ancient cities

Berlin
Federal states did not offer favorable conditions
for emulating such townscapes. Its members
resisted contributing to the grandeur of the capital,
always suspected of usurping more power to the
detriment of local states. This was the case in
Germany, indisputably continental Europe’s most
powerful state since its unification in 1871.
However successful, the country was a federation
of kings, princes, and citizens of the free cities.
They were brought together under the banner of
the Second Reich but jealously guarded their local
prerogatives. They refused spending their taxpayers’
money on the embellishment of its new
Reichshauptstadt Berlin. What splendor the city
offered dated back to its role as the capital of absolutist
Prussia. Even authoritarian Emperor Wilhelm
II did not succeed in harnessing parliament into
generous funding of its new capital.
What further added to Berlin’s unimpressive
image was dominant laissez-faire rule. Political
liberalism emphasized a thin state, providing barriers
against arbitrary spending. Embellishment
schemes should be funded by local, not national,
taxes. Compulsory purchase was rare and circumscribed
by detailed procedures. Thus, laissez-faire
liberalism was just as powerful an obstacle to massive
urban intervention and embellishment as
London illustrated. Foreigners visiting the capital
of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful nation
were perplexed by the chaotic free market townscape
of its central areas, with its cacophony of
styles, each building trying to shout down its
neighbor. Commerce, not the state, ruled supreme
in the city.
Washington, D.C.
But the twin forces of federalism and laissez-faire
did not prevent the young American republic from
creating an impressive capital. Its grid plan was
devised by L’Enfant (1791), an enlightened French
architect, but it attained true glory in 1902 with the
upgrading of the Washington, D.C., National Mall
under supervision of Daniel Burnham, who had just
returned from a study trip to the leading capitals of
Europe. Funding was a minor problem now that
the United States was beginning its ascendancy as
an international power that required a truly aweinspiring
capital. It became one of the more
Capital City
107
convincing statements of the City Beautiful, in
which Old World precedents were domesticated by
a less assertive indigenous monumentalism.
Totalitarianism and the Capital City
The World War I experience muted enthusiasm for
the capital as a carrier of national superiority. But
not for long. The triumph of totalitarian rule in
Europe became manifest in the reshaping of the
capital into an overwhelming demonstration of
power. Mussolini’s interventions in Rome had no
other motive than to point Italians to the continuity
between the Roman Empire and the fascist state.
He carefully excavated the Via dei Fori Imperiali so
as to confront his countrymen with the remnants
of Roman triumph. In the near distance they stood
eye to eye with modern translations of Romanità
(the Roman world) as conceived by Mussolini’s
court architect Marcello Piacentini, with their
stern, uncompromising facades clad in marble, the
undisputed symbol of beauty and durity. In his
plans for the transformation of Berlin into
Germania, the new capital of the Third Reich,
Hitler’s favorite architect, Albert Speer, stretched
axiality and symmetry to oversized dimensions to
accommodate mass manifestations in which millions
of uniformed Germans paraded for their
Führer. Joseph Stalin’s proposals for the radical
restructuration of Moscow served similar aims,
although here a major concern was to eliminate as
many cathedrals and churches as possible, eradicating
the memory of what, until 1917, had been
the capital of the Russian Orthodox Church. Here,
Boris Iofán developed an eclecticist rhetoric that
suited Stalin’s preference for socialist realism.
Triumphant urbanism continued its fatal attraction
on totalitarian rulers well after 1945, as is
illustrated by Ceaus‚escu’s presidential palace in
Bucharest and Mao’s Tiananmen Square in Peking.
In both cases, planning by clearance provided the
space needed for these megalomaniacal projects.
The Modern Developing Capital City
Many postcolonial, nontotalitarian states considered
such vocabulary of the Grand Manner oldfashioned
and no longer capable of expressing
their nation’s orientation on the future. Thus,
India’s president Jawaharlal Nehru rejected both