Ceremonial visit by U.S. President Ronald Reagan to the Kolmeshöhe Cemetery, near Bitburg, West Germany in May 5, 1985, with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. CC BY-SA 4.0 Elke Wetzig.
“We’re told that after the war the Nazis vanished without a trace
But battalions of fascists still dream of a master race
The history books, they tell of their defeat in ’45
But they all came out of the woodwork on the day the Nazi died
[. . .]
So if you meet with these historians, I’ll tell you what to say
Tell them that the Nazis never really went away
They’re out there burning houses down and peddling racist lies
And we’ll never rest again until every Nazi dies”
—Chumbawumba, “The Day the Nazi Died,” 1998
“To understand non-Nazi architecture, it is useful to study Nazi architecture, and as part of it to analyze the phenomenon of Albert Speer.”1 Historians Francesco Dal Co and Sergio Polano wrote these words in the Spring 1978 edition of Oppositions, a now defunct publication issued by the Institute for Architecture & Urban Studies (IAUS) in New York. IAUS was founded by Peter Eisenman and operated from 1967 to 1985. It was bankrolled by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and the Department of Architecture at Cornell University.2 IAUS’s clients were the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the State of New York, the Ford Foundation, and the State of Israel, to name just a few.3 Philip Johnson, a wealthy fascist from Ohio who established MoMA’s architecture department as its first director, worked closely with IAUS.4 Johnson is remembered as “the Institute’s gray eminence,” and for a brief period after 1981, when IAUS was experiencing financial difficulties, it almost rebranded as “the Philip Johnson Center for Architecture” to stay afloat.5
As the aforementioned quote suggests, the authors were trying to make a logical case to justify studying the work of Albert Speer: the most powerful architect in the Third Reich who by 1978 had completed his prison sentence and was living freely in Germany, enjoying a newfound celebrity status in niche cultural milieus. The a priori assumption of Dal Co and Polano was that if you dive deep enough into “Nazi architecture,” you might dialectically arrive at its opposite, what they called “non-Nazi architecture.” And this is what they were trying to do, through Speer. “Hitler’s architect” Albert Speer, also remembered as “Hitler’s second in command,” assumed a much broader role than just designing buildings and utopian cities for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, however.6 He was also minister for armaments and war production, making him one of the most powerful figures in Nazi Germany alongside Heinrich Himmler, who was party to the execution of Alphonse Laurencic in Spain. Fritz Ertl, the Austrian Bauhaus alum who designed Auschwitz’s crematoriums, answered to Speer and Himmler.7
Speer was released from Berlin’s Spandau Prison on September 30, 1966.8 In 1978, Dal Co and Polano interviewed Speer for Oppositions. (Can you wrap your mind around that? Sitting with one of history’s most vile, murderous creatures?) This, however, wasn’t the first time Speer had the spotlight in a “centerfold.” Seven years earlier, Speer had given a lengthy interview in a 1971 edition of Playboy. (Yes, that Playboy.) In the interview Speer tried to play down his relationship with Hitler and, to exonerate himself, described Hitler as “possessing” a certain “coldness” and “deadness.”9 The Speer interview in Playboy was followed by an advertisement for cheap whiskey and other things that can be left to the reader’s imagination.
Between 1966 and 1978, in the space of just twelve years, the Nazi Albert Speer was released from prison, had a major splash in Playboy, denounced Hitler, helped sell some cheap booze, and starred in a fancy architecture journal. Not bad for a genocidal war criminal!
In fact, the perverse fetishization of Speer had begun much earlier. In the 1930s, Philip Johnson, then a journalist working in Nazi Germany for a far-right US newspaper, sent glowing reviews of Speer’s work to design publications.10 Much later, in 2013, Leon Krier devoted a whole book to Speer (Albert Speer: Architecture 1932–1942), for which Robert A. M. Stern wrote a sympathetic foreword.11 Krier called Speer “a great artist.” That same year, Eisenman said in an interview, “I’m very fond of the Reich Chancellery,” a famous building by Speer in Berlin.12 In hindsight, this shared affinity for Speer’s work makes sense: Krier, Stern, and Eisenman were three of Philip Johnson’s closest protégés, or “the kids,” as Johnson endearingly called them.13
Speer’s Italian fascist counterpart architects—Giuseppe Terragni, Armando Brasini, Giovanni Guerinni, Ernesto La Padula, Marcello Piacentini, Mario Romano—also featured in many renowned publications.14 According to Eisenman, he and British architectural historian Colin Rowe first took an interest in Terragni in 1961, a time when Casa del Fascio (House of the Fascists), went by the more innocuous name Casa del Popolo (House of the People), owing to the building’s obvious political associations.15 In 1968, Italian architect Bruno Zevi published a monograph about Terragni, albeit one that skated “cautiously around the subject, finding a way through its political complexity,” as Eisenman put it.16 In 1969, at the Conference of Architects for the Study of the Environment (CASE) held at MoMA, Eisenman and his cronies declared their affinity for Terragni before a large audience.17 In 1971, IAUS presented a study to Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir on new “urban settlements” in Palestine.18 In 1975, Arthur Drexler, then head curator of MoMA’s architecture department, put Terragni’s influence in a nutshell, saying that the New York Five’s “formal properties derive first and foremost from Le Corbusier of the twenties and thirties [. . .] and Giuseppe Terragni, whose handful of marvelous buildings exploited the ambiguity of wall and column relationships his contemporaries tried to get rid of.”19 In 1985, IAUS closed. In 1995, Greg Lynn described Terragni as the “germ of Chomskian structuralism” that spawned poststructuralist architecture.20 (In those years poststructuralists with a penchant for fascist architecture frequently invoked Noam Chomsky: Eisenman said he looked to Chomsky’s Cartesian Linguistics [1966] and Language and Mind [1968] for House I and House VI, for instance.21) In 1996, Anyone Corporation (ANY), Log’s umbrella company, published the Philip Johnson Festschrift.22 In 2003, Eisenman published Giuseppe Terragni: Transformations, Decompositions, Critiques, a book he penned with Terragni himself together with Manfredo Tafuri.23 Historian Kurt Forster wrote many flattering canonical texts about Terragni.24 Eisenman ceaselessly worshiped Terragni’s House of the Fascists in Como, Italy, his entire life—influencing countless impressionable, sycophantic students who simply didn’t know any better.25
Much of this shameless fetishism was happening during Italy’s Years of Lead (Anni di Piombo) in the 1970s and 1980s when Italian neofascists gained power and assassinated and disappeared hundreds of people, with help from the CIA.26 During the same period, on the western side of the Atlantic Ocean, talking heads at MoMA, Cornell, and Princeton University were openly praising European fascist architects; on the eastern side, Italian fascists executed antifascist filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, Franco ruled Spain with an iron fist, and Salazar was terrorizing millions of Angolans.27 Fascism never went away, and yet so many white professors and curators were hell bent on adding fuel to the flames. Extolling Speer and Terragni was utterly reprehensible, yet this fetishism went largely unchallenged. And it still continues to this day! There is no shortage of new books about fascist architecture—an industrial complex of sorts.28 Enter any architecture school in the US and you’ll likely find a professor who tells you how good Terragni is, and maybe even Speer and Brasini as well, depending on their relationship to postmodernism. Most students can name at least a few fascist architects thanks to people like this. Ask students to name an antifascist architect, and you’ll likely see blank stares. That’s the US education system for you.
But weird pseudo-intellectual apologias for fascists happened outside architecture too. From Eichmann’s trial to the interview with Speer in Playboy, Operation Paperclip, Wernher von Braun’s directorship of NASA, and Ronald Reagan’s infamous 1985 visit to Germany’s Bitburg Cemetery, where he paid his respects to Nazi soldiers (famously criticized in “Bonzo Goes to Bitburg” by The Ramones), the revitalization and rebranding of fascism at the cusp of neoliberalism was an epistemological mess, architecture notwithstanding!29 By the 1970s, Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl—director of Triumph of the Will, a Nazi film produced by Goebbels, for which Speer designed the set—was praised by Western film theorists, not unlike Speer and Terragni.30 Immediately after the war, critics rightfully tarred Riefenstahl as an “unindicted co-conspirator” of the Holocaust.31 A few decades later, critics hailed her as being on a par with Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Sergei Eisenstein, and Agnes Varda.
The rehabilitation of Speer, Terragni, and Riefenstahl makes for apt comparisons. In opposition, artists like Pasolini and critics such as Susan Sontag were some of the few who took a stand against fascism’s burgeoning popularity in art history and cultural circles. And then there was Daniel Spoerri, a Swiss Jewish artist whose father was killed in the Holocaust.32 Spoerri opted for a more slapstick approach to antagonize fascists: in 1987, in Hamburg, Germany, Spoerri designed and built a public freestanding bathroom, Crap Chancellery, meant to look like Speer’s Reich Chancellery.33 Two large “plastic excrement mounds” were placed outside a scaled-down faux Reich Chancellery façade, in the place where grandiose Nazi eagles would have been. Thanks to hidden generators tucked inside the pillars, steam rose up from the massive (plastic) shit piles, ostensibly replacing a grandiose fascist symbol with fecal matter.34 The provocation invited unsuspecting Germans to relieve themselves after consuming greasy carnival food inside the replica of a sacrosanct fascist building, beloved by none other than Peter Eisenman—a proper sacrilegious antifascist shithouse.
Earlier, in 1974, Sontag published an essay titled “Fascinating Fascism,” where she came out as an opponent of what she referred to as the “rehabilitation” of fascist artists happening in those years. In it, she took aim at Riefenstahl and Speer sycophants, attacking their combined attempts to bury their kindred friendships with Hitler and Goebbels: “The purification of Leni Riefenstahl’s reputation of its Nazi dross has been happening for some time, but it has reached a climax this year.” She prefaced this by saying: “It is not that Riefenstahl’s Nazi past has suddenly become acceptable. It is simply that, with the turn of the cultural wheel, it no longer matters. Instead of dispensing a freeze-dried version of history from above, a liberal society settles such questions by waiting for cycles of taste to distill out the controversy.”35 In response to the Riefenstahl partisans, Sontag rightfully vilified her as a “horrid propagandist” for her Nazi bosses.
In Pasolini’s Salò (1975), inspired by Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom (1785), we also witness antifascist critiques of the moral and cultural decay wrought by fascist depravity. Sade’s ire had been directed at the French nobility and the Church, while Pasolini’s target was the rise of Italian consumerism after World War II. Sade’s 1785 critical fiction explored how noble libertines indulged in depraved acts with kidnapped victims in a German homestead. Pasolini’s Salò is a modern antifascist adaptation of Sade’s novel set in the Italian countryside—a film about eighteen teenagers who were kidnapped and tortured by Italian fascists in the 1940s.36 While Pasolini’s film is viewed as an extreme act of cinema, Salò is first and foremost a work of antifascist art and architectural criticism in its employment of visual techniques, historical settings, political theories, and religious critique to produce a depraved world that clearly has its origins in the (then) current one, producing a sort of belligerent nonfiction, similar to Kriss Ravetto’s argument in The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics.37
In both fictional milieus by Pasolini and Sade we see characters deprived of love and air in a world driven by a philosophy of inwardness, subjugation, and worldlessness. We see chilling allegories and takedowns of fascism itself. Pasolini’s film debuted three weeks after he was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered by far-right zealots, his body left on a beach in Ostia outside Rome.38 The queer Marxist filmmaker’s art was too dangerous, but only to the status quo and its acceptance of neofascism wrapped in the veil of postwar consumerism. Sade’s 1785 work, 120 Days of Sodom, coincidentally takes place in Germany’s Black Forest, the location of Martin Heidegger’s infamous writer’s hut, as well as where his nativist ethnonationalism was rooted.39 (A coincidence not lost on these authors!) This synchronicity speaks directly of a transtemporal connection between Sade’s criticism of the ruling class, Pasolini’s criticism of Italian consumerism and fascism and its effects on the working class, and this book’s fundamental criticism of the professors, curators, and architects who defanged (and depoliticized) revolutionary ideological practices—bad actors influenced by fascist worldviews.
Pasolini’s refusal to disengage resulted in a work of art that was dangerous because it did not serve the interests of capital directly and/or provide cover either for historical fascism or for constantly evolving capitalist consumerism. As Pasolini stated in an interview not long before his death, “De Sade’s sadomasochism has a clear and specific purpose: the effect of what power does to the human body—the reduction of the human body to a commodity; the cancellation of another person’s personality.”40 Methods of extremity were (aesthetically and narratively) weaponized into an effect in Salò. Both 120 Days of Sodom and Salò show how libertine fascism reinforces the rugged individualism inherent in capitalism—whether discussing its consumerist approaches or its evolution toward fascism. The villa is a villain in that it does a few things very well in the heterotopian ambition of incompatibility, supercharging the act of “dwelling” to include acts of survival alongside those of abuse, murder, torture, and rape. These individual acts are enforced through a system of collaboration not only with guards and storytellers but also eventually with the prisoners themselves, since the panopticon’s biopower is inherent in the intimate surveillance that takes place in the villa. Violence and propaganda are the only identifiable options for prisoners to partake in—death is even teased but rarely given before the cessation of endless torture.
The villa and estate, in the works of both Sade and Pasolini, are outside the realm of legality. Extended in retrospect to Sade’s Sodom, one can view Heidegger’s Black Forest (or many other picturesque locations) as existing outside the realm of legality but within a realm of locality, where customs and prejudice are justifiable and exonerated.41 The villas in both works encapsulate the worldlessness of Heideggerian phenomenology, and the anti-utopianism of Foucauldian heterotopia. These are cautionary tales of the paths offered to us under capitalism, but more specifically of the almost logical ways in which to arrive at them—through self-preservation, rugged individualism, an inhuman level of indulgence founded on labor extraction, innocence, safety, and delight. The libertines use the locality for their own fascistic ambitions as an expression of the world they want to contain.
Pasolini’s architectural criticism is expressed in his painterly construction of our view of the estate in which the movie takes place. Shot primarily in three villas and one production studio, Pasolini was intently reverent toward the Italian Mannerist and Baroque buildings he chose to work with. (It is worth noting here that Pasolini was also an admirer of the “sacred” masters like Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, Fra Angelico, Caravaggio, Girolamo Romanino, Picasso, Giorgio Morandi, Renato Guttuso, Cézanne, and Carlo Levi; and some of his closest friends, such as Toti Scialoja, Giuseppe Zigaina, Federico de Rocco, and Renzo Vespignani, the artist who illustrated Kafka’s books, were painters.42) The oldest of the buildings where Pasolini filmed was Villa Gonzaga Zani, designed and constructed in the sixteenth century by Giulio Romano, who collaborated with Raphael.43 The Mannerist villa is entirely fitting as the principal space for the interior scenes. After all, Mannerism is generally accepted as an anticlassical form of architectural rhetoric, demonstrating that an idiosyncratic expression of opposition to established norms could be quirky, violent, sexual, but also contemporary. The way in which Pasolini foregrounds Raphael’s tutelage in his spatial use of Romano’s villa is a nod to Federico Fellini. Framing and lighting renders the depravity of fascist inhumanity visible, and indeed impossible to look away from, thanks to long establishing shots and extreme close-ups.44
Unmoving shots give center stage to violent scenes against the backdrop of Villa Gonzaga Zani’s Mannerist interior and/or Villa Sorra’s Neoclassical exterior. (The latter would be reproduced in a soundstage in Rome to film the more controversial crescendo scenes.) Villa Sorra was designed by Giuseppe Antonio Torri in the late seventeenth century and built in the early eighteenth century. Here Pasolini uses its gardens and settings to translocate Sade’s Black Forest site to his Salò. The courtyard scene finale, which sees some of the most depraved abuse and violence, is a choreography of Baroque and Neoclassical architectural landscape tropes. Both Pasolini and Sade use innocents and children (particularly the abuse of children) to affect the viewer in a very direct way. Salò elicits a response in the hope that it will be impossible for the viewer to remain neutral: The film gives us the choice between antifascism or death of the self—a necropolitical and ethical dilemma we also raised in the prelude with respect to Alphonse Laurencic.45 Have you, dear reader, made your mind up yet? Which side would you have chosen?
At the end of Salò, the defiant guard raises his left fist in the air shortly before being gunned down by the libertines for breaking their rules, his gesture reminiscent of the historic working class and socialist symbol of solidarity. The libertines extinguish the symbols of liberation before one final depraved act of collective torture, spectacle, and murder. In the final scene, Pasolini offers a perversely touching homoerotic moment between two male guards, who were privy to the death and torture of prisoners at the request of the libertines. They dance and talk about their love lives back home outside the villa, as if what just occurred either didn’t occur or was really quite normal. Fascism’s true terror comes from the insidious ways it mutates and infects the most mundane parts of life—architecture is not spared from this pathogen.
From Speer’s stripped classicism to Terragni’s futurism, fascist architecture devoured the full aesthetic spectrum, making it nearly impossible to visually identify as a unified category, at least without the obvious signs. That is to say the only thing that suggested a visual connection between Speer’s Reich Chancellery (1939) in Berlin and Terragni’s Casa del Fascio (1936) in Como were the swastikas on flags that were once draped over them. Iconography aside, the two buildings were aesthetically far apart. One thing is for certain though: Attitudes toward fascist art and architecture—no matter what it looked like—changed dramatically as the twentieth century progressed. In just two decades, fascists went from Nuremberg to the centerfolds of Playboy and Oppositions (Speer), to Hollywood’s red carpet (Riefenstahl), and to the annals of the Ivory Tower (Terragni). All this depravity begs the questions: Why were fascist artists and architects rehabilitated? What function did this rehabilitation serve? And who was responsible?
But perhaps a more troubling conundrum is this: Why were historians and theorists so comfortable exalting fascists to begin with? To an outsider, this must have looked odd. Just what was it that was so enticing to them—yesteryear’s so-called intelligentsia—about Albert Speer, Giuseppe Terragni, Leni Riefenstahl, and fascist art and architecture more broadly? They were nothing short of obsessed! Why, not even thirty years after the Holocaust, were these deplorable people getting so much good press masked behind the facade of intellectual thought? Was there something in the water? Postmodernism? Poststructuralism? Nihilism? Heideggerianism? Heterotopianism? Fascism? Moral relativism? Sheer stupidity? All of the above? Could this perversity testify to a larger epistemological problem in US architecture today? Why do people like fascist architecture, or neoliberal architecture for that matter? Is it because they’re fascists?
Sure, some fascists later atoned for their crimes against humanity, but would they have apologized if Hitler had won? Why did Dal Co, Polano, Eisenman, and their friends at Oppositions waste so much time on Speer and Terragni to begin with? What is “non-Nazi architecture,” to revisit Dal Co and Polano’s thesis? And what is “Nazi architecture”? Is Nazi architecture fascist architecture, and non-Nazi architecture antifascist architecture? What the hell does “non-Nazi” even mean? Isn’t it preferable to be anti-Nazi, antiracist, or, better still, antifascist? Call us naive, but might there be a better way to understand antifascist architecture than by obsessively studying Nazi architecture? Isn’t it more productive to study antifascist architects and their buildings and writings?
When fascist architecture is described as beautiful, what does that fully imply? (Think: “I’m very fond of the Reich Chancellery.”) Is this simply a matter of aesthetic appreciation, an admiration of form in isolation from context? Or does this judgment, perhaps unwittingly, also validate the politico-economic system that brought these structures into being? What are the underlying nefarious epistemologies that shape this perception of beauty? We would contend that these are not neutral observations; they are informed by broader ideological frameworks that may reify a troubling alignment with the forces that constructed such architecture.46 Or, to put it more bluntly: Stop fetishizing fascist bullshit!
The shifting attitudes toward fascist art and architecture serve as poignant examples of how cultural memory and political rehabilitation can intertwine. From the immediate postwar denunciations of Nazi collaborators to their subsequent reintegration into popular culture, academia, and government, this transformation was striking. By the time Reagan visited Bitburg Cemetery in 1985 to honor SS officers, fascism’s rehabilitation was nearly complete, bolstered by public apologias for those once condemned. What societal functions did this rehabilitation serve? And what forces were responsible for this erasure of accountability? How did the Overton Window shift so far in so few years?
A central intention of this book is to raise these questions and investigate the impact fascism and neoliberalism have had, and are continuing to have, on the revolutionary ambitions and imaginations of architects. In the next chapters, we attribute partial culpability to two fundamental philosophical pillars of contemporary architectural theory that have, for better or worse, become almost indistinguishable from the project of architecture itself: Heideggerian phenomenology and Foucauldian heterotopianism. Since this complication affects more than just architecture, it is important to identify the outward manifestations of fascism and neoliberalism that punctuate these approaches, their paths paved by fascism’s depoliticization during the 1970s moment Sontag decried in “Fascinating Fascism.” It is also our contention that these ideologies paved the way for fascism and neoliberalism to be comfortably hidden and recuperated as fundamentals for contemporary architectural ideation, which we touch on later in part one.
It is, therefore, crucial to recognize that while architecture cannot be neatly reduced to any single ideological movement, we cannot ignore the ways in which architectural theory and practice have already been essentialized. Historical entanglements with external philosophical frameworks—whether phenomenological or capitalist—have deeply influenced the architectural imagination, particularly in the United States, often without critical interrogation. Critiquing the lingering influence of these ideologies, even as they evolve, is essential for two key reasons. First, it exposes the dangerous persistence of unexamined default modes of thinking, which shape our understanding of the built environment, not through a standardized approach but by subtly reinforcing status quo positions. (This kind of default can be traced across modern sociopolitical decisions, many of which have resulted in policies that prioritize death and exclusion.) Second, this critique aims to establish a more rigorous framework for architectural analysis, one that is grounded both within and beyond the discipline.
The goal here is not simply to advocate an antifascist architectural aesthetic but to develop an antifascist architectural ideology—one that is informed by material conditions while remaining flexible enough to engage with the unknown. Just as Foucault’s heterotopianism and Heidegger’s concept of “being” were adapted to suit the violent ambitions of their time, architecture must remain vigilant in resisting such adaptations today.
