Posted on 02/21/2003 7:25:14 AM PST by robowombat
HEADLINE: HITLER'S DREAM CITY COMES ALIVE IN EAST
BYLINE: Allan Hall In Berlin
THE SON of a Nazi father - the man designated by his Fuehrer to rebuild Berlin as the greatest city in the world - has the same designs on modern Beijing.
Albert Speer jnr, who was born a year after Hitler came to power, is among three contenders for a multi-billion pound contract hailed as the architectural Holy Grail of the new millennium.
More than 60 years ago it was his father who dreamed of such glory. Hitler bestowed upon him the honour of rebuilding the Reich capital to become a metropolis like no other. It was to be called Germania and defined by superlatives - bigger, taller, wider, grander - than any other. A failed architect, Hitler was obsessed with the idea of a modern-day Rome for his Third Reich. Like his empire the dream evaporated in blood and ashes and Germania never made it beyond the drawing board and model stage.
Speer the elder spent 20 years in jail after the Second World War for using slave labour when armaments minister for Hitler. Now his son, his blood racing with the same visions and dreams of architectural glory that drove his father, has come up with a grand design for a 'Super-Beijing' that has many parallels to Germania.
There is a plan for a 17-mile-long east-west axis in the city: just as there was for Germania. There are drawings for grand plazas, for workers' houses to ring the factories - just like Germania - and a mammoth railway station to link all of China, as Hitler planned for Germania to link all of the conquered lands of the Reich.
Speer, 68, has lived in the shadow of his father's greatness and infamy all his life. He knows that to many his father was the Devil's Architect. - to others, the only "good" Nazi. But he insists that his grandiose designs on the ancient heart of Beijing is not a walk down a sinister memory lane.
"Great projects demand great buildings," he said. "I am not one for speeches. I stuttered in school. I let my work speak for itself. This is a fantastic opportunity to rebuild a great portion of the city. No architect could pass it up."
He spent January in Beijing talking over his designs with Chinese authorities and will return there in April for a final decision. Two other concerns - one French, one Chinese - are in with a chance.
Speer's designs include shopping plazas, cinemas and an eco-city that seeks to give China its first taste of western eco-culture with recycled rainwater, alternative energy sources and eco-friendly farming.
The offer of the glittering prize came Speer's way as Chinese authorities renovate the city in preparations for the Olympics in 2008. Beijing is faced with problems that include air pollution, shortages of water resources, traffic jams and rebuilding of dangerous and dilapidated houses, a lack of subways, light railways, expressways and airports.
Part of Speer's remit, should his Frankfurt-based firm win, will be to finish the task of rebuilding more than nine million square metres of dangerous and old apartments.
Speer's architectural partnership has won many commissions in recent years, including a diplomatic quarter in Saudi Arabia, the parliament in Yemen and traffic systems in Nigeria. But the Beijing project would be the jewel in the crown. He insists that the plans for Germania that his father had are not what has driven him in re-drawing the map of Beijing.
"This is a modern city built in a modern style," he said. "There are grand buildings to be sure. I know what comparisons people might draw but that doesn't interest me - I am just glad I have got to the age whereby I am not known as Junior anymore. That is an enormous step forward."
Speer's plans are vast in their scale, covering an area of 100 square km. The railway station alone requires thousands of metric tons of concrete while the grand boulevards and plazas envisaged in the design incorporate windparks and solar panels to reduce the industrial smog that sometimes blankets the city.
Speer's partnership employs 125 people. He taught for 15 years at the University of Kaiserlautern before going into private practice which has resulted in many commissions both at home and abroad. He was responsible for the German Pavilion at the 2000 Expo exhibition in Hanover.
It is ironic that his plans for a super-city have been formulated just as interest is renewed at home in the long-shelved blueprints on Germania. For late last year, in a wood on the Mueritzsee Lake, 60 miles from Berlin, surrounded by a minefield, German amateur historians discovered the only building Hitler ever saw completed for Germania.
The 50-metre high apartment building was code-named The White House and was built on an island on a lake at the height of the war. The White House was the prototype of bomb-proof buildings the Fuehrer wanted to construct for the workers of the Reich capital that would rule the world.
Dietmar Arnold, the chairman of a group called Berlin Underworld which discovers and preserves the Nazi bunkers that riddle the capital, said a cross -check in archives showed that the White House - previously thought to be just another anti-aircraft tower built to shoot down allied planes - was the blueprint for workers' apartment buildings Hitler wanted to construct after the "final victory" that never came.
A Germania historian and Third Reich architectural expert Professor Wolfgang Schaeche said: "This was also known as Testwork T and is the only surviving example of the architecture that Hitler would have dominated Germania with."
"Hitler envisioned a capital to match his ego," said Detlef Franke, a historian . "The workers' apartments were to be military in style because he couldn't bear to think of his capital being reduced to rubble."
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