While cleaning my apartment I came across an old New York Times article, “Bilbao Ten Years Later,” by Denny Lee (Travel, Sept. 2, 2007). It was accompanied by a huge photo by Denis Doyle that revealed vertical streaks—presumably from dirt, pollution and rain—marring the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum’s titanium fish-scale surface. It reminded me that 20th and 21st century architectural dream spaces age poorly—and quickly. Traditional building materials—wood, stone, mud, iron, brick—tend to resonate as time passes. Weather and surface damage add patinas and dings that tell a story. Not so with glass, plastics, titanium, aluminum and fiberglass. They just get ugly.
Western architecture was transformed by Utopian dreams generated in post-WWI Germany and the Soviet Union, and built in re-enforced concrete, glass, steel and ceramics. The products of those dreams haven’t aged well. Now, we celebrate confections spun in cyberspace (the new dream space) and built with materials intended to simulate pure motion, color, light, water and sound. The physics of time and weather are not factored into the contemporary architect’s vision. Designed with no practical acknowledgment of real world conditions, contemporary buildings inevitably require (but rarely get) expensive repairs and continuous cleaning to sustain the original (non-material) vision. (See Gehry’s MIT Stata Center problems)
NOTE: Rem Koolhaas has observed that “as the global economy throws up ever more enormous development projects, which become ever more quickly obsolete, the design of a given city merges with the design of its decay.” (See www.aether.com) In designing decay, decay becomes a medium…hmmm.
bordertalksblog.com 
Congratulations on a wonderful, thoughtful new blog.
Your post about Bauhaus has finally forced me to confront the single most disturbing thing about my Fulbright experience last summer in Berlin. Despite every effort to resist it, I liked some of the remaining Third Reich architecture. And that has bothered me no end ever since.
The perversion of arts and culture during this period, all in the service of bolstering an ideology of genetic superiority leading to genocide, has been exhaustively documented. And in the case of studio arts and painting, for example, the result would be amusing if the context was not the attempt to annihilate every Jewish man, woman, and child. I say amusing because, after the legendary 1937 Munich degenerate art exhibit, the state-sponsored paintings were so relentlessly stupid and self -consciously cartoonish that it seemed as if the artists had been explicitly ordered to create pablum. Most of it is truly bad Norman Rockwell, trying to depict idealized scenes of the German Volk that were so laughable that they even failed as effective propaganda. The political elite paid tribute to the Volkish clap-trap while they secretly hid and collected virtually all the great expressionist “degenerates” who had flourished before and during the Weimar period. As far as art for public consumption, though, they did largely jettison modernism and replace it with the pathologically sentimental. The result has to be seen to be believed.
But then there is the architecture.
To be sure, most of it does have the scale and size of buildings trying as hard they can to convince people of their insignificance in relation to authoritarian institutions. In this sense I felt right at home, having for years spent time in the shadows of Nelson Rockefeller’s immense and ludicrous Empire State Plaza in Albany.
Walk next to Herman Goering’s Wilhelmstrasse Air Ministry, for example, and you can imagine the feelings of impotence and helplessness that visitors must have felt. Majestic? Yes. In fact, hyper-majestic. Triumphal? Yes. The kind of triumphalism that dwarfs both the individual and the spirit; that creates the impression that the building houses the powerful and final actions of men who don’t represent the state but are the state. There is nothing in the design to suggest that the state might be a more complex mix of the powerful and the frail, the perfect and the imperfect. The frail and the imperfect were headed straight for annihilation and had no place in the narrative of a state to be filled with a master race.
So why did I keep walking past these buildings, many of which survive as modern-day German government ministries? What was the attraction?
What I began to see was that, despite the largely successful eradication of modernism in art, music, theatre and literature, the buildings of the Third Reich were infinitely less successful in their effort to jettison the modernism that a German architect like Gropius had championed before he hightailed it into exile. I am not saying that they were in any sense Bauhaus creations, but the sleekness, the simple elegance and the streamlining were in some cases unashamedly elegant and modern. And along with the ministries, this is especially the case with the remaining 1936 Olympic facilities. When surviving buildings were stripped of much of their Nazi eagle and swastika ornamentation, what remained was often strikingly modern, and – I was truly unnerved to discover – beautiful.
Things do get super- loony when you see how the post-war DDR communists tried to do their version of authoritarian architecture with a distinctly Soviet flavor. Now you are talking hulking, lumbering, cavernous boxes made of the cheapest material imaginable; truly kitchen-sink architecture where everything was thrown in together – slogans, triumphal statues, and the uniquely Soviet style that yells out: “Concrete molds, concrete molds! Bring me more concrete!” In Berlin they remain both as reminders of the cold war and as humorous relics of a time when sheer ugliness reigned supreme. People like to laugh at them.
But I still can’t shake those Albert Speer ministries that, despite their outsize scale, had and have an elegance that was not without some connection to modernism and that occasionally called to mind the work of American architects like Gordon Bunshaft or Louis Kahn. It is completely clear why both Albert Speer and Louis Kahn cited ancient classic ruins as seminal influences.
One can be grateful that Speer and Hitler’s mythical Germania, a super-capital that only existed in plans and models, was never built. Whatever hints of modernism that these buildings would have included would have been dwarfed by a one of the most overwhelming and nightmarish monstrosities of authoritarian architecture ever conceived. A fully-fascist mega-city. But when I landed at Tempelhof Field, originally intended to be part of Germania, I was stunned by the simplicity and beauty of the Speer-inspired design.
It’s not that they didn’t know they were being modern. Others have also pointed out the Nazi’s inability to shake off the Bauhaus influence. It’s that they thought that the fascist aesthetic was a new creation of a new society. What I think I saw was that it owed more than they imagined to the very degenerate architects who, if they didn’t escape in time, themselves became victims of fascism. Societies grounded in incoherent and hodgepodge ideologies inevitably produce comparably hodge-podge art and culture. Bauhaus was part of the hodge or the podge or both.
But, while I never looked at those buildings and forgot the atrocities that were planned and executed in their nooks and crannies, I looked.
And I looked some more.
Fascism is a fraud but it does its dirty work by seducing humanity with fascinating aesthetics. Why did the Nazis loot the art of Europe, because it is so fascinating. They too are all too human. Any student of aesthetics is seduced by the elegant. I wonder what the world would be like if the creative genius of humanity was not constrained by serving the present de Medicis? Would it result in something akin to the indigenous world before Europe spilled its beans?
I guess it is hard to engineer the human spirit. Frankly, I do not miss the World Trade Towers, they gave me the creeps when I walked in their shadows. There is a more human scaled version by the same architectt in downtown Detroit, rather elegant.
As for Gehry, a true flash in the pan. All that squiggly slanting foil about and for what? To further Alcoa Aluminum?