Originally published December 2020.

It was my friend and sometime neighbour John Stewart’s recent “Blog 7” which started me thinking about the discrediting of historical buildings as well as historical figures.

He was writing on Guiseppe Terragni’s Casa del Fascio in Como, which is quite rightly regarded as one of the seminal buildings of the ‘heroic period’ of modern architecture. Designed in 1932, when Terragni was aged just 28, this was the local headquarters of Mussolini’s Fascist party. 

As John writes, “Modernism has been seen predominantly as an expression of liberal social democratic ideologies and yet here is one of its icons celebrating a totalitarian regime. As a result of the quality of Terragni’s architecture, many have sought to excuse his complicity with those who were in power in Italy while he was working, but he would have been appalled at this suggestion of double standards. Like many of his contemporary young Italian architects, he was an enthusiastic and committed Fascist and he regarded the Casa del Fascio commission as a great honour […] it remains both a fascinating piece of architecture and an equally fascinating relic of a once hugely popular and now entirely discredited Italian political movement.” 

Judging by the feedback left by others on John’s blog, this building is in the top ten of a lot of architects’ favourite buildings. It is now occupied by Guardia di Finanza, an Italian law enforcement agency under the authority of the minister of economy and finance. I will leave that there.

In the contagious spirit of Black Lives Matter, there has been a great revisiting of our past. There was a hope that we would all take time out to understand and learn more from history, but there was also a danger of rewriting it. Having myself been involved on a project in Plymouth for well over a year, the sole objective of which was to coincide with the Mayflower 400 celebrations, Sir Francis Drake was caught up in the maelstrom and went from hero to zero overnight so that much of the design content had to be quickly and forensically reviewed. Covid-19 put the brakes on the project in any case, so completion has been stalled and the neat segue with the muted anniversary celebrations interrupted. 

The way such powerful movements transfer and transmute can be seen with Premiership footballers and match officials ‘taking the knee’ before kick-off. This was originally a protest gesture made by American footballer Colin Kaepernick against standing for his national anthem, but it was adopted as a wider symbol of support for the unfair treatment of Black Americans and is now made in support for the wider BAME community. The gesture is powerful, but it is also by its nature transient and time will be the arbiter of its lasting influence. 

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s horrible and needless death, there was a strange resonance with Lenin’s statement made 100 years ago on the Bolshevik revolution: “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.” There are parallels in time and in spirit with the coronavirus pandemic, in that there has been a sudden quickening to the rate of change and it feels as if worldwide inertia has been unlocked. Slow, often reluctant shuffles of progress have become giant strides against all expectation.

But as we come out of a second collective – and no doubt reflective – national lockdown, this current mood forces us to question all sorts of areas of our lives: career, family, friendships, even a belief system. In the same vein, some of us in my profession might now question how we should view historical pieces of engineering or architecture. The pyramids, where more slaves died in the making than were there to see them completed; the towering steel-framed Chigaco skyscrapers, which were erected with little or no thought for the health and safety of the workforce; or Scotland’s Forth Bridge, where 73 lives were reportedly lost during its eight years of construction before its fanfare opening in 1890. 

Even Berlin’s Reichstag Building, which was set on fire in the same year that Hitler assumed the role of Reichskanzler in 1933 and was only properly brought back to life by a spectacular transformation in 1999 by Norman Foster as a great symbol of German reunification, has its tarnished history. The Foster + Partners website describes the transformation of the Reichstag as“rooted in four related issues: the Bundestag’s significance as a democratic forum, an understanding of history, a commitment to accessibility and a vigorous environmental agenda. As found, the Reichstag was mutilated by war and insensitive rebuilding. The reconstruction takes cues from the original fabric; the layers of history were peeled away to reveal striking imprints of the past – stonemasons’ marks and Russian graffiti − scars that have been preserved as a ‘living museum’.”  The notion of ‘peeling away of layers’ brings to mind the fascinating theme of ‘palimpsest’ in architecture, which I will save for another day.

So much for the buildings: what about the protagonists themselves, the design authors? Probably the most infamous architect in history was Albert Speer. He was part of Hitler’s inner circle and was responsible for projects such as the Reich Chancellery and the Nuremberg rally grounds, before being appointed general building inspector for Berlin, which included the ‘resettlement’ programme.  

Quite rightly, his involvement with a movement that saw millions of Jews exterminated makes Speer a despicable figure, or at the very least a figure caught up in despicable events. A TV documentary I saw recently on the trial of Adolf Eichmann showed the crucial question to be whether he followed instructions as a faithful civil servant or had a mind of his own. His case fell apart with a post-war recorded interview where he boasted of his involvement first with the transportation of Jews and subsequently with their deportation to the concentration camps, and he was hanged for war crimes and crimes against humanity in 1962. 

Speer was more successful in distancing himself from the Nazis, through two autobiographical books that he wrote while imprisoned after the war: Inside the Third Reich and Spandau: The Secret Diaries. He was released from prison in 1966 and died in 1981, but to this day carries the stigma of his involvement with Nazi Germany, despite his later rejection of it. Rightly, Speer’s work is not referenced by today’s architects, unlike Terragni whose prolific portfolio in his brief 39-year lifetime also included nurseries and schools and is regarded with cautious reverence.

The point is that whether architects and buildings are tainted by historical atrocities like Albert Speer or by mere scandal like the feted American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, many of their accomplishments still exist. What do we do with them and how should we regard them? This is a big societal question, with which I imagine many people far cleverer than me are grappling.

In London, people of the past are linked with buildings of the present by placing blue plaques on the outside of buildings. This is an initiative now administered by English Heritage after the previous brown plaques were conferred by the Royal Society of Arts. Taking some down or increasing their number to include buildings where under-celebrated historical figures once lived or worked is a current worthy ambition, but this too will surely be a battleground for argument, especially if it is restricted to London. In any event, the judgment as to whether someone is worthy of a plaque appears less easy to make than it once was. After all, who doesn’t have skeletons somewhere in their cupboard?

In a November edition of “Desert Island Discs”, Hilary McGrady, director-general of the National Trust, was quizzed by Lauren Laverne about the trust’s future attitude towards the 93 properties that have been found in its own report as having “substantial links to slavery and to Britain’s colonial past”. McGrady gave what I considered a very sober reply to a sensitive subject, basically saying that it “helps tell history in its fuller sense”. She went on to say that “20, 30, 40 years ago, we didn’t even tell the story of ‘downstairs’, but only told the story about the family”. This sounds incredulous now, but it perhaps gives us hope by illustrating the acceleration of what McGrady calls “new layers of information and understanding”.

It transpires that the National Trust had pre-commissioned the report on the issue of colonial links, but Black Lives Matter had given new focus to the accurate mapping of history of each particular property. McGrady criticised what she called the “blaming and shaming”, and her plea for understanding and acknowledgment is poignant in McGrady’s case as she grew up in the Troubles and has undergone her own experiences of prejudice and intolerance. I somehow feel she is in a better place than some to make this kind of judgment call.