PS11 Architecture and Politics in Germany, 1918–1945 Reconsidered 11:00 - 13:10 Thursday, 19th April, 2018 Meeting Room 5 Track Track 2

11:05 - 11:25

PS11 Martin Wagner’s “Balance-Sheet” Cities and the Transatlantic Welfare State

Anna Vallye Connecticut College, New London, CT, USA

Abstract

The pioneering premise of Architecture and Politics in Germany held that the architectural vanguard’s project to “express” Weimar revolutionary society through novel stylistic form prefigured Nazi hermeneutics of culture, which would read “architectural styles as symbols of specific political views.” In this, Miller Lane’s approach was similar to contemporaneous works of “social art history” in its attempt to understand architecture’s relationship to political life by extending the symbolic (as opposed to aesthetic) dimensions of cultural expression to the domain of political ideology. Recent historians of the Weimar Republic, such as Udi Greenberg (2014) and Noah Strote (2017), have situated the period’s cultural debates as conflicts over the structural and institutional forms of the liberal democratic state. Could a parallel shift of focus, from the hermeneutics of ideology to the strategics of state formation, reveal new political dimensions in Weimar architecture and its legacies? The work of architect Martin Wagner, chief planner from 1926 to 1933, exemplifies, I argue, a strategic reflection on the possible functions of architecture as instrument of democratic welfare state formation. His concept of the city as “private enterprise” or corporation, built on the structural overlap in the systems of market and political organization theorized by Max Weber and Georg Simmel, extended to urban architecture the forms of public-private interplay characteristic of the germinating welfare state. The “balance sheet” became for Wagner both key instrument and avatar of the urban fabric as reified fiscal policy. Accordingly, much like the political thinkers traced by Greenberg and Strote, Wagner eventually ran afoul of the Nazi regime not simply as a committed modernist and socialist, but also as a strategist of democratic state structures. His work in the United States, where he emigrated in 1938, continued to negotiate the public-private dialectic of the evolving welfare state in his adoptive country. 11:25 - 11:45

PS11 The Comedy and the Tragedy in

Jeffrey Lieber The New School, New York, USA

Abstract

In reassessing Barbara Miller Lane’s book, my paper illuminates the “comedy of errors” at the heart of “diaspora architecture” in the 1930s and early- to mid 1940s. I am especially interested to put Miller Lane into dialogue with Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, who also addressed architecture and politics in Germany and the US, and the catastrophic legacy of Nazism. Mohly-Nagy’s articles and lectures of the late 1950s and 1960s predate and presage Miller’s Lane’s study. Where Miller Lane is dispassionate and objective, Moholy-Nagy is fiery and subjective, offering cris de coeur. Moholy-Nagy hammered away at the ambiguities and anxieties of émigré architects: at the Modern Architecture Symposium at Columbia University in 1964 she documented (and denounced) Mies’ attempts to collaborate with the Nazi leadership. She argued that Mendelsohn collapsed in his architectural imagination, and that the program was dead on arrival in the US. These and other controversial views were largely dismissed at the time. My paper will explore the differences in tone and approach to the period and it’s central figures by Miller Lane and Moholy-Nagy. My main point is that despite Miller Lane’s intervention into the field, and the proliferation of studies of modern architecture and politics in Germany, and the war’s aftermath, Moholy-Nagy’s more caustic, damning, and idiosyncratic analysis has never really been integrated and absorbed into the history of the period or assessments of the relevant architects’ work. Why not? She presented imported German modernism as fatally tainted, and fascist, while at the same time she championed the work of a young generation of architects whom she believed were breaking free from the strictures of German functionalism and linking architecture and politics in more progressive, pragmatic ways, notably Paul Rudolph, Cesear Pelli, and Paolo Soleri. Her analysis leads to still unexplored endpoints. 11:45 - 12:05

PS11 and National Socialism: A Reconsideration

Nader Vossoughian New York Institute of Technology, New York, NY, USA

Abstract

Barbara Miller-Lane's Architecture and Politics in Germany represents a landmark achievement for countless reasons. Nevertheless, one of its weaknesses is that it tends to overlook the fact that the discussions and collaborations which took place among architects during World War II tended to cut across national boundaries.

In this paper, I use one case study to document this point. In particular, I look at the relationship between Ernst Neufert and Alvar Aalto. During Finland's Winter War and its subsequent Continuation War, Finnish officials were eager to secure arms and military support to stave off Soviet aggression. They also wanted to sustain their export-based economy. The Nazis needed access to Finnish territory to launch Operation Barbarossa. They also required raw materials to execute their construction plans for the Führerstädte and to facilitate the rapid building of military basis and concentration camps. My paper shows that Neufert and Aalto cultivated a close working relationship to assist their respective countries economically and militarily. In particular, Neufert helped Aalto with the creation of a Standardization Office in 1942 and 1943. This was so that he could bring the specifications governing the prefabrication of building components in Finland into alignment with those recognized in Nazi Germany. He gave Finnish manufacturers the tools they needed to fulfill Germany's various construction-related needs. He also helped the Nazis address their shortage of raw materials. The significance of this paper rests on the fact that it uses economic history (i.e., Finland's economic ties to Germany) to explain political and architectural history. I invite scholars to reexamine Alvar Aalto's ties to the political and architectural culture of Nazi Germany. I draw together original archival materials from Finland, the United States, Switzerland, and Germany. I also emphasize the global and transnational relationships that defined the Nazis' hold on power. 12:05 - 12:25

PS11 Architecture and Politics in West-Germany 1952-69: The Political Symbolism of the Modernist Bungalow

Carola Ebert BAU International Berlin - University of Applied Sciences, Berlin, Germany

Abstract

The architecture of the modernist bungalow is highly significant of the political processes re-defining West- German society after 1945. Built 1952-1969, in the country’s formative years during the Wirtschaftswunder’s economic growth, West-German bungalows symbolize more than the advent of flat-roof modernism on the housing market. This ubiquitous typology’s connotations draw heavily upon those ideological debates of the Weimar republic, which Miller Lane analyzed succinctly. Omitting the immediate, nationalsocialist past, West- German bungalow architecture connects to the concept of modern architecture as democratic or progressive, as it had evolved during the Weimar republic. Drawing on examples from the catalogue raisonné of the West-German bungalow established as part of the author’s research, the paper pays specific attention to the political connotations of this typology – most notably how the concept of a new, young democracy was associated with modern, flat-roofed residential architecture. The typology unifies a broad range of houses – from small lower-middle class homes to spacious modern villas for industrialists and Sep Ruf’s Chancellor’s bungalow in West-Germany’s capital with its direct political implications. The paper argues that Weimar’s political debates were not only influential with regard to the political connotations of nationalsocialist architecture, as Miller Lane argued, but that the dichotomy of the 1920s and 1930s continued to dominate the political connotations of architecture in West-Germany for decades after 1945. Bungalow Germania, the partial insertion of a model of Ruf’s Chancellor’s bungalow into the German pavilion at the 2014 Venice architecture biennale, shows this dichotomy’s continuing relevance for the political connotations of German architecture until today. By analyzing the West-German bungalow’s political symbolism, however, this paper argues that this seemingly progressive architecture in fact served to accommodate an increasingly apolitical middle-class society, withdrawing into the suburbs and their private gardens.