Jean-Louis Cohen – an internationally renowned architectural historian and the curator of the exhibition – puts forward a very clear thesis: the war galvanised technological-innovation processes and triggered a changed mindset that led to the undisputed supremacy of modern architecture after 1945. Starting from this premise, the exhibition explores architectural developments during WWII, analysing the impact of the conflict on both the built environment and the architectural discipline. It paints a remarkable picture of the total mobilisation of entire cities and areas, the threat posed by occupations, the horrors of the destruction and the need for reconstruction.

There are original drawings, photographs and models, radio clips and films from the period plus propaganda posters for and against the enemy and appeals to patriotic heroism that were translated into efficiency, cleaning and the saving of resources. It all starts touchingly with photographs of architects variously involved in the war effort: some died fighting and others designed concentration camps – putting visitors immediately in close contact with something profound: life and death, with architecture as the common denominator.

The conflict zone is no longer a line

One of the areas most explored by the exhibition is the role played by aviation in launching an era in which the enemy arrived from the sky as well as across the land. The air force wiped out walls as a defence mechanism, eliminating their usefulness and meaning.

Weapons have always directly influenced forms of living and their architecture: the cities founded by the Romans served the militias; the narrow curved streets of mediaeval cities were designed for clashes between horsemen and those on foot; Michelangelo developed city walls shaped like an embrace and ready for the enemy cannonades, as well as addressing the growing impact of gunpowder; city walls eventually disappeared when nation-states were a guarantee that no army could invade them again. The major shift in scale was then driven not by arrows or cannons but by fighter-bombers.

In the first section of the exhibition, the combat zone ceases to be a line and becomes an area. Section two unveils the autarchic approach countries were forced into: raw materials were placed at the service of the nation at war. Scientific research was seen as a means to victory but also offered a new ethic founded on economy and recycling. One example is the development of thermal insulation in buildings, a first workshop on sustainable architecture.

Building Fast

The next sections provide an overview of factory and worker-housing construction: Perret and Le Corbusier experimented with new spatial options and American industries moved away from the borders to avoid potential attack. In the USA, the Housing Act led to the construction of 625,000 new dwellings, mostly temporary and close to weapons factories that were decrepit and destroyed in 1945.

The necessary mobility of forces engaged in the war resulted in the development of systems for the speedy construction of prefabricated troop accommodation and they experimented with modular systems that could be mass-produced and were easy to erect.

On the enemy front, the Nazis designed fortifications such as the Maginot Line and the Atlantic Wall – 2,685 km long and running from Norway to the Basque Country – dotted with thousands of casemates and blockhouses along the coast that were abandoned after the war.

The threat from the air prompted the need to invent evacuation camps for the civil population. Existing properties were evaluated for soundness and potential conversion to refuges, and newly constructed buildings were designed to accommodate thousands of people for anti-aircraft protection.

Designing the invisible and dispersing the crowds

The visual expertise of architects and landscape architects was commandeered for what Salvador Dalì called “designing the invisible”. Camouflage services were scientifically developed to disguise batteries of cannons, isolated bunkers and even entire villages. American universities taught special courses on how to hide constructions from fighter-bombers.

The conveyance of information to both civilians and the military exploited every field of graphic portrayal: maps, plans and diagrams. Designer and architect communication was key to developing mechanisms that would increase popular support of the war effort.

The gathering and rational dispersion of the masses at the front and behind the lines became a primary theme. Hilberseimer stated that the main trend of the period was towards large-scale projects. In Washington, the Pentagon was built in the centre of an extensive system of motorways and car parks, rationally exploiting the links between different parts of a building that had to be crossed at full speed, without wasting time. The same occurred at Auschwitz, a concentration camp built in the heart of a large industrial agglomeration lying at a railway junction linking several strategic European cities.

Flexibility, standardisation, imprisonment and trials

Another two key words are flexibility and standardisation, and adapting existing property to new uses such as troop accommodation, makeshift hospitals and gaols for prisoners became a priority. By contrast, military constructions were designed to be reversible and adaptable to post-war times. Ernst Neufert defined his work as standardising, with model sizes for all types of architectural space or feature. 

There are also stories of imprisonment: from Quaroni who – as a British prisoner with 20,000 fellow-soldiers in the Himalayas – produced hundreds of drawings for a votive church in Dehra Dun, to Henry Bernard – a French architect interned in a German camp – who convinced the Nazis to group 448 architect-prisoners in just one camp, a veritable École des Beaux-Arts in exile at the Stablack camp, where they organised architectural competitions and sent the drawings to Paris to be judged by special juries. On his return to the liberated French capital, Bernard held an exhibition of the works by all the camp deportees.

Dan Kiley designed the spaces in Nuremberg where the war horrors were put on trial. The construction employed nearly 1000 workers and brought judges and defendants face to face, and films were shown on large screens for the very first time in a court. The room is the stage for a trial in which the winners dismantle the mechanisms of the losers and their killer empires.

The soldiers’ homecoming coincided with a rediscovered civilian life and people were now ready to accept new materials and modern building solutions in domestic architecture, too. In 1946, Buckminster Fuller tried to convert the Wichita aircraft factory to a production centre for his innovative Dymaxion Dwelling Machine.