Last edited by Terry Lean (2007-04-17 08:50:32)

Speer's architecture, I would argue, was designed to strip the individual, as part of the collective will, in some simplistic variation of Nietzsche's ubermensch.

Most of the totalitarian architecture--including Soviet architecture--was conceived as part of a whole "groupthink" ethetic method so as to completely overwhelm the viewer. It is not dissimilar, I think, to how the Romans erected their Emperor Cults and the initial threat of the early Christians.

Indeed, in one of those numerous letters to Trajan, Pliny the Younger muses over how to convert the Christians into something more 'devoted'; and subsequently, with the use of torture, the increase of "patriotic cults" in the Roman Empire.

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With the Bauhaus and Modernism, there was that whole conception of a Platonic enlightened class which prized rational and 'purist' esthetics in opposition to the cluttered and 'immoral' gaudy esthetics of the Victorians or Art Nouveau. They viewed people who inclined towards the gaudy as reeking of the bourgeios and generally small-minded, which was also the case with the later American Abstract Expressionists, exemplified by Clement Greenburg's "Avant-Garde & Kitsch".

Adolf Loos actually wrote several treatsises condemning decorative flourishes as signifiers of an immoral and unrefined people.

Last edited by Incroyable (2007-04-17 13:25:43)

Last edited by Incroyable (2007-04-17 13:24:30)