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

2017, SCROOPE: Cambridge Architecture Journal

Abstract

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.

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References (15)

  1. For a compact critical appraisal of the diaries see Eberhard Schulz, 'Albert Speers Gefängnisbuch' [Albert Speer's Prison Book] in Reif, ed., Albert Speer, pp. 473-479.
  2. Speer, Spandauer Tagebücher, p. 113.
  3. Ibid., pp. 17, 417, 537. Note also that Speer hung a reproduction of one of Schinkel's 1834 drawings for his Entwurf zu einem Palast auf der Akropolis [Castle on the Acropolis] project on his cell wall at Spandau: 'The first thing that I see from my bed when I wake up each morning is the Erechtheion on the Acropolis.' Ibid., 200.
  4. 9 For an excellent study on the regional variations of traditional German farmhouses see Torsten Gebhard, Alte Bauernhäuser [Traditional Farmhouses] (Munich: Callwey, 1977), particularly chapters 3 'Oberdeutschland', pp. 58-124) and 4 'Alpenland' , pp. 125-172.
  5. Speer's drawings for the Atelierhaus are housed in the Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv in Munich. Léon Krier redra ed some of the orthographic line drawings and published them in his Albert Speer Architecture, 1932-1942 (Brussels: Archives d'architecture moderne, 1985). It is to be noted that in Krier's suite the north and south elevations were mirrored by mistake and the west elevation was labelled as the east elevation. These slip-ups are noted not so much as to draw attention to the error of scholarship as it is to make the point that it is the radical bilateral symmetry of the building that invites such errors in the first place.
  6. Adolf Behne, 'Das Musterwohnhaus der Bauhaus-Ausstellung' [The Prototype House at the Bauhaus Exhibition], Die Bauwelt 41 (1923), pp. 591-92, (p. 591). It is beyond the scope of this essay to explore the significance of the observation, but note the parallel appeals to the iconography of the traditional 'haus' in the Atelierhaus and in the Bauhaus.
  7. August K. Wiedmann, The German Quest for Primal Origins in Art, Culture and Politics (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1995), pp. 4-5.
  8. Martin Heidegger, 'Only a God Can Save Us' , p. 56. See also his, 'The Question Concerning Technology' [Die Frage nach der Technik, 1949] in David Farrell Krell, ed., Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 311-41.
  9. 20 The question of the extent of Heidegger's guilt is no easier to answer than that of Speer's. For a sober critical appraisal of the available archival sources see Theodore Kisiel, 'Heidegger's Apology: Biography as Philosophy and Ideology' in Heidegger's Way of Thought (New York: Continuum, 2002), pp. 1-35. It is something of an aside, but note that Speer was released one week before Heidegger gave his Der Spiegel interview. One of the conditions that Heidegger placed on this interview was that it was only to be published a er he died. It was published on 31 May 1976, 5 days a er his death.
  10. Martin Heidegger, 'Why Do I Stay in the Provinces?' ['Warum bleiben wir in der Provinz?' , 1934] in Sheehan, ed. Heidegger, pp. 27-30 (p. 28).
  11. I have previously written on Heidegger's Hütte. See my 'Brunnenstern: The talismanic presence of architecture and ornament in Heidegger's Hütte' in Vincent Giraud and Benoît Jacquet, eds., From the Things Themselves: Architecture and Phenomenology (Kyoto: Kyoto University Press, 2012), pp. 127-154.
  12. 23 The twin issues of primitivism and nostalgia loiter in Heidegger's Hütte. I thank Karsten Harries for emphasising to me the necessity to be attentive to these issues when addressing the building.
  13. Adam Sharr, Heidegger's Hut (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2006), p. 6.
  14. On the positive roles of authority and tradition see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method [Wahrheit und Methode, 1960], trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1999), particularly Part II, Chapter II, Section B (i) The rehabilitation of authority and tradition, pp. 277-285.
  15. Carl, 'Type, Field, Culture, Praxis' , p. 39. On a related point, note how Edmund Husserl drew attention to the contribution of the habits, terms and procedures of traditional building praxes and the use of standardised tools, materials, and dimensions in the formation of geometry. See his 'The Origin of Geometry' [Die Frage nach dem Ursprung der Geometrie als intentional-Historisches Problem] in Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology [Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenscha en und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, 1936] trans. David Carr. Evanston (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 354. Ross Anderson, Pushpa Arabindoo and Regan Koch, Peter Armstrong, Theodora Bowering, Peter Carl, Michael Robinson Cohen, Amy DeDonato and Miroslava Brooks, Jessie Fyfe, Federica Goffi, Tom Heneghan, Glen Hill, Irit Katz, Luke Kon, Anca Matyiku and Chad Connery, Rowan Moore, Daniel Norell and Einar Rodhe, Wendy Pullan, Alex Young-Il Seo, Claudio Sgarbi, Neil Spiller, Maximilian Sternberg, Benjamin Taylor, James Horace Vertigo, Anthony Vidler, Jonathan Weston, Susan Seung-Ok Whang