Unpacking Fascism’s biggity architecture

Fascists have a morbid fascination with grandiose buildings. In Germany, the Fascist architectural endeavour was led by Albert Speer, Hitler's chosen architect who later served as the Nazi armaments minister during the Second World War. The broad-spectrum stab of Albert Speer’s architectural delusions was to virtually level Berlin to the ground for constructing bottoms up — Welthauptstadt Germania, loosely translated to mean world capital Germania. The People’s Republic of China nominated Albert Speer the Junior — the son of Hitler’s notorious comrade-in-arms and the creator of the 1936 Berlin Olympics extravaganza — to formulate the master plan for the Beijing Olympic games of 2008. Their storming the global stage and Herr Speer drawing upon the luminescence to his father’s complete grasp of the architecture of power took a leaf right out of the Nazi architectural playbook to turn Chinese aspirations into brick-and-mortar reality.