Hitler's Words Into Stone
Can architecture itself be fascist?
For those who are only vaguely familiar with Hitler's architectural tastes, perhaps having seen them parodied in Charlie Chaplin's film "The Great Dictator," the drawings and photographs in Mr. Krier's book provide an extended glimpse into Nazism's megalomaniacal spatial aspirations. But despite all their indisputable fascination, the images reinforce the argument made by many architectural historians that there were far more accomplished early 20th-century neoclassicists than Speer, among them Edwin Lutyens, John Russell Pope and Paul Cret.
"Can a war criminal be a great artist?" asks Mr. Krier. "My answer is undeniably yes." But there is another important question posed by this book: whether it is permissible to find beauty in an art that served to legitimize an abhorrent regime. He warns that Speer's work has a "seductive beauty" that "hurts moral feelings and confuses judgment." Though he is again bemoaning a contemporary inability to regard classicism in a detached manner, it is Léon Krier who is in a delirious thrall to a malevolent aesthetic.
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