Raised on the Dark Grounds of Tradition: Albert Speer's Atelierhaus at Berchtesgaden, 1938 (original) (raw)

2017, SCROOPE: Cambridge Architecture Journal

Furtively scribbled down on anything that he could find to write on, including tobacco wrappers, toilet paper, calendar pages and cardboard packaging, the former Nazi armaments minister and architect Albert Speer smuggled 25,000 diary notes out of his tiny cell in Spandau Prison over the 20 years that he served there in solitary confinement for crimes against humanity. Published later as Spandau Diaries, Speer charts what seems to be a calculated course between the rhetorical device of apologia, in which a person seeks to clarify and defend their conduct against an accusation in order to earn vindication and regain acceptance, and its counter, apology, as a regretful acknowledgement of wrongdoing. This essay extracts for discussion some of the entries that particularly address concerns central to architecture. And it pairs these with a close analysis of one of Albert Speer’s diminutive and apparently inconsequential buildings—his own Atelierhaus [studio-house] built at Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps in 1938. Proposing to be local, the small building with a steep gable roof evidently sought to be simultaneously the modest embodiment of traditional building practice, and its superior architectural apotheosis. There is a removed, designerly clarity to the geometric armature of the architecture that discloses a desire to ‘clean up’ and reify a deep tradition of building, serving as a didactic architectural demonstration. The section is divided into three strata. The lowest ‘classical’ stratum communicates with the earth. The walls are raw stone, and the ceiling is composed of four shallow masonry vaults. The uppermost ‘gothic’ stratum is the domain of timber. The white-washed ‘modern’ middle stratum hosts Speer’s drafting room that is demonstrably open to the landscape. What is unsettling is that the kinds of decisions about the design of the Atelierhaus that Speer made over the drafting board, such as the play of modules in the plan and section drawing, are the kinds of decisions that architects regularly make. It is rather the nearness of some aspects of his thought to his peers than the remoteness of others that is disturbing.