Totalitarian architecture refers to the
type of architecture created by totalitarian states. It is typically designed
to be imposing and large in size to portray a sense of power, majesty, and
virility.
Totalitarian architecture refers to the
architecture of totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century , the Italian
fascist regime (1922-1945), the German Nazi regime (1933-1945) and the Soviet
regime , mainly during its Stalinist period (1929-1953). ). This concept is
based on the recognition of the importance given to architecture in these
regimes and insists that these regimes, despite their differences, have
resulted in comparable architectural designs.
This type of architecture was born in Italy Europe such as Nazi Germany and
the Soviet Union of Stalin until the end of the Second World War .
The opposition between modern architects
and traditionalists has led us to believe that the architecture of totalitarian
regimes is identified with the return to the neoclassical tradition , against
the modern movement embodied by the International Congresses of Modern
Architecture. ( CIAM ). In fact, neoclassical architecture has not been the
preserve of totalitarian regimes alone, which themselves have developed more
diverse architectural styles.
Features
The general lines of totalitarian
aesthetics are, among others, monumental and grandiloquent proportions,
standardization of representation techniques, hyperrealistic style, simulation
of motion, straight and homogeneous lines (usually pointing to the sky),
preponderance from one color to another (usually red ), the
de-individualization of characters and narratives to the detriment of
collective characters (mass), choreography and corals, reverence for physical
exertion, manual labor, athletics and body .
A totalitarian aesthetic has in common to
the culture of totalitarian regimes the revival of ancient civilizations that
represented its roots, such as the Roman Empire , Byzantine Empire and ancient Greece
Totalitarian regimes made use of art and
other aesthetic expressions ( clothing , object design , graphic production ,
national symbols) as part of a logic of total domination of human life. In the
case of Nazism and Stalinism, real state policies have been established for
aesthetics. Politics appropriated the rhetoric of art: it was "art in its
late romantic phase," according to Susan Sontag . Not surprisingly, many
of the German , Italian, and Soviet Union
rallies of the 1930s - 1940s follow the same principles as the "total work
of art" conceptualized by late German romantic composer Richard Wagner :
drama , music, and choreography were fused with emotion and ideology , with the
ethos enunciated through pathos . The masses were converted at the same time
into spectators and extras. In his essay "Fascinating Fascism" (1972),
Sontag summed up the general guidelines of totalitarian aesthetics:
"The taste for monumental and massive
reverence for the hero is common to both fascist and communist art ... The
presentation of the movement in grandiose and rigid patterns is another common
element, for such a choreography reflects the unity of the state itself Mass
masses, choreographed exhibitions of bodies, are valued activities in all the
totalitarian countries. "The masses are made to take shape to be drawn.
Neoclassical monumentality
The concept of totalitarian architecture is
based on the similarity observed between certain achievements of the fascist,
Nazi and Soviet regimes, both quantitatively (great period of public
construction, size of monuments) and qualitative (recovery of neoclassical
elements integrated with elements of modern architecture ).
Indeed, totalitarian regimes have given
great prominence to architecture as a visible expression of both the
"revolution" in motion and the values of regimes (primacy of community
or collectivity over the individual, order , merger around a single project,
etc.). Lenin speaks from 1918, at a time when there was still no question of
totalitarianism, of "monumental propaganda".
The assimilation of neoclassicism of the 1930s
to totalitarian regimes is criticized by those who prefer to evoke a
"style of the 1930s". The latter point out that contemporary
constructions in countries not subject to totalitarian regimes have the same
characteristics. As architecture professor Jean-Louis Cohen reminds us:
"Authoritarian regimes are far from being the only sponsors of classical
monuments, such as the development of the Chaillot hill in Paris, the
Washington Federal Triangle and the great British public buildings. prove it. Major
international exhibitions are also the pretext for demonstrations of
architectural hysteria in which curators are always winners.
For example, the buildings of Washington's
administrative buildings (the Supreme Court Building, the National Gallery of
Art , the National Archives , the Jefferson Memorial) and the New Deal in the
United States ("marked by a clean classicism of which Paul Philippe Cret
will be the theoretician "from 1932), the buildings of the World
Exhibition of 1937 in Paris in France ( Palais de Chaillot , Palais de Tokyo ,
etc.) as well as many buildings in Brussels (Stade du Centenary, Grand Palais
des Expositions du Centenaire, headquarters of the Belgian Shell Company,
headquarters of the General Insurance of Trieste, Brussels-Central station ,
etc.), where the monumental style will continue after the Second World War
(headquarters of the Bank Belgian National Gallery, Ravenstein Gallery,
Brussels North Station , Palais des Congrès, Royal Library Albert I , Palace of
the Dynasty).
The Nazi architect Albert Speer himself
admits in his memoirs: "It was later claimed that this style
(neoclassical) was the hallmark of the state architecture of totalitarian
regimes. This is totally inaccurate. It is rather the mark of an era, recognizable
in Washington , London
or Paris , as well as in Rome ,
Moscow or in our Berlin
This style of the 1930s is indeed the
consequence of the assertion of the states in the architectural field,
following their increasing intervention in the economy caused by the First
World War and the economic crises and the rise of the concept of economic
planning , territorial, etc.. It is therefore the expression of the
interventionist state, whether it is a democratic welfare state or a totalitarian
state.
Ambiguities
In particular, the architecture of
totalitarian regimes is intended to express the will of these regimes to impose
the superiority of the collective over the individual. This is expressed by a
monumental architecture and the revival of classical Greco- Roman architectural
values.
However, the reality is more complex and
the architecture of the totalitarian regimes is not reduced to the flights of
stadium colonnades on propaganda films.
First, modernism and traditions in
architecture interpenetrated in the 1930s. Architectural professor Bertrand
Lemoine explains (about the 1937 World Expo ): "It would be too schematic
to simply contrast classicism and modernism because in 1937, as in the 1930s,
the trend towards integration is quite strong between the two ".
Secondly, totalitarian regimes have
implemented several architectural styles, either successively in time or in
parallel, not without debates, internal conflicts or ambiguities.
The aesthetics in different regimes
As pointed out above, the main
manifestations of what can be called a totalitarian aesthetic are found in the
two major totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, Hitler's Nazi-fascism
, and Stalin's Soviet communism. The way in which such aesthetics is used in
both, however, has differences, now its (b) tis and now quite glaring. Nazi
aesthetics sought to reject absolutely any reference to the artistic
innovations struck by the early vanguards of the early twentieth century, which
they considered mental drift, debauchery or even "communist art." On
the other hand, the aesthetics adopted by the Stalinist regime came to
incorporate some of the constructivist researches, although applying them in an
antagonistic way to their origins.
Socialist Realism
Socialist Realism was the official set of
formal, stylistic, and poetic guidelines of the Soviet
Union between the 1930s and Stalin's death and the subsequent
process of de - Stalinization . Socialist Realism was, more than a style, an
official policy aimed at adapting Soviet cultural production (and other
communist militant artists in the world) to the Marxist-Leninist (in fact,
Stalinist view) of reality.
The main architect of Socialist Realism was
Andrei Zhdanov .
Against Socialist Realism several critics
and active detractors arose, as Pablo Picasso , Piet Mondriaan and Clement
Greenberg . In the historical context of the Russian Revolution, Socialist
Realism was consecrated as the official aesthetic policy of the State in
antagonism to the various aesthetic tendencies generically denominated as
Russian vanguard , through the repudiation of Stalin to the supposedly
liberating aspect of the previous aesthetics. The members of the Russian
avant-garde, artists in general linked to Constructivism , Abstractionism and
Suprematism , played an important role in the first phase of the revolution,
proposing the creation of large public art workshops in which free aesthetic
expression would be encouraged by the State in the search for liberation, both
individual and collective, of pre-revolutionary values. With Stalinist
totalitarian politics, this type of artistic positioning was hard-fought, with
names associated with abstract art being pursued in particular. Kasimir
Malievith is considered the exemplary case: forbidden to continue his
suprematist research (considered revolutionary by several critics and scholars
of Western art), he began to paint only figurative and realistic works at the
time of the enactment of Soviet Realism. Even that poet who was considered the
leading voice of the revolution in literature, Vladimir Mayakovsky , came to be
criticized by the ideologues of governmental aesthetics, having such pressure
been considered as one of the cause of his suicide by Trotsky , while others
consider the possibility of a murder political power created by the Stalinist
regime itself .
During virtually the entire period of
existence of the Soviet Union , the original
Russian avant-garde was forgotten and little studied, giving priority to
socialist Realism. Only with the downfall of Stalinist communism in Eastern Europe did such a movement start to spark new
interests.
Aesthetics Nazi
Aesthetics, for National Socialism, was a
central point of its policy of reorganizing the world. For Hitler's ideology,
Western society was undergoing a process of decay, attributed to a social
contamination that had as two main factors the ethnic Jews and the Communists
ideologically. Once both were eradicated, the German nation would be purified
and free to achieve its role of supremacy in Humanity, according to the Nazi
promise. Thus, the reform of the world would be a process of
"purification," "sanitization," and
"beautification," even if this meant the physical extermination of
individuals (including still-so-called "Aryans" with physical
deformities and mental illnesses).
The Nazis also decided to banish the
modernist art produced by the artistic avant-gardes, especially in painting and
sculpture , exhibiting their works for public execration in the so-called
"Degenerate Art Exhibitions".
The Nazi aesthetic was applied by NSDAP
party staff under the personal guidance of Adolf Hitler , who was a designer
(graphic and product) by training and profession, and a frustrated plastic
artist in his youth. Hitler's main collaborator in this field was the speaker
and propagandist Josef Goebbels .
For the Nazis, art should have an effect,
such as monumentality and grandiloquence. It should also glorify the purity of
the Aryan race. Thus, Jews in the ethnic field and Communists in the
ideological field - beings, in their view, contaminated - should be fought. The
concept of degenerate art has this purpose.
Modernism and totalitarianism
After World War I and the end of the Belle
Époque , pessimism took over the intelligentsia and made many artists seek to
forget the past and build new values from scratch. Art could not fail to
accompany this change, and began to seek a new aesthetic to break with what had
occurred in all previous centuries. An ideal that became a common goal for
several avant-garde artists of the period was the democratization of art, that
is, the production of an artistic genre that reached all social classes ,
equally, through universal forms and themes, common to all Men.
There were several artists who pursued this
"stage". Modernist styles, in their nuances, are almost all part of
this quest for universal art. However, we were able to clearly distinguish two
groups of artists who sought this universality, according to their behaviors in
relation to the totalitarian phenomenon that stood: the "for", who
agreed with the aesthetic reform proposed by the new regimes, which do not
align in hypothesis some with the avant-gardes, with the exception, of the
Futurism of Marinetti , only in its praise to the force; and the
"contra", who also proposed an aesthetic reform, but precisely
through the distancing of passadism, the use, also, of the abstraction and the
definitive rupture with the previous styles.
On the whole, however, apolitical artists
were virtually nonexistent at the time. The participation of many of them in
the Spanish Civil War , both in the Socialist International Brigades and in the
Falangist forces, was evidence of this.
In the second group we have the outstanding
work of Piet Mondriaan, the Dutch painter who proposed a real plan of social
reform through aesthetics. For him, the ideal aesthetic and was that
non-figurative, composed only of abstract geometric elements, therefore
universal. In making representations of reality, the artist would be presenting
his own impressions of truth, thus influencing the observer - which Mondrian
strongly condemns. He justifies this condemnation by arguing that figuration
(especially realism) presupposes the pre-learning of certain concepts for their
understanding, both formal and symbolic, while abstractionism does not. For
Mondrian, if the goal is universalization, there can in no way be figurative or
significant representation in a work of art: the only visual elements that are
perceptible equally by all Men are the regular geometric forms.
In the post-war of 1918 , several
avant-garde tendencies that emerged from the end of century XIX were affirming
and consolidating. Modernism was not the only vanguard of that time, nor was it
the one that caused the greatest consequences in the twentieth century.
However, it was the winning vanguard and, in this way, this is the history that
was written, that of the winner.
Totalitarian aesthetic manifestations
Graphic arts
The graphic arts , especially Posterismo ,
were extensively used in the propaganda of totalitarian regimes, as well as in
the creation of an aesthetically permeated by official ideology.
It is interesting to note, however, that
one of the main focuses of development of graphic design in the twentieth
century was through the German Bauhaus school and its followers (especially the
Ulm School of Form ), that is, movements antagonistic to totalitarianism and
politically linked, in a very general way, to the social-democratic world
project. The Bauhaus was even closed by the Nazi government. Likewise, in Russia
Cinema
After painting and sculpture, the most
produced arts in Europe , cinema was the form
of artistic expression that suffered the most from totalitarian aesthetics.
And, at the same time, the one that more spread among the population, both for
the purpose of aesthetic appreciation and for the character of mass
communication.
In the cinema, some of the main
representatives of these aesthetic currents were the German documentary
filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl and the Soviet director and editor Sergei Eisenstein
. Chinese films produced after the 1949 revolution , such as the recent Red
Turn , are also driven by the totalitarian aesthetic of the Chinese regime.
In her masterpiece, The Triumph of the Will
, Leni Riefenstahl "uses large shots of concentrated mass images
alternating with close-ups that isolate a singular passion" (as Susan
Sontag comments in her 1986 "Fascinating Fascism" essay). The
intention is to convey the concept of Ordnung , columns that march in rigid
lines, young people with obstinate look. Leni Riefenstahl had an exact notion
of the technical resources he needed to be able to grasp the effect of the
uniform and orderly mass. The camera should go up, the lens should capture the
whole scene, and if there were no crane , one would be invented. The
construction of the pro-filmic (the object that is photographed / filmed) in
Leni's work is part of the totalitarian ideological game: a single truth, a
univocal look at the object. Searching for the true appearance, documentaries
appeal to a particular discursive resource: the "real effect." After
all, it's just a record of facts, as the director insists.
Architecture and sculpture
The main exponents of the Nazi aesthetic in
the construction and in the concrete form arts were Albert Speer in
architecture and Arno Becker in sculpture .
The architecture of the great Nazi-fascist
palaces eventually incorporated classic stylistic elements, but its main
characteristic was the constant search for a haughtiness and monumentality so
great that they became oppressive. Public buildings should, by their greatness
in relation to the individual, display the state in its fullness and
superiority. Generally, such production can be considered "eclectic",
since it had references to styles now in vogue, such as art deco and certain
revivalisms, although it was unpublished.
Totalitarian aesthetics in music
Totalitarian and militaristic aesthetics
are inherent in some musical groups, for example, Laibach , Joy Division ,
Death in June , Haus Arafna , partly Pink Floyd (period of The Wall ),
Rammstein , Marilyn Manson , Pet Shop Boys , Soviet rock artists Alice ,
Nautilus Pompilius etc. In the lyrics of these and other groups one can meet
the harsh criticism of totalitarianism, including the totalitarianism of
Western mass culture. Sometimes this criticism is given in an ironic form, and
it may seem that it even supports a totalitarian system. Direct or indirect
references to totalitarianism are characteristic of many industrial groups, in
particular, representatives of the martial industrial style.
Aesthetic totalitarianism today
Some of the countries that, of course,
produce mass culture following the parameters of totalitarian aesthetics are North Korea , the People's Republic of China and Turkmenistan Spain
Moreover, totalitarian aesthetics are
revived in pop culture products whenever one wishes to relegate to the culture
of countries that have lived these regimes in their analogies with Western
democratic regimes. Some examples of this are the famous video clip of the band
Pet Shop Boys for their re-recording of the Go West song, representing the Red
Army under a computer graphics styling, or the opening video of Michael
Jackson's HIStory album that used the Bulgarian army to reveal a gigantic
statue of the singer.
Certain cinematographic productions that
seek to portray dystopic environments (such as the Brazil
Critics of totalitarian aesthetics often
associate their works and their stylistic values with the concept of kitsch ,
associating the massification of culture with totalitarian regimes in their
analogies with supposedly democratic regimes. Noam Chomsky considers existence
a form of totalitarianism , based mainly on advertising. Chomsky says that
"propaganda means for democracy the same as the club means for the
totalitarian state." In this way, for Chomsky, the massification of
culture occurs through a totalitarian artifice, serving economic interests and
preventing the visibility of original manifestations of thought, which would
include any form of aesthetic, leading to a certain standardization of forms of
expression and to another type of aesthetic totalitarianism.
Totalitarian architecture achievements and
projects
Nazi Germany
Ryugyong Hotel
Fascist Italy
New towns in the Pontine Marshes : Latina
Courthouse of Milan
or Palermo
German Democratic Republic
Source From Wikipedia
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