New Urbanism and Nazi Germany : a comparative study of neotraditional community design and the Third Reich

At the 1937 Paris exposition, representatives of Nazi Germany erected a grand pavilion to display the accomplishments of their regime. The award winning neoclassical structure, designed by Albert Speer, brimmed with the shiny wares and Teutonic art of the Third Reich. It stood as a temple to German facism, and its altar was a "Podium of Honor." There, above a raised dais, hung Rudolf Hengstenberg's Comradeship. The painting depicts a group of carpenters and other tradesmen constructing a house. Directing the workers were a smaller group of engineers and foremen. At the center of this enterprise stood the leader, the architect, watching over his charge with dapper authority. The state-sponsored canvas was no doubt intended as an allegory of class harmony, yet it was also highly representative of the Third Reich. In Hitler's Germany, the design professional emerged as a central figure who not only designed the built environment, but also helped direct the social and economic elements of the community. Architects and planners imposed enlightened guidance on a troubled and foundering state, and, in the process, were to restore strength, purity and harmony to a nation racked by decades of Weimar mismanagement. To students of the Third Reich, the prominence achieved by Nazi designers should come as no surprise. Adolph Hitler was, by his own admission, as architectural dilettante. In his youth he had aspired to become a designer, only to be thwarted by his lack of technical skill. Perhaps to compensate for these failures, he later surrounded himself with architects and portayed himself as "master builder of the Third Reich." Under Hitler, state architecture became far more than an agent of civic expression. It became a means of uniting the German people while strengthening their culture and promoting their government's ideology.