Albert Speer Jr., Like Father Like Son in Olympic Design?

Maybe one of the best pieces of Olympics writing we’ve read thus far comes in the form of an op-ed by Nina Khrushcheva in the Guardian entitled, “Olympic Hubris.” In it, she makes connections between Albert Speer‘s designs for the 1936 Berlin Olympics and the hiring of his son, Albert Speer Jr., to design the master plan for the Beijing Olympics. While we always feel really sorry for Speer Jr. in constantly getting connected back to his father, Khrushcheva does as well, but says it’s foolish not to recognize the creative purposes and father and son work similarities with both Olympic games. Here’s a bit:

Totalitarian regimes — the Nazis, the Soviets in 1980, and now the Chinese — desire to host the Olympics as a way to signal to the world their superiority. China believes that it has found its own model to develop and modernise, and its rulers regard the games in the same way as the Nazis and Leonid Brezhnev did, as a means of “selling” their model to a global audience.

Obviously, the Chinese were naive to choose an architect whose name carried such dark historical connotations. The name of Speer itself probably did not matter to the officials who chose him. They sought to stage an Olympics that made manifest their image of themselves, and Speer Jr, looking back to his father’s mastery of the architecture of power, delivered the goods.

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