Speer’s plan—developed in close collaboration with Hitler, who understood the nationalistic power of architecture and urban design—was to transform Berlin: the old city was to be reborn as Welthauptstadt Germania (Germania, World Capital), the seat of the new empire. [...]
Thus, through this one image—five seconds of film—viewers begin to enter the shadowlands between the world that was and the world that might have been. As your eye moves up from the column to follow the shot, you’re treated—or terrified—with a feast of unbuilt architecture. Using the latest software and rendering techniques to visualize the completion of actual archival plans from the 1930s, the production team has masterfully brought to life a mad planner’s beautiful nightmare: an “Alt-Berlin” that was designed to last a thousand years, but never built. (Dick’s story doesn’t get to Berlin, but he certainly would have enjoyed the mind-bending nature of this work.) [...]
Although never built, Speer’s monster-piece (indeed, some dubbed it the “Monsterbau,” or monster-building) truly puts the “dominate” in “dome”: looking like the U.S. Capitol on Pervitin, it would have been large enough to fit the Papal Basilica of St. Peter inside it. Hitler planned to use the massive hall to gather crowds of up to 180,000 people—what would have been by far the largest interior assembly space in the world; planners fretted that the respiration from so many excited Nazis in a single enclosed space might create its own weather patterns. [...]
Speer even contemplated the destruction of his own beautiful creations 1,000 years in the future, expounding his Ruinenwerttheorie—a “theory of ruin value”—for the architectural monuments he designed, a sort of perverted death-cult in stone, the city as mausoleum.
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