The author would like to thank, for their varied help, advice and encouragement, Steve Featherstone of Llewelyn-Davies, Peter Murray of Wordsearch, Zhang Xin and Yang Ho Chang, Alex Linklater, Claire Paterson of Janklow and Nesbitt, Charles Jencks, Stefan McGrath and Will Goodlad at Penguin, Jane Ferguson of the Observer, and The Research Library, The Getty Research Institute Los Angeles (980060), for permission to quote from the letters of Philip Johnson; and, in their different ways, Sarah Miller and Olivia Sudjic.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Director of the Design Museum, Deyan Sudjic was born in London of Yugoslav parents. He is former architecture critic for the Observer and a visiting professor at the Royal College of Art. For many years he edited Domus, the international magazine of art, architecture and design. He was director of the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2002 and is the author of The Language of Things: How We Are Seduced by the Objects Around Us, the much-praised 100 Mile City, the best-selling Architecture Pack, and monographs on John Pawson, Ron Arad and Richard Rogers.
I used to keep a photograph torn from a tabloid pinned up over my desk. Through the blotchy newsprint you could make out the blurred image of an architectural model the size of a small car, jacked up to eye level. Left to themselves architects use non-committal shades of grey for their models, but this one was painted in glossy lipstick colours, suggesting it was made to impress a client with an attention span shorter than most.
Strips of cardboard and balsa wood stood in for a mosque with a squat dome fenced in by concentric circles of spiky minarets. The gaudy shapes, and the reduction of an intricate decorative tradition to a cartoon, not much different from a hundred other attempts at having it both ways, tried and failed to be simultaneously boldly modern and respectfully rooted in the past. The questionable architectural details weren’t what made it such an unsettling image. What really grabbed my attention was the glimpse of the darker aspects of building that the picture captured. None of the uniformed figures clustered respectfully around the model looked like architects, who usually feature conspicuously in this kind of picture; but there wasn’t much doubt about the identity of the thickset man with the heavy moustache, looking disorientatingly like a World War Two British army major in his vintage khaki sweater and beret, or the unblinking fascination with which he was gazing so adoringly at his model.
Saddam Hussein, like many authoritarians, was an enthusiastic patron of architecture. Unlike Napoleon III, however, whose fastidious tastes are still clearly visible in the parade-ground tidiness of the boulevards of Paris, or Mussolini with his contradictory passions for modernism and Caesar Augustus, Hussein had no obvious preference for any specific architectural style. He did, however, have an instinctive grasp of how to use architecture to glorify himself and his regime and to intimidate his opponents.
From the moment of its conception, the Mother of all Battles mosque had a very clear purpose: to claim the first Gulf War as a victory for Iraq. Hussein was humiliated in that war. His army was expelled from Kuwait. Its desperate flight home left the highway disfigured by the grotesque train of incinerated Iraqi conscripts, trapped in their burnt-out plundered cars, the roadside strewn with loot. Hussein wanted to build his own reality to try and wipe out that image of defeat – just as the Kuwaitis used their meaningless toy parliament, designed by Jörn Utzon, architect of the Sydney Opera House no less, to suggest that they were a Scandinavian democracy rather than a Gulf oligarchy. Building anything at all while Iraq struggled with the deprivations brought about by Hussein’s manipulation of United Nations sanctions was a calculated gesture of defiance. And the mosque itself came loaded with an iconography that made this defiance all the more explicit.
The message of the newspaper picture of Hussein’s mosque is unambiguous. Architecture is about power. The powerful build because that is what the powerful do. On the most basic level, building creates jobs that are useful to keep a restless workforce quiet. But it also reflects well on the capability and decisiveness – and the determination – of the powerful. Above all, architecture is the means to tell a story about those who build it.
Architecture is used by political leaders to seduce, to impress, and to intimidate. Certainly those were the underlying reasons for Saddam Hussein’s building campaign. His palaces and monuments were tattooed all over Iraq, less indelibly than he would have liked, in an attempt to present the entire country as his personal property both to his external and to his internal foes.
In the south, outside Basra, lines of bronze effigies ten feet tall follow the shoreline: they depict Iraqi officers killed in the meat-grinder war against Iran pointing across the gulf towards the old enemy. An enemy with its own taste for monument-building in the days of the Shah, the product of a failed attempt to construct a pedigree for the Pahlavi dynasty.
In Baghdad itself, the notorious outsize crossed swords span the highway into the city, gripped by giant bronze hands modelled on Hussein’s own, but cast in the quintessentially English suburbia of Basingstoke. In Saddam’s day, nets filled with shoals of captured Iranian helmets dangled from the two hilts. Such monuments, kitsch as they are, are universal. They date from the victory memorials of the Peloponnesian wars, and the triumphs imperial Rome granted its favoured generals. The same ritual celebration of the defeat of an enemy is reflected in the monumental sculptures cast from captured Napoleonic cannon that adorn the centres of London and Berlin. The idea of the crossed swords was filched without acknowledgement from Mike Gold, an architect based in London who originally proposed it, minus the helmets, as an innocuously whimsical civic landmark for a motorway in Saudi Arabia. In Iraq, its meaning was completely transformed. Versace’s inflammatory caricature of sex and money could be worn with a sense of irony in Milan, but not in Milosevic’s Belgrade, where the bandit classes took the glitter and leopard-skin look at face value. And in Baghdad, a piece of ironic postmodernism becomes the most literal kind of architectural propaganda. But Hussein had an objective wider than celebrating his questionable victories, and intimidating his enemies. His mosque-building campaign can be seen as an overcompensation for the essentially secular nature of his regime, demonstrating his credentials as a devout defender of the faith despite his taste for whisky and murder.
Yet architectural propaganda is not the exclusive domain of those commissioning a building. As the United States dispatched two more aircraft carriers towards Iraq at the end of 2002, the New York Times published a photograph of Saddam Hussein’s Mother of All Battles mosque on its front page. Here, four years after the design was first unveiled, was the completed building. Without a hint of scepticism, the paper baldly repeated the conventional media wisdom that the minarets, an outer ring of four and an inner, slightly shorter group of four more, are literal representations, respectively, of Kalashnikov assault rifles and Scud missiles. It’s an assertion that existed mainly in the minds of the Western media and their taxi drivers, and which might be a little more convincing if the minarets had tail fins, or were decorated with olive-drab camouflage paint rather than white limestone embellished with blue mosaic. Nor does the outer ring come equipped with gun sights or the distinctive curved magazine and walnut stock of a Kalashnikov. They look much less martial – and much less elegant – than the pencil-slim Ottoman minarets of Istanbul, which certainly do look like rockets. The paper’s reporter sounded disappointed after his tour of the mosque: ‘Where once visitors were told what seems obvious, how the cylinders of the inner minarets slim to an aerodynamic peak, like a ballistic missile tapering at the nose cone, they are now assured that no such references were ever in the architects’ minds.’ But by then America already felt itself at war, and such a bombastic interpretation of the mosque was too much of a propaganda gift.
1. Part of a massive building programme, Saddam Hussein’s Mother of All Battle’s mosque mixed piety and aggression to stamp his authority on Iraq.
Although the mosque does not use literally militaristic metaphors, its underlying message is hardly reassuring. The image of the exterior is less a howl of defiance than a conventional piece of laboured Gulf hotel glitz, looking more like a police academy in drag than a national monument. More telling was the paper’s photograph of the glass showcase at the heart of the mosque with a 650-page transcription of the Koran inside. According to the New York Times, the mosque’s Imam, Sheik Thahir Ibrahim Shammariu, claimed that the calligrapher used Hussein’s own blood, donated over a period of two years at the scarcely believable rate of a pint every fortnight, to fill his pen. Another photograph shows the reflecting pool that encircles the mosque, allegedly shaped like a map of the Arab world. At one end, a blue mosaic plinth juts out of the water to form an island. The paper claimed that this irregular mound took the shape of Hussein’s thumbprint. The paper doesn’t go into how it could be so sure that it had correctly identified the thumb as distinctively Hussein’s own. If true, it carries a message that could not be clearer. The mosque’s Imam was disappointingly reluctant to confirm the warlike iconography of the mosque to the New York Times, but he was obligingly ready to spell out some of its more occult meanings. The outer minarets are 43 metres high, he pointed out, supposedly for the forty-three days of bombing at the start of the first Gulf War. The four minarets of the inner ring, representing April, the fourth month, are 37 metres high, for the year 1937. The twenty-eight water jets in the pool symbolize the 28th day of the month. Together they spell out 28 April 1937, Hussein’s birthday.
In the flesh, the mosque is not a particularly effective way of demonstrating Iraqi defiance; and since Hussein’s purpose was to present himself as a devout Muslim, it seems unlikely that he would use the Christian calendar to do it. This emphasis on the power of numbers, if it really is intentional, was uncomfortably echoed in some of the seven plans to rebuild the World Trade Center, revealed in New York in the same week that the story appeared. Richard Meier and Peter Eisenman designed a tower 1,111 feet high, presumably on the basis that a mere 911 feet would have been too short to attract enough attention. Daniel Libeskind famously went for 1,776 feet.
One interpretation of Hussein’s enthusiasm for building could be to see him simply as following in the tradition, common all over Asia and the Middle East, of employing fashionable Western architects to design prestige projects to demonstrate how up to date he was. Indeed Baghdad had a history of planning gargantuan architectural monuments throughout much of the twentieth century. In 1957 King Faisal II commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design an opera house in the manner of Moscow’s unbuilt Palace of the Soviets. A colossal thirty-storey-high memorial sculpture of Iraq’s greatest Caliph, Haroun al-Rashid, grandson of Baghdad’s founder, took Lenin’s place as its centrepiece. It would have been a piece of nation-building on an epic scale by an Iraq still emerging from British colonial rule. A commission for Walter Gropius to design a university was actually built. Le Corbusier also secured a commission in Baghdad from Faisal in 1956, designing an arena only completed after his death, when it became known as the Saddam Hussein Sports Centre.
But Saddam Hussein wanted to do more than look modern. He was also attempting to co-opt a much older heritage of monument-making stretching back five thousand years to Ur and the first urban civilizations on the Euphrates. He initiated a series of damaging ‘restorations’ of Iraq’s ancient sites, not flinching from reconstructing the Hanging Gardens of Babylon using materials more commonly found on a suburban housing estate. He had each brick stamped with his own name in the manner of the ancient emperors, to demonstrate that he was their natural successor. He even posted guards in period costume, and equipped with spears, at his version of Ishtar’s gate in his Babylonian theme park.
Hussein’s determination to use architecture as a propaganda tool to glorify his state and consolidate his hold on it was clear enough. Though it was hardly effective, when measured against his objectives, architecture stands clearly incriminated for the part it played in his brutal regime. But what can you say about those commissioned to execute his ideas? The mosque is certainly a banal piece of architecture, and those who designed it are clearly guilty of a lack of imagination, but does the use to which Hussein has put it necessarily implicate the architect in anything worse?
Architecture has an existence independent of those who pay for it. Simply because the architect of the mosque worked for one of the more brutal of recent leaders, there is no reason to assume that he is himself culpable, as we did of Albert Speer when he was convicted by the Nuremburg war crimes court. The mosque is not itself committing an act of violence; its architectural forms need not in themselves be the embodiment of a dictatorship.
It is still an open question, though one that is often asked, whether architecture can project an inherent meaning at all. Is there, in fact, such a thing as a totalitarian, or a democratic, or a nationalistic building? And if they do exist, what is it that gives architecture such meanings? Can classical columns or glass walls really be described as the signs of fascist or democratic buildings, as some have claimed? Are these fixed and permanent meanings, or can they be changed over time?
If Saddam Hussein had shown the wit, or the cunning, to invite Zaha Hadid, the most celebrated woman architect in the world, and herself born in Baghdad, to design that mosque, we might have been briefly distracted enough to see his regime in a different light. If Hadid had accepted, we would certainly see her differently: at best a political innocent, at worst a naive compromiser. Certainly her chances of getting to build anything in America would have been dramatically diminished. A Hadid mosque would have sent another kind of message, still a glorification of Hussein’s state, still an act of defiance, but a claim for the cultural high ground too. It would have suggested a regime more sophisticated than the one that countenanced the cold-blooded murder of Hussein’s two sons-in-law and the gassing of thousands of its own citizens. But would Hadid, in the unlikely event that she had been asked, and even more unlikely event that she had accepted, have been seen as playing a part in reasserting a more civilized Iraq? Or would she have been condemned as a pawn in a game of state, prepared to subordinate every other consideration in the pursuit of the chance to build?
It is not only architects who are driven by the overwhelming urge to build at any cost. Saddam Hussein’s obsession with building raises a series of questions about the psychology that motivated him. To explore the question of why he, and others like him, invested so much in building, we need to consider whether architecture is an end itself, or a means to an end.
We build for emotional and psychological purposes, as well as for ideological and practical reasons. The language of architecture is used by software billionaires endowing a museum in return for naming rights to project power, as much as by sociopathic dictators. Architecture has been shaped by the ego, and by the fear of death, as well as by political and religious impulses. And it in turn serves to give them shape and form. Trying to make sense of the world without acknowledging architecture’s psychological impact on it is to miss a fundamental aspect of its nature. To do so would be like ignoring the impact of warfare on the history of technology, and vice versa.
Unlike science and technology, which have conventionally been presented as being free of ideological connotations, architecture is both a practical tool and an expressive language, capable of carrying highly specific messages. Yet the difficulty in establishing the precise political meanings of buildings, and the elusive nature of the political content of architecture, has led today’s generation of architects to claim that their work is autonomous, or neutral, or else to believe that if there is such a thing as overtly ‘political’ architecture, it is confined to an isolated ghetto, no more representative of the concerns of high-culture architecture than a shopping mall or a Las Vegas casino.
It is a flawed assumption. There may be no fixed political meaning to a given architectural language, but that does not mean that architecture lacks the potential to assume a political aspect. Few successful architects can avoid producing buildings with a political dimension at some point in their career, whether they want to or not. And almost all political leaders find themselves using architects for political purposes. It is a relationship that recurs in almost every kind of regime and appeals to egotists of every description. That is why there are photographs of Tony Blair, and François Mitterrand, and Winston Churchill, and countless mayors and archbishops and chief executives and billionaire robber barons each bowed over their own, equally elaborate, architectural models looking just as narcissistically transfixed as the beatific Saddam Hussein beaming over his mosque.
This is not to equate George Bush the Elder’s presidential library, or Tony Blair’s Millennium Dome or his Wembley Stadium, or any Olympic arena that Britain may or may not get around to building for the 2012 games, with Hussein’s mosque. To manoeuvre at the court of an elected prime minister to secure the chance to build involves an altogether less corrosive kind of compromise than the potentially lethal survival dance demanded by a dictatorship. But democratic regimes are just as likely to deploy architecture as an instrument of statecraft as totalitarians.
Versailles was built as a court whose architectural splendour and physical location were meant to neutralize the power base of the nobility in the French provinces. Two centuries later, Napoleon III was once more using architecture as an instrument of political power when he engaged Georges-Eugène Haussmann to rebuild Paris on a monumental scale – not so much to curb the power of the Parisian mob as to legitimize his questionable claims to an imperial title. And François Mitterrand saw a Paris adorned by a transformed Louvre, and the Grande Arche at La Défense, as an essential part of his strategy to make the city the undisputed capital of a modern Europe. For all three rulers, how those monuments looked was as much part of the strategy as what they contained. Mitterrand adopted an aggressive architecture of simplified geometric forms in steel and glass to symbolize French commitment to modernity, just as the Sun King made Versailles a temple to a royal cult to demonstrate the divine right of kings.
I started to collect images of the rich and powerful leaning over architectural models in a more systematic way after I suddenly found myself in the middle of one. The elder statesman of Japanese architecture, Arata Isozaki, had hired an art gallery in Milan owned by Miuccia Prada for a presentation to an important client. Outside, two black Mercedes saloons full of bodyguards were parked on either side of the entrance, alongside a vanload of carabinieri. Inside was another of those room-size models. Isozaki described it as a villa. In fact it’s a palace for a Qatari sheik, his country’s Minister for Culture. And the palace has to do rather more than accommodate the sheik, his family, his collection of rare-breed animals and his Ferraris, his Bridget Rileys and his Hockney swimming pool, as well as his Richard Serra landscape installation. It is a deliberate effort to inject a sense of cultural depth into a desert sheikdom with little urban tradition. Each piece of the building has been allocated to an individual architect or designer, and Isozaki’s assistants are marshalling them for an audience with the sheik to present their projects. The architects wait, and they wait, drinking coffee and eating pastries dispensed by waiters in black tie until the sheik finally arrives, almost two hours late. Here is the relationship between power and architecture in its most naked form, a relationship of subservience to the mighty as clear as if the architect were a hairdresser or a tailor. The villa was never built. I last heard of the sheik when the London newspapers reported that he was under house arrest, suspected of abusing the culture ministry’s budget.
We are used to discussing architecture in terms of its relationship to art history, or as a reflection of technological change, or as an expression of social anthropology. We know how to categorize buildings by the shapes of their windows, or the decorative detail of their column capitals. We understand them as the products of available materials and skills. What we are not so comfortable with is coming to grips with the wider political dimensions of a building, why they exist in fact, rather than how. It’s an omission that is surprising, given the closeness of the relationship between architecture and power. Architecture has always been dependent on the allocation of precious resources and scarce manpower. As such, its execution has always been at the discretion of those with their hands on the levers of power rather than that of architects. Pharaonic Egypt did not devote the surplus from its harvests to the construction of the pyramids, rather than to road building or abolishing slavery, because of any creative urge of the Pharaoh’s architects.
Despite a certain amount of pious rhetoric in recent years about architecture’s duty to serve the community, to work at all in any culture the architect has to establish a relationship with the rich and the powerful. There is nobody else with the resources to build. And it is the genetically predetermined destiny of the architect to do anything he can to try to build, just as it is the mission of migrating salmon to make one last exhausting upriver trip to spawn before expiring. The architectural profession can be seen, then, not as well meaning, but ready to enter into a Faustian bargain. They have no alternative but to trim and compromise with whatever regime is in power.
Every kind of political culture uses architecture for what can, at heart, be understood as rational, pragmatic purposes, even when it is used to make a symbolic point. But when the line between political calculation and psychopathology breaks down, architecture becomes not just a matter of practical politics, but a fantasy, even a sickness that consumes its victims.
There is a psychological parallel between making a mark on the landscape with a building and the exercise of political power. Both depend on the imposition of will. Seeing their world view confirmed by reducing an entire city to the scale of a doll’s house in an architectural model certainly has an inherent appeal for those who regard the individual as being of no account. Even more attractive is the possibility of imposing their will in the physical sense on a city by reshaping it in the way that Haussmann did in Paris. Architecture feeds the egos of the susceptible. They grow more and more dependent on it to the point where architecture becomes an end in itself, seducing its addicts as they build more and more on an ever larger scale. Building is the means by which the egotism of the individual is expressed in its most naked form: the Edifice Complex.
On balance, Haussmann’s Paris steered clear of megalomania. Ceauşescu’s Bucharest did not. In both these cities, demolition was almost as essential a part of the process of transformation as new building. And destruction and construction can be seen as closely related. Whatever else it was, the assault on the twin towers of the World Trade Center, driven by visceral hatred, was a literal acceptance of the iconic power of architecture, and an attempt to destabilize that power even more forcefully through erasure. The fact that one of the hijackers at the controls of the airliners was himself an architecture graduate only serves to underline the point.
This book is an exploration of what it is that makes individuals and societies build in the way that they do, what their buildings mean, and the uses to which they are put. It looks in some detail at a selection of buildings, architects, billionaires, politicians and dictators, mostly from the twentieth century, in the belief that understanding the nature of their shared obsessions can help us protect ourselves from their more malevolent ambitions. These are buildings that can tell us a great deal about our fears and passions, about the symbols that serve to define a society and about the way that we all live our lives.
Adolf Hitler went to Paris only once in his life. He flew there in the wake of the French Army’s collapse as the victorious leader of the Third Reich he had created, stretching from the Atlantic to the Soviet frontier in order to wash away Germany’s humiliation at Versailles in 1919. He landed at Le Bourget just before dawn on 28 June 1940. But it was not generals or party leaders who sat closest to him on his personal plane. Extraordinarily, Hitler chose to savour his greatest moment of military triumph by sharing it with two architects, Albert Speer and Herman Giesler, along with Arno Breker, the regime’s sculptor-in-chief. He skipped the obvious political sites. Instead of the Elysée Palace and the National Assembly he took them to see Charles Garnier’s Opera House. Hitler spent more than an hour testing his memories of the plans he had studied so obsessively in his days of poverty in Vienna. He knew the building well enough in his mind to be able to point out the blocked door that had once led to a room lost in later alterations with a certain smugness as they toured the grandiloquent marble corridors.
One of the twentieth century’s most unforgettable photographs was taken on the steps of Les Invalides later that day. It is an image that is a key to understanding the nature of Hitler’s pursuit of power. Hitler, the former corporal with a lifelong passion for architecture, had lingered over Napoleon’s tomb, and on the way out had entrusted Giesler with the task of designing something even more impressive, when the time came. As the group emerge into the sunshine, Hitler of course is in the centre, wearing a long white overcoat. Everybody else is dressed from head to foot in black, in an eerie precursor of the universal taste for Commes des Garçons suits among architects of the early years of the twenty-first century. Most of them are soldiers, a couple belong to Hitler’s political entourage, led by Martin Bormann. But the uniformed man on Hitler’s immediate right, pointing into the camera, is Speer. At a respectful distance to his left stand Giesler and Breker, the sculptor, in his Nazi forage cap.
Here is the leader, surrounded by his architectural acolytes. He is a magic figure radiating light, like the Sun King hemmed in by lesser mortals lost in darkness. It is a scene as carefully designed as one of Speer’s party rallies, just as pregnant with meaning and, in theory, as astonishing a tableau as if George W. Bush had decided to tour Baghdad in the company of Jeff Koons, Philip Johnson and Frank Gehry. The dictator is demonstrating his priorities and making his intentions manifestly clear: Hitler, the great architect, is ready to redesign the world. And yet, somehow, we never entirely got the message: he wanted to be seen not as a military leader, or a political figure, but as an artist. For so many leaders, architecture represents simply a means to an end. There is the real possibility that for Hitler, at least, it was always an end in itself.
By the time that Emil Hacha finally negotiated the second of the two pairs of outsize bronze gates forming the ceremonial entrance to the Reich Chancellery on Wilhelmstrasse, it was already well after midnight. The Czech President had made the short drive through the empty streets of Berlin from his suite at the Adlon Hotel sitting beside Hitler’s foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop. A tiny crowd, no more than fifty people, waited in the rain to see them sweep by on the way to the most difficult three hours of Hacha’s life.
2. Hitler on a triumphal visit to Paris, flanked by his two favourite architects, Albert Speer, right, and Hermann Giesler, left, and his sculptor, Arno Breker, far left.
This was a brutal time to be embarking on a state visit, but 15 March 1939 was one of the more desperate days in European history. Hitler had reoccupied the Rhineland and annexed Austria without firing a shot. If he could, he was determined to secure full control of Czechoslovakia in the same way. The first and only president of the Second Czechoslovak Republic travelled to Berlin in a despairing and futile attempt to snatch his country back from oblivion. Czechoslovakia had already lost the Sudetenland, with its carefully prepared lines of pillboxes and fortifications on the frontier with Germany, in the betrayal of the Munich conference. Now Hitler wanted to destroy the beleaguered state altogether. Encouraged by Germany, the Hungarians and the Russians were moving to scoop up slices of Czech territory, leaving the rest to Hitler as a protectorate of the Reich. At the same time, the Slovaks prepared to secede to create their own satellite nation, allowing Hitler a free run to attack Poland, his next target in the search for Lebensraum.
Hacha had no cards but his dignity left to play. His officials had been telephoning Berlin for the last three days pleading for an audience with the Führer. By the time Hitler finally agreed to a meeting, 200,000 German soldiers were mobilized to move across the frontier. In fact the special train bringing Hacha, accompanied by his daughter, his foreign minister Frantisek Chvalovsky and a small entourage of officials, was more than an hour late arriving in Berlin, delayed by troop transports moving south and east. Hacha’s position as a supplicant was made immediately clear. A guard of honour met the President at the Anhalt station, fulfilling diplomatic protocol to the letter; but the reception party numbered only insultingly junior functionaries, and the German bandmaster skipped Czechoslovakia’s national anthem. Hacha must have wished that he had stayed in Prague and ordered his troops into action. The negotiating process had started without the Czechs knowing it, and they had already lost the first round. Hacha went to the Adlon Hotel, while his foreign minister, Chvalovsky, called on Ribbentrop at the German foreign office, who then accompanied him to the Adlon. The terms they took to Hacha were so brutal that the Czechs at first refused to leave the hotel. Ribbentrop left them thinking it over for more than an hour while he went to see Hitler alone before finally returning to collect them. According to one account, he passed the time watching a film with the Führer.
Hacha had become president when his predecessor, Eduard Benes, went into exile in 1938 following Neville Chamberlain’s refusal to back his stand against Hitler’s territorial demands, and his acquiescence to the dismemberment of the First Czechoslovak Republic. Hacha was a respected jurist and the head of the Czechoslovak Supreme Court, but he had little political experience and even less stomach for a fight. Whether his readiness to accommodate Hitler was an attempt to save his own skin or to spare his country from futile bloodshed remains a sharply contested issue. He was to die in disgrace in 1945 in the hospital of the Prague prison where he was held as a collaborator after the Allied liberation of the German protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Whatever his intentions, he would have needed real courage to sustain himself as he entered the Chancellery’s Court of Honour on that Berlin night six years earlier.
Albert Speer had designed this courtyard, a prelude to the Chancellery itself, as a world within a world, from which there was no way out except on Hitler’s terms. Its blank, floodlit walls shut out the city to create a hollow space open to the sky in which Hitler’s guards, drilling back and forth, cast giant shadows against the background of its superhuman proportions. The void of the courtyard was filled by shouted orders and the sound of marching boots on stone. Here was a practical demonstration of the expression of political power through building, its symbolic quality put to use for highly specific purposes. Less than a hundred miles away, a well-equipped Czech army with modern artillery, technologically advanced aircraft and Skoda tanks was waiting for Hacha’s order to defend their country. In Berlin, however, the President was being made to feel helpless, transfixed by Speer’s floodlights on an architectural stage set, meticulously designed to demonstrate to him that he was at the mercy of the most powerful man in the world.
Hacha reviewed his second honour guard of the night, to the musical accompaniment of another military band, and ascended the steps up from the courtyard to the tall, narrow entrance to the Chancellery, flanked by a pair of Arno Breker’s 15-foot-high bronzes. They depicted prominently muscled, naked Teutonic giants. The one on Hacha’s left held a drawn sword to represent the Wehrmacht, while his comrade on the other side, symbolizing the National Socialist Party, grasped a burning torch. Above Hacha’s head, set into the German stone of which the whole Chancellery was built, a bronze eagle took wing, gripping a swastika in its claws. Four monolithic columns dominated the steps. Hacha was a short man in his late sixties with thinning, receding hair, prominent eyebrows, and suffering from a weak heart. His ascent – under the gaze of the SS guards in steel helmets and white gloves, bayonets fixed to their rifles – left him out of breath. The steps demonstrated to visitors that ascending to the Führer’s higher plane was a privilege, but they also created a windowless ground floor, reflecting the defensive planning of a building linked to three levels of underground bunkers, below and behind the Chancellery. Hacha was white-faced, anxious and dizzy as he made his way across the entrance lobby, completed just eight weeks earlier. He was exactly the kind of visitor that the Chancellery was designed for. If ever architecture had been intended for use as a weapon of war, it was here.
The grandeur of the Chancellery was an essential part of Hitler’s campaign to browbeat Hacha into surrender. Beyond the courtyard, itself a kind of summation of the Nazi State, was an elaborate sequence of spaces inside the Chancellery, carefully orchestrated to deliver official visitors to Hitler’s presence in a suitably intimidated frame of mind. After a walk a quarter of a mile long, visitors were left in no doubt of the power of the new Germany. This was architecture that was very much a means to an end. ‘I have an urgent assignment for you,’ Hitler told Speer at the beginning of 1938. ‘I shall be holding extremely important conferences in the near future. For these I need grand halls and salons that will make an impression on people, especially on the lesser dignitaries.’ Bismarck, of course, was able to orchestrate German unification without the need for any such ego-boosting props. He had worked in the relatively modest surroundings of the old Chancellery, which was swallowed up by Speer’s work. But then Bismarck had never wanted to be an architect.
Past the Chancellery guards and out of the way of the floodlights, Ribbentrop ushered Hacha across the porch and into a windowless hall beyond, its walls inlaid with the pagan imagery of mosaic eagles grasping burning torches garlanded with oak leaves, its floors slippery with marble. There was no furniture, nor even a trace of carpet to soften the severity of the hall. A clouded glass ceiling floated over the marble, electrically lit from within to cast a shadowless light, in an inescapably modern, almost art-deco gesture. Even Hitler could not shut out every trace of the contemporary world. This was the space that the sculptor Arno Breker described as ‘permeated with the fire of political power’. And it had no other purpose than to impress. Under the hovering glass, and the massive marble walls, the bronze doors at the far end of the hall shimmered and beckoned and threatened. Visitors were propelled down its length as if being whirled through a wind tunnel. As Hacha walked, he was aware of his heart accelerating in rapid fluctuating beats.
Moving through the next set of doors, Ribbentrop led Hacha across the floor of a circular room topped with a dome. Speer designed it in an ineffectual attempt to conceal the fact that even the inexorable march of his triumphal axis toward Hitler’s presence still had to adapt itself, for the time being at least, to the random accidents of the geometry of Berlin’s street plan and surviving architectural fragments of an earlier state. Beyond this room, Hacha found another echoing marble hall. At 450 feet long, it was twice the length of the hall of mirrors in Versailles. Hitler and Speer never tired of repeating the fact as they reeled off endless lists of the record-breaking architectural statistics to which they laid claim with the Chancellery.
In the far-off distance Hacha could see yet another space, the reception hall, to which Hitler had summoned the Berlin diplomatic corps for the Chancellery’s inauguration that January. As he had said then, ‘on the long walk from the entrance to the reception hall, they will get a taste of the power and grandeur of the German Reich’. But this was not where Ribbentrop was leading Hacha. The hall that they walked through was 30 feet high. On the left, a parade of windows looked out over Voss Strasse, and on the right were five giant doorways, each 17 feet high. They stopped at the central pair of double doors, guarded by two more SS men in steel helmets. On a bronze scroll above the doorcase were the initials AH. This was Hitler’s study, which he called his workroom, though theatre was a more appropriate description. Hacha might perhaps have recognized the eighteenth-century tapestries hanging on either side of the door from his days as a law student on holiday in Vienna. They were taken from the Kunsthistorisches Museum and depicted Alexander the Great’s conquest of what was then the known world.
3. Hitler asked Albert Speer to design the Chancellery in Berlin to intimidate and impress. The Czechoslovakian president suffered a heart attack in its endless corridors.
The room boasted a coffered ceiling high overhead. In the far corner stood Adolf Hitler, his desk positioned against one of the five floor-to-ceiling windows. Sprawling over 4,000 square feet, this was hardly just a room. To walk from the door to the desk took a nerve-racking full minute. Hacha may have missed the significance of Alexander’s exploits on the tapestry outside, but the marquetry inlay showing Mars with his sword halfway out of its scabbard on the front of Hitler’s desk could not have sent a more obvious message on this of all nights. It was a message amplified by the blood-red marble walls, the giant globe on a stand next to the marble table by the window, and the carpet woven with a swastika motif. A bust of Bismarck sat by the desk. Hacha would not have known that this was one of Speer’s sleights of hand. The original had been smashed during the building of the Chancellery. Speer had kept what he took to be a bad omen secret and asked Breker to make a copy. ‘We gave it some patina by steeping it in tea,’ he later claimed.
Far away on the other side of the room, over a fire-place set between twin doors, hung Lembach’s portrait of Bismarck. In front of the fire was a sofa as big as a lifeboat, occupied by Goebels and Goering. Air Marshal Goering began to describe the effortless slaughter his Stukas could inflict on Prague. They would start with the destruction of Prague Castle and then move across the city, quadrant by quadrant. In the tension, Hacha suddenly collapsed under the pressure. He rallied, but three-quarters of an hour after his arrival, before the treaty putting the Czechs under German protection could be signed, he fainted again, and Hitler’s own doctor was called. ‘I had so belaboured the old man that his nerves gave way completely, he was on the point of signing, then he had a heart attack,’ Hitler told Speer later. ‘In the adjoining room Dr Morell gave him an injection, but in this case it was too effective. Hacha regained too much of his strength, revived, and was no longer prepared to sign.’
It wasn’t until 4 a.m. that Hacha’s spirit broke, and he finally agreed to put his name to a document that spelled out Czechoslovakia’s abject capitulation, declaring that he had entrusted the fate of the Czechs to the hands of Hitler and the Reich. Czechoslovakia had ceased to exist, and Hacha was reduced to the status of a puppet ruler of the German protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, a humiliation that he had ample time to reflect on during his endless walk back through the marble and mosaic halls of the Chancellery.
Speer’s architecture had apparently done all that Hitler had expected of it, dealing a near-fatal blow to the Czech President, and helping Germany overrun an entire country unopposed. Speer had made every piece of stone, every decorative rug, every piece of furniture, every light switch, and each twist and turn in the floor plan, serve to reinforce the message of Germany’s inherent superiority.
Speer was passionate about his determination to use real stone, rather than a cosmetic veneer of the material, to create buildings that would have a dignity even as ruins. But in spite of this gesture toward authenticity, at a deeper level his was an architecture of sleight of hand, rather than substance. Germany was not the most powerful state in the world. Hitler was not Caesar Augustus. Speer’s buildings pretended that they were. But perhaps all architecture depends on the creation of an illusion of one kind or another.
The Chancellery was a long thin building, much of it just one room and a wide corridor, running the whole quarter-mile length of Voss Strasse. Speer created a symmetrical stone façade for the corridor that faced across the street to address the back of Wertheim’s department store. To give this façade a certain palatial quality, he divided it into three, with a set-back central section, and two projecting wings at each end each with their own column-flanked entrance. Taken at face value, the gigantic façade, which implied that a massive palace extended behind it, and the reality, which consisted of just one room plus a hallway, were an absurd mismatch. Official visitors, misled by the expansive grandiloquence of Voss Strasse and arriving at the wrong door, needed to be ushered around the corner, to the sliver of stone that contained the main entrance even though the logic of Speer’s architecture suggested it was the palace’s back door, for admission. Otherwise, they would miss the whole charade. Skip all those grand entrances, courtyards and halls, and they would be able to stride across the corridor straight to Hitler’s desk.
There were actually four levels above ground in the Chancellery, but the façade was designed to make it look as if there were just three, making the proportions so massive that the sills of the lowest windows, supposedly on the ground floor, were 12 feet above the pavement. Pedestrians facing this gigantic stone object found themselves confronted with cold hostility. The message of the architecture could not be made more obvious: this was a place reserved for giants, even if the building served as nothing more than an impressive wrapping for the single most essential element in the design – the triumphal route to Hitler’s desk. Hacha experienced it like a potholer, moving from one giant underground cavern to another, never sure exactly where he would find himself, or what he would have to confront next, as an intimidating and bewildering sequence of spaces unfolded in front of him.
Even the process of building the Chancellery was presented as a demonstration of German technical and organizational superiority over other races. Speer and Hitler conspired a little misleadingly to suggest that the whole project took just a year to complete, from start to finish. They announced the scheme to build a new Chancellery only in January 1938, when Speer had already started buying houses on Voss Strasse and was preparing to demolish them to clear the site. Much was made of the thousands of workers brought in from all over the Reich to work on the project, and of the Führer’s munificence in accommodating them in Berlin’s hotels.
The role of the concentration camp for political prisoners at Flossenburg in Upper Bavaria in supplying the white granite to be used in the building of Hitler’s new Berlin was less publicized at the time, but the camps had an intimate connection with Speer’s architecture. The SS had established the German Earth and Stone Works company, known as DEST, in 1938 to provide the building materials for the new Germany, forcing their prisoners to work themselves to death, to pay for the system that imprisoned and tortured them. The Flossenburg and Mauthausen camps were carefully sited close to stone quarries so as to serve Speer’s needs for his monumental building projects – not just in Berlin, but Nuremberg, Munich and Linz too. The camps and the monuments were part of a single system: each made the other possible. With their stone watchtowers and their turreted walls, the camps themselves represented a certain architectural ambition. Hundreds of Spanish Republican prisoners died building them. Two more camps were established at Oranienburg to supply bricks. Later, when Speer became Hitler’s armaments minister, he used them as a threat to intimidate those workers he called ‘slackers’ and dissuade them from claiming sickness to avoid war work. He was also intending to use slave labour on Berlin’s construction sites, guarded by the SS.
Architecture, as Speer practised it, was primarily a means to an end. Aside from its role in supporting the concentration camps, and defining the Nazi State, that end was personal aggrandisement. The more that he could please his patron the Führer, the greater the rewards. And the more that his work helped to make complete the victory of Nazi Germany over the world, the greater would be the resources from which those rewards could be made. The details of what Speer built were less significant to him than the fact that he was building what the Führer wanted. Speer studied architecture at Berlin’s Technical University but failed to secure the place that he wanted in Hans Poelzig’s master class – because, said Speer with elaborate and unconvincing humility, his drawing failed to make the grade. So he studied under Poelzig’s mirror opposite, Heinrich Tessenow, instead. Poelzig was an expressionist, with a following among left-wing students. Tessenow was an austere classicist, and though never a Nazi himself, he attracted the right-wing nationalist students who dominated the Technical University. Despite his earlier preferences, Speer was diligent enough in learning the mannerisms of his master for Tessenow to employ him as an assistant. Later, Speer was ready to accommodate Hitler’s own far more flamboyant tastes. No doubt if Hitler had demanded architectural abstraction, Speer would still have been happy to oblige. But Hitler wanted ancient Rome, and Speer did his best to provide it.