Hitler as Architect

"How I wish I had been an architect!" Adolf Hitler often exclaimed to his Nazi master builder, Albert Speer. But he was indeed an architect of sorts. True, Hitler did not build much. His plans for the Third Reich's monuments, worked up into complete designs by Speer, stayed mostly on paper in rough sketches and scale models. The tens of billions of dollars needed to realize these halls, palaces, chancelleries and stadiums were dissipated in war. None of his biggest projects, like the Nuremberg stadium, were built, and most of the monuments of Nazi architecture were pulverized by Allied bombs. But the Fuehrer's intentions come clear in a handful of his designs culled from Speer's personal archive, on view this month at the New York Cultural Center.

Big Is Enough. Hitler's designs are like his speeches: huge, hammeringly repetitious, banal, but filled with an inescapable, machine-like force. He had no perceptible sense of proportion, interval, space or even ornament. But he did know that very big buildings tend to make very big impressions on people. And that was enough.

His project for the Great Hall in Berlin, with its 1,000-ft.-high dome (16 times the volume of Michelangelo's cupola on St. Peter's) may look to a sophisticated eye like a cross between a white elephant and a cookie cutter. But had it been built, the effect on the 150,000 human ants it was designed to hold would have been stupendous: this would have been not only the largest building in the world but also the most crushing and politically expressive.

For in Hitler's designs, form follows function as surely as in any Corbusier or Gropius. The function had nothing to do with human needs. It was simply to intimidate the people, and to assert the state--visual symbols as purposeful as Goebbels' radio broadcasts. No Berliner could look anywhere in his city, Hitler hoped, without seeing that overpowering dome, those relentless colonnades.

In fact, every building Hitler dreamed up could be read as pure metaphor. The outside form was always clear--as sharp and infantile as play blocks--sphere piled on cube piled on rectangle. But as inside space, the designs are illegible, and probably were meant to be. Imagine the buildings from the sketches: what rooms stare from those endlessly repeated window bays? Where do those interminable corridors go? Does anyone ever walk up that colossal staircase? They all reflect the processes of totalitarian politics--explicit in their demands, obscure in their workings.

Languages of Power. Unhappily, the New York Cultural Center has presented Hitler's architecture as if it were unique to Nazism--the swollen granite children of one mad brain. This is the stock liberal ploy of separating Hitler from history for fear of contaminating history itself. In fact, the grandiosity of his architectural fantasy belongs to a whole tradition of visionary architecture, which encompasses idealist architects like the 18th century Frenchmen Boullee and Ledoux as well as the great Italian engraver Piranesi, who saw grandeur in prisons, glory in ruins. (In his memoir, Inside the Third Reich, Speer notes that Hitler took into account how his edifices might look as ruins a thousand years later.) And a debased 18th century neoclassicism, in fact, has long been the universal language of political power from Leningrad to Paris--and even Washington.

Hitler's uniqueness lay in the monstrous size and paranoid consistency of his dreams. By wedding neoclassicism to his Kampf, he killed the style for good. Dictators (and even democrats) of the future will need to find another.

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