fulfil the dreams of the Teutonic Knights. In architecture, this meant what Kenneth Frampton in Modern Architecture - A Critical History described as ‘stylistic schizophrenia’ – at Herbert Rimpl’s Heinkel complex in Oranienberg, the offices were neoclassical, the housing arts and crafts and the factory functionalist. Similar dichotomies operated in the work of American architects like Albert Kahn, although the connection to 'modernism and socialism' is harder to spot. Regardless, Krier has nothing to say about any of this. 


Particularly telling are the differences between the two versions of ‘An Architecture of Desire’ (so-called because of the apparently maternal nature of the Germania dome, among other things). Krier in 1985: ‘many people are more disturbed by the grandeur of Speer’s designs than by images of Auschwitz’. In 2012, this is toned down to ‘images of Speer’s designs’ and ‘those of concentration camps’, which is not the same thing, although absurd in a lesser way. The notorious statement that ‘Los Angeles and Auschwitz-Birkenau are children of the same parents’ has been removed entirely in the later version. References to modernism as the product of fossil fuels have been newly inserted, though this evidently concerned neither Speer or the younger Krier. And while 28 years ago, Krier was angry that the Soviets had used the marble from the Reichskanzlerei to build their war memorials, he now appears to believe that it’s apt revenge. Or does he? The new version is ‘edited by Irene Perez-Perro’, which implies that the bowdlerization of the book’s most offensive and apologist statements was contracted out.

And the architecture, apparently the sole subject, the sole justification? Speer appears to have been a mediocre but efficient neoclassicist, and as Lars Olaf Larsson’s cogent essay makes clear, his neoclassicism was not unique in the ‘30s. To ask ‘why Speer? Why not, say, Zholtovsky, Bonatz, Asplund or Lutyens?’ is missing the point. Krier’s project at its root is to both de-Nazify classicism and Nazify modernism, via a contorted, dishonest and historically valueless argument. Krier, in a claim vastly more ‘totalitarian’ than any made by his stock modernist villains, writes at one point that ‘by its nature, civic classical architecture does not exert terror’. Speer’s own introduction to the volume, meanwhile, states otherwise. He and Hitler, he writes, would talk about how a visitor from the provinces would visit Germania’s Great Hall, ‘that gigantic area of 220 metres high and 250 metres diameter, and feel literally crushed by what he saw’. The war criminal was more honest than his apologist.

21 comments:

  1. Thanks Owen, the prominent architecture monthly's loss is our gain.

    And a welcome corrective to my obviously doomed attempt to see the positive in Poundbury a while back. http://www.architectureinberlin.com/?p=1634

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thank you for bringing more information to this topic for me. I’m truly grateful and really impressed. Please visit Apartments in Aberdeen

    ReplyDelete
  3. Very well-written articlem, thanks for that! German industrialists know what they are doing! I welcome you to order an essay on the similar topic from british essay writer.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hello, I have browsed most of your posts. This post is probably where I got the most useful information for my research. Thanks for posting, maybe we can see more on this. Cheap Essay Writing Help UK

    ReplyDelete
  5. Thank you for sharing such an informative blog, i like it and i suggest this post to the all students of LLaw Dissertation Help UK.

    ReplyDelete
  6. We have been providing the best essay services to the students around the globe and in the UK. We make sure that each and students receive customised essays, distinct from one another, at the lowest prices possible. Online Essay Writers UK

    ReplyDelete
  7. We at Law Writing have been providing services to the students for many years. The content we compile and produce is authentic. You can contact our customer care representative and feel free to submit your order at the lowest prices.

    ReplyDelete
  8. I do concur with all the thoughts you have introduced in your post for contextual analysis composing. They're truly persuading and will surely work. All things considered, the posts are exceptionally short for amateurs. Would you be able to please expand them a little from next time?..Keep this incredible work
    Best Dissertation

    ReplyDelete
  9. With more than 12 years involvement with exposition composing, we've helped a huge number of understudies in Australia with assignments, papers, theory and theses. Our dedication towards consumer loyalty and quality work makes us trusted and solid abroad article composing specialist organization.
    Assignment

    ReplyDelete
  10. An exclusive requirement post with all basic data about Assignment Help UK administrations. Anticipating benefit the exceptional administrations.
    Dissertation writers help in uk

    ReplyDelete
  11. Cheapnotic.com is your proud partner in Men’s cheap shopping collection. We have a variety of products including the latest fashion T-Shirts, watches, jackets, coats, caps, glasses, grooming kits, and much more.
    Cheap Men's Watches

    ReplyDelete
  12. Our platform provides a wide variety of affordable and amazing products. We deliver inspired finds for women, men, kids, auto, gadgets and much more. Discover luxury steals at discounted prices all year long, not to mention FREE world-wide shipping. So get excited to shop and get Cheapnotized!
    Cheap Kitchen Supplies

    ReplyDelete
  13. QSEOPRO invests wholeheartedly in giving first class advanced advertising arrangements at reasonable costs. Our tremendous scope of arrangements joins brand advancement and configuration, content advertising, logo configuration, exploration and examination, and website streamlining notwithstanding contemporary computerized promoting. The broad scope of arrangements is modified to explicitly oblige your necessities and assist you with standing apart to your clients. We expect to not just furnish you with the best to develop your undertaking on the web yet additionally rule in the computerized world.

    ReplyDelete
  14. Artikel yang sangat bagus dan memberi informasi tambahan buat saya. Semoga artikel ini bisa terus berkreasi dan inovasi agar bermanfaat untuk orang banyak.

    http://104.168.170.117/

    ReplyDelete
  15. interesting that is for sure.

    carson

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Acts 16:31, 1 Corinthians 15:1-8, 1 Peter 1:17-21, Revelation 22:18-19

      Delete
  16. Acts 16:31, 1 Corinthians 15:1-8, 1 Peter 1:17-21, Revelation 22:18-19

    ReplyDelete
  17. Poundbury's Hidden Reverse reveals an interesting side of this unique town. The blend of tradition and modern planning is fascinating. If you're exploring this topic for a thesis, working with PhD law thesis literature writers can help deepen your analysis. They can guide you in connecting legal theories with real-world examples like Poundbury.

    ReplyDelete