In The New Atlantis: A
Journal of Technology and Society, Roger Forsgren writes “The Architectureof Evil,” in which he reflects on the life and work of Albert Speer. Speer was
the engineer, the architect that built the impressive structures, buildings and
monuments from which Hitler launched the Nazi cause.
Albert Speer did not, as far as any
historians know, personally design any death chambers, nor did he personally
kill another human being. But Speer did use his brilliant technical expertise
and talents to enable the war efforts of the most evil regime in history,
allowing it to murder millions of human beings. But even as we condemn him, we
must ask—especially we engineers and technicians—is Speer so different from us?
How many of us would be willing to compartmentalize our emotions, suppress our
consciences, almost to sell our souls, for the opportunity to work on the grand
projects that Speer was involved in? How many of us are so focused on solving a
technical problem that we fail to contemplate where that solution might lead?
To many engineers, Speer and his
experiences during the war may seem irrelevant today. But although there seems
to be little chance (we hope) of a highly industrialized power again waging a
war of world conquest, the essential questions that Speer faced still pertain
to the work of many engineers today. You may be an engineer sitting in front of
a computer-aided design screen, creating a seemingly benign component that will
become part of some sophisticated weapons system that will be sold to unknown
people in a far-off land. You may be a computer security researcher, or a
virologist, and discover some new potential weapon or security vulnerability,
and have to decide how to make the information public to shield against such
attacks, but without helping those who would launch them. Or you may design
automobile parts, and be faced with a compromise between saving your company
production costs and protecting the lives of customers.
These are good issues. To be seduced by the magnitude of
a project so that we begin to make a series of tiny compromises is easy, and
the danger involved can seem small enough to not count. Having a worldview
rigorous enough to sustain the necessary reflection and a community lively
enough to nourish such reflection is essential for all of us. All of us live
out our vocations within an ethical context because we live in God’s world and
bear his image.
There is another danger, one that we all face. It is to so
pursue excellence in our work, to so bury ourselves in the demands of our
vocation that we get lost in the details until we no longer are committed to
anything larger. This is a creeping danger, a slow process, not something that
suddenly arrives with trumpets blaring. Still when Work and Vocation are
elevated to the status of idolatry, they are cruel masters. If excellence in
architecture is capturing in design the vision and purpose of a structure,
Speer achieved a rare and brilliant excellence. But at a horrific cost.
It might be said that
Speer exemplifies what happens when a technical person becomes too absorbed in
his work. Speer claimed at his trial that he was simply doing what nearly any
other architect would have done; he was too busy “studying far into the night”
to even discuss the political world exploding all around him, too lacking in
the ability to think discriminately and critically, and so he found himself
“unable to deal with the arguments” of his cohorts, and instead just went
along. Perhaps it is the inherent nature of the technical disciplines that
brings their practitioners to view the world with a practical eye, to possess a
preoccupation with efficiency and order—even to the point of ignoring the
humane values of dignity and justice. These are characteristics that will
surely sound familiar, to some extent, to those who have worked with engineers,
even if in far less sinister contexts.
The difficulty with this is that few of us are like Speer:
we are not engineers working on great projects. We are ordinary people working
on ordinary things. The danger here is to assume our smallness automatically
shields us from hard choices, or that our hard choices do not matter so much
because they are small. As Francis Schaeffer was fond of saying, in God’s
economy there are no small people and no small places. The children of God are
to pursue their callings, their work, their vocation with excellence—and that
cannot be accomplished unless our pursuit is shaped by a growing discernment
that brings all of our life consciously under the Lordship of Christ.
Source: “Evil’s Architect,” on The Dish (25 Nov 2012 08:07
AM)
Usually, when I think of beauty in large urban buildings,
the word “old” or “ancient” immediately comes to mind. It is scenes like these
that I am usually thinking of:
From Bratislava, Slovakia:
From Budapest, Hungary:
It isn’t that a building must be old to be beautiful, but I
would argue that some modern architecture is not only ugly but, and I realize I
am an amateur here, downright silly. Like the I. M. Pei glass pyramid he
plopped down on the grounds among the stately buildings of the Louvre in Paris:
(Now I’ve probably insulted any Parisians or architects
reading this—please straighten me out in your comments.)
In contrast is a new skyscraper in Chicago that I want very
much to see.
Paul Goldberger introduces us to the building and the
architect in a fine piece (which you can read here) in The New Yorker:
Aqua—a new,
eighty-two-story apartment tower in the center of Chicago—is made of the same
tough, brawny materials as most skyscrapers: metal, concrete, and lots of
glass. But the architect, Jeanne Gang, a forty-five year-old Chicagoan, has
figured out a way to give it soft, silky lines, like draped fabric. She started
with a fairly conventional rectangular glass slab, then transformed it by
wrapping it on all four sides with wafer-thin, curving concrete balconies,
describing a different shape on each floor. Gang turned the facade into an
undulating landscape of bending, flowing concrete, as if the wind were blowing
ripples across the surface of the building. You know this tower is huge and
solid, but it feels malleable, its exterior pulsing with a gentle rhythm.
Three close ups of the lovely terraces Gang wove into the
exterior of the design:
And the architect on one balcony during construction:
Marvelous beauty, amazing imagination, a design for a building that is a deeply moving expression of creativity by someone made in God's image.