Giants of Berlin 1

How to shape the infinite

In the giants of Berlin blogpost-series, I will take a look at architects who played god and their gigantic buildings that shaped drastically the image of my charming but quite ugly city. (Sorry Berlin)

The Boob

Although the most gigantic plan of all was not completed, the remains still teach us a lesson. This post is about an architect who understood that utopia means “no place” and the one who didn’t and almost unleashed a giant dystopic boob on us.

Design that empowers

“What is architecture? shall I join Vitruvius in defining it as the art of building? Indeed no, for there is a flagrant error in this definition. Vitruvius mistakes the effect for the cause.” – Boullée in the Essai

Boullée was one of the revolutionary architects and theorists of 17th-century France. He felt responsible for spreading the ideas of enlightenment through his work. Thus he created the enlightened city. One that is within reach and where the core idea remains pure. On his paper. An infinite place where we are all connected, and equal. The designs meant to be educatory. They illustrated how a building can have an intense psychological effect and in some cases, can grant you a spark of enlightenment.

Boullée’s greatest work is the cenotaph for Newton. The absolute Newtonian space and the century’s inventions both influenced the design.

He tried to express with architectonic art the inexpressible. For that he chose the sphere with its perfect regular shape. He saw its endless symmetry as a bridge between our finite cognition and the immense nature of space. His giant creation was to create awe at the universe.

The sphere sits in a “siteless, placeless”¹ environment. To enclose the infinite, Boullée turned eternal into an interior. A vast public space without any ornament, only the void and starlike alternations of light and shade on the surface. Humans seem small in this massive room but in our imagination our movement is free. The further we come the more we can get to be the designer who see the bigger picture.

A good public building cultivates

Another of his utopian visions is the national library. A public building with a crucial function in cultivating the masses. Endless shelves to preserve infinite knowledge. The shelves lead our eyes to the one focal point ahead of us. The repetition and density of books and columns transform them into a bigger pattern. Through this defamiliarization process, they get another meaning, they become “something other”_². By imagining the place we become part of the whole, that endeavors forward.

Boullées’s work influenced many, but not everyone got the memo that a utopia, by definition, doesn’t exist. One architect who took the plans too far and tried to realize something of the same size was Albert Speer.

What on paper can expand our perception when realized can have the opposite effect. We can not fly around an actual out-of-scale building as in our imagination. We the wingless people are forced to look at it from the bottom. Our position tells us we are insignificant compared to the authority manifested before us. In these vulnerable moments, a need for a protective paternal force emerges. We fear freedom. This inescapable psychological effect was well known by the Nazis as well.

“Führerstil”

The ambitious and gifted sycophantic Albert Speer was Hitler’s favorite architect. The Nazi architecture style was relatively short-lived and artificially created. It took elements from classicism but exaggerated them to an unrecognizable extent. Hitler oversaw the plans himself. The most insane one “Germania” and the giant boob “The great Dome” reflects the megalomania of the Nazi regime.

The design that demoralizes

Albert Speer got the humble task to transform Berlin into the ideal Nazi metropolis called Germania. He adopted parts of Boullée’s work but the core concept. Speer redrew the city’s layout into one daunting Boulevard leading up to the “Great Dome”. What was in Boullées metropolis abstract, became explicit. The representation of the infinite possibilities within one individuum became the representation of the power oppressing the individuum. What was utopistic and thus critical, in Speers plans became dystopic and unreflective.

“Du bist nichts, dein Volk ist alles! – Nazi sign in the third Reich

The built environment induces visceral feelings in everyone. The third Reich saw it as a possibility to make architecture a weapon in their wheel of propaganda. Some plans of Albert Speer function more as a movie set, rather than a public space. A good location for a rally, where the people are the ornaments. Where they are fused into one waiving glob. Here not the books but the individuum transformed into something other.

Necropolis

On a usual day without a rally or celebration, Germania would feel empty for the inhabitants. As a church on every other day than Sunday, or an office building after work hours. The axiality, enlargement, and exaggeration are hollow and meaningless without a mass. Speer most probably saw himself not one in the crowd but one looking down on it. He envisioned it from a birds-eye perspective. (They created models 1:50 and even a few 1:1 of elements to make it more imaginable.) The human scale of space and time were both ignored. Following the “value of ruin” principle the Nazi buildings supposed to look magnificent after a long decay. Materials such as granite and stone were more important than those who cut them in the concentration camps. The stolen flats and properties of the Jewish communities were likewise calculated into the logistics.

To live in a dystopia

After the war, the plan of Germania perished. Today the gigantic dome and Boulevard seem grotesque and unimaginable. Some believe that Germania was predestined to fail because the idea was immoral. Or the plan was too absurd to survive and didn’t fit the natural order of the city. These are all illusions. The stumbling stones remind us daily that Germania has existed.

References

1. Denny, Phillip (2012) Étienne-Louis Boullée: Utopia & the Enlightenment
2. Pier Vittorio Aureli, “Architecture as a State of Exception: Étienne-Louis Boullée’s Project for a Metropolis,” in The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011) pp. 175.
3. Terzoglou, Nikolaos-Ion. (2012). Ideas of space from Isaac Newton to Étienne-Louis Boullée. South African Journal of Art History (SAJAH). Volume 27:1. 29-44.
4. Étienne-Louis Boullée, “Architecture, Essay on Art,” in Helen Rosenau, Boullée and Visionary Architecture (London: Academy Editions, 1974.)
5. Szabó, Levente: „Kisajátított építészet – A harmadik birodalom építészeti programjáról”, in Kerékgyártó Béla (ed): Berlin átváltozásai: Város, építészet, kultúra, Typotex Kiadó, Budapest 2008, pp 141–156