NP Nazi architecture

[Doug Millison]

"It would have been wiser for the new MoMA catalog, which delves into such
minutiae as Mies's use of photo-montage and the morphology of his courtyard
houses, to have addressed the issue of his politics with the same degree of
scrupulousness. By ignoring such a central subject in such an otherwise
rounded view of Mies, the show gives off a mild stench of cover-up. Among
the writers in the catalog, Vittorio Magnano Lampugnani touches briefly on
Mies's Reichsbank proposal, and on Hitler's and Albert Speer's
megalomaniacal plans for rebuilding the German capital; but his blandly
descriptive approach sidesteps any value judgments. Only the German-born
Rosemarie Haag Bletter (full disclosure: she is my wife) alludes to the
verboten topic in her essay on Mies's flirtation with crystal imagery,
drawing a sharp parallel between the architect's extensive use of
Kristallglas (plate glass) and the ensuing devastation of Kristallnacht,
which erupted just three months after he left for the States. 

"An honest and impartial investigation by MoMA, the institution most
responsible for the creation of the American Mies and for the maintenance of
his myth, would have done much to clear the air. Was Mies a willing
fellow-traveler of the Hitler gang, or an equal-opportunity panderer, or
just a cowardly self-centered cad who abandoned his long-estranged wife,
three daughters, and even his long-suffering mistress and collaborator Lilly
Reich to endure the coming apocalypse alone after he sailed away to America?
The alternative to an authoritative accounting is to leave the field to
sensation-seekers such as Elaine S. Hochman, whose overheated but half-baked
book, Architects of Fortune: Mies van der Rohe and the Third Reich, which
appeared in 1989, did no service in the way of setting the historical record
straight. So the MoMA show is a great missed opportunity, and quite a bit
less definitive than it pretends. One can understand Lambert's hero worship
of her surrogate father figure Mies, but what is MoMA's excuse for its
evasiveness and indifference? 

http://www.thenewrepublic.com/080601/filler080601_print.html
The New Republic
Martin Filler on Architecture. 
Mies and the Mastodon 
08.06.01