Three New Deals: Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, Hitler's Germany, And the Rise of State Power in the 1930s - Hardcover

Introduction

 
On Comparisons
 
In September 1946, Sigfried Giedion, probably the most renowned historian of modern architecture, gave a lecture before the Royal Institute of British Architects in London. The editors of the Architectural Review were so taken with Giedion's ideas that they convened a symposium to discuss them, inviting such leading architects and architectural historians as Walter Gropius, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Gregor Paulsson, William Holford, Lucio Costa, and Alfred Roth, as well as Giedion himself. The symposium took for its title that of Gideon's original lecture: "The Need for a New Monumentality."
 
            For the first time in the history of modern architecture, the discipline was subjecting itself to fundamental self-criticism. The chief insight to emerge was that modernists, in their struggle against the historicism of the nineteenth century, had perhaps focused too exclusively on architecture's technical, functional side, to the exclusion of the complex set of desires and expectations that transcends everyday utility and distinguishes architecture from mechanics or engineering. "The people," wrote Giedion, "want buildings representing their social, ceremonial, and community life. They want their buildings to be more than a functional fulfillment. They seek the expression of their aspiration for joy, for luxury, and for excitement. Monumentality consists in the eternal need of the people to create symbols that reveal their inner life, their actions, and their social conceptions. . . . This demand for monumentality cannot, in the long run, be suppressed."1
 
            Most of the participants agreed that they should have been more receptive to such expectations in the years before World War II. In the wake of World War I, modern architects had aspired to provide structural expressions of social revolution to the masses, by and for whom it had been carried out. But the masses had never understood--much less liked--modern architecture. And during the Great Depression, capitalism's period of crisis, they were drawn to modernism's bitterest enemies, National Socialism and Fascism, because these offered them something they wanted and needed, something that modernism had refused to provide them: monumentality.
 
            The conflation of monumental--that is, backward-looking, neoclassical--architecture with the Third Reich and the other totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century reflects the political and ideological oppositions of the 1920s and '30s--as does the association of modern architecture with liberal democracy and the social-welfare state. The underlying assumptions entailed therein remained unquestioned into the 1970s. Even as late as the 1990s Bruno Zevi, the Italian patriarch of modern architecture, expressed "disgust" and "contempt" for an academic conference devoted to 1930s--read: Fascist/totalitarian--neoclassicism. In an article in the leading Italian architecture journal, L'architettura, he accused the organizers of "obfuscation, ignorance, arrogance, and idiocy," adding that the conference didn't deserve to be taken seriously because it promoted "excrement, shit, vomit, and spew."2
 
            For decades critics ignored, or chose to ignore, the fact that neither Italian Fascism nor early Soviet Communism fit the paradigm. They also disregarded the affinities many leading practitioners of the modernist New Architecture movement in Germany--including Mies van der Rohe--had felt with Fascism during the initial years of the Third Reich. It took an entire generation after World War II before scholars, as part of a general effort to locate Nazism within a wider historical context, came to today's consensus that the earlier equations were too simplistic. Suddenly they woke up to the fact that neoclassical, monumental buildings had been constructed in Washington, Paris, London, and Geneva during the 1930s, just as they had in Berlin, Moscow, and Rome. They recognized that Mussolini's program of architectural functionalism, or "rationalism," was nothing other than an extension of modernism and that even the Third Reich, the great exemplar of antimodern philistinism, had taken a modernist approach when dealing with function rather than representation. They acknowledged that there had been architecturally modern Fascists and architecturally traditional liberals and that 1930s neoclassical monumentalism was just as widespread as the modernism that the Museum of Modern Art had dubbed the International Style in 1932. Instead of reducing neoclassicism to a side effect of totalitarianism, scholars became more interested in how various national, political, and ideological systems applied what Giorgio Ciucci calls "the specific aesthetics of power."3 Architectural historian Louis Craig's term "government international" sums up this style well, as does Franco Borsi's assertion that "monumental architecture could signify equally the strength of the institutions in the democracies and the aggressive power of the state in the dictatorships."4
 
            Critics began to ask why a majority of democratic nations in 1927 rejected modernist designs for the headquarters of the League of Nations, choosing instead a neoclassical, monumental one, why the Third Republic in France built the neoclassical Palais de Chaillot for the 1937 World's Fair, and why the architecture of Washington, D.C., received a monumentalist infusion under Roosevelt's New Deal. The answers were the same. Scholars gradually recognized neoclassical monumentalism--whether of the 1930s, the Renaissance, the French Revolution, or the Napoleonic empire--for what it is: the architectural style in which the state visually manifests power and authority. Although neoclassicism temporarily lost its hold with the rise of nineteenth-century liberal capitalism, in which the state restricted itself to a supervisory role and allowed the private sector to determine architectural aesthetics, it regained it in the twentieth century, beginning with increased state regulation of the economy in the years before World War I, continuing through the state's mobilization of the economy during the war, and culminating with its near-total intervention during the Depression.* The various state solutions to that crisis amounted to a defeat for liberal capitalism and a triumph for governmental authority.
 
            Both the revolutionary states of Bolshevism and Fascism, as well as the reformist ones of the capitalist democracies, needed an architecture that would tower on behalf of, but also above, the people like a temple, inspiring trust, respect, and a quasi-religious sense of deeper meaning and community--while at the same time showing the rest of the world who it was dealing with. A concrete embodiment of the competition between political systems was the constellation formed by the three most spectacular buildings at the 1937 World's Fair in Paris. The monumental Palais de Chaillot, for which the government of the Third Republic had torn down the old Trocadéro, was strategically placed at the end of the central axis, flanked by the "massive pavilions" of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. The Palais symbolized France's self-perception as a major power, unwilling to back down before the two dictatorships, or rather, firmly holding center stage while shunting its rivals off to the sides.5
 
            The primary sites for monumental construction and self-representation...