William Huchting at makeArchitecture, a Chicago firm that specializes in modern-style green houses, has created a presentation on Mies van der Rohe's design for German pavilion at the 1935 Brussels World's Fair. When Mies submitted the design he was a member of the Reichskulturkammer, which was created by Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels.
(I had to shave some pixels to make the video fit my column width. The properly proportioned version of the presentation can be found here.)
Mies's relationship to the Nazi government has long been a matter of contention. There's little doubt that Mies avidly pursued the commission for the Brussels pavilion. The prospectus for the project included a clause that read, "The exhibition building must express the will of National-Socialist Germany through an imposing form; it must act as the symbol of . . . National-Socialist fighting strength and will." (Quote swiped from Franz Schulze's Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography) To satisfy the requirements Mies included some token Nazi iconography such as an abstract eagle and a swastika in the Brussels pavilion, and his proposal was accompanied by a fawning letter to Goebbel's Reichskulturkammer. The Brussels pavilion was never built for financial reasons.
Some contemporaries of Mies explained that he pursued the commission because he needed money after his architecture practice suffered after the crash of 1929. Furthermore, Mies was appointed the last director of the Bauhaus because he had the reputation for being apolitical, with a past that included projects such as a monument to two Communist heroes and a throne for a Spanish king. During his brief tenure Mies tried cooperating with the Nazis in hopes of reversing their hostility to modernism, thereby allowing more modernist design and architecture to flourish in Germany. The Nazis--not a flexible lot, to say the least--remained unconvinced, and Mies was forced to shut down the Bauhaus in 1933. Frustrated and ostracized, Mies left Germany for the US in 1937.
What's most ironic to me is that the animation is so bland, and the animation is so jerky, that it looks just like Wolfenstein 3D. When the Nazi flag comes into view, it just reinforces that them. What's the keyboard shortcut to whip out my chain gun and start shooting at those curtain walls?
Posted by: some guy | March 31, 2008 at 12:45 PM