Owen Hatherley on a new edition of Leon Krier’s 1985 controversial book about Albert Speer’s architecture…
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 twentieth century classicism by Lars Olaf Larsson, and an introduction by Speer himself
In this new edition, ‘An Architecture of Desire’ has been updated but 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?”