Das »Haus aus Glas« und sein langer Schatten

Abstract

Using examples from the period of Italian fascism and the National Socialist era in Germany, the relationship of modernism and modern architects to power is examined. The focus is on the changing and in part contradictory connotations to which modernism was exposed. The field of state architecture in both totalitarian regimes provide the occasion to discuss a basic problem of modernism: The instrumentalisation of its formal language for any ideology. For the Italian context, Giuseppe Terrgani’s Casa del Fascio in Como and the Florentine railway station of the Gruppo Toscano are used as examples; for Nazi Germany, the positions of Wilhelm Pinder and the system-relevant role of industrial building, as well as the myth of the flight into industrial building as an outlook into the time after 1945.