Capital punishment?

Demolition of the White House’s East Wing received plenty of coverage this week, as did the much larger ball room that will replace it. Embellishment of the Oval Office’s décor has also been reported, and no blushes – or, perhaps, flushes – have been spared when it comes to bathrooms either, with a marble makeover for one historic example getting attention. But the current President’s ambition to reshape things in his own image extends beyond the walls of that complex. There is the edict that Classical ‘shall be the preferred and default architecture for Federal public buildings’ in Washington DC, prompting me to create a little graphic in response, and plans for a vast triumphal (‘Trumphal’?) arch at the east end of Memorial Avenue. But this isn’t the first time a leader has sought to transform his country’s capital, and whilst that effort has left us some of the greatest cities in the world, it has also inflicted horror. 

Napoleon III’s remodelling of Paris in the last decades of the nineteenth century – managed by career civil servant Georges-Eugène Haussmann, Prefect of the Seine département – changed the face of the City of Light. The most wide-ranging programme of urban renewal ever carried out in a modern city is best known for its broad, straight boulevards driven through tightly-packed mediaeval neighbourhoods. Easing the connections between districts but also creating dramatic views and public piazzas, they were lined with iron street furniture such as kiosks, benches and lighting to encourage promenading. Elegant apartment blocks, carefully consistent in height and materials but with considerable individual variation to give interest, provided new homes for the upwardly mobile and used the new technology of the lift to invert the hierarchy of floor desirability. These plus grand civic structures – railway termini, churches, parks – were all underpinned by extensive infrastructural improvements.

Charles Garnier’s design for an opera house epitomises this extraordinary period. Its remarkable opulence derives from its multiplicity of styles, seemingly unlimited palette of lavish materials and sheer force of effect. A dominant position on a triangular junction laid out especially for it and the cost – it was the single most expensive building of those erected during Napoleon’s campaign – can also not be ignored.

Adolf Hitler’s plans for the transformation of Berlin are notorious, having reached a wider audience after publication of Robert Harris’s stunning alternative history novel Fatherland. Again designed and intended to be executed by a close confident, this time his architect, Albert Speer, they would have seen two kilometres-long, tens-of-metres-wide axes cutting across the city – itself to be renamed Germania – and two new railway termini replacing the existing  Anhalter and Potsdamer stations. A gargantuan triumphal arch, a hundred metres high and so large that its inspiration, the Arc de Triumphe, could fit inside it, would be inscribed the names of German’s Great War dead. The culmination of the scheme, near a gigantic parade square surrounded by a range of ministerial and cultural buildings, was the People’s Hall, the largest building in the world and topped by a dome sixteen times larger than that of St. Peter's.

The new Reich Chancellery, Hitler’s official residence and workplace, was in fact completed, just before World War 2; designed to impress or even intimidate, visitors arrived via a long courtyard and from there had to pass through a sequence of spaces including a reception lobby and a gallery twice as long as the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles before finally reaching the Führer’s desk. The building was virtually destroyed in the battle for the city in 1945, with the remains later demolished by the Soviets.

Post-war developments drove many decisions over capital cities. In Brazil a plan over 100 years in the making was initiated in 1955 by the new president, Juscelino Kubitschek – establishing a new capital city, to be called Brasilia, in a more central location that also allowed for expansion. Planner Lúcio Costa out a ‘winged’ design on a tremendous scale where the body contained residential buildings and the wings governmental structures; the goal was a socially and politically harmonious capital that drew on the ideas of French-Swiss architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier. Costa aimed to merge different classes in the housing area, through giant superblocks divided into smaller, self-contained neighbourhoods. Modernist ideas and architecture ruled, the latter often delivered by Oscar Niemeyer.

His Cathedral, engineered by Joaquim Cardozo, features a cluster of cranked concrete columns forming the mathematical volume that is a hyperboloid of revolution. Structurally competed in 1960 in time for the city’s dedication, consecration took longer with actual completion not occurring until 1977.  

France once ruled the Ivory Coast but in 1960 that territory gained both independence and its first president in former parliamentarian Félix Houphouët-Boigny. Unusually aligned with the West rather than the East, he maintained strong links with his country’s former imperial masters but still embarked on a programme of extravagant gestures and grandiose architecture that began with moving its capital city from Abidjan to his hometown of Yamoussoukro. That achieved, Houphouët-Boigny commissioned the construction of the world’s largest church.

The Basilica of Our Lady of Peace was inspired by St Peter’s in Rome, albeit with subtle changes to avoid any competitive disrespect – the surmounting cross is taller but the dome is lower, resulting in a total height that defers to the original. Thousands of square metres of stained glass and marble were imported from France and Italy respectively and every one of the 7,000 seats in the nave is air conditioned. Building took five years at a cost of several hundred million dollars, at a time when the Ivory Coast was under severe economic strain. The same concerns surrounded the luxury hotel, convention centre and palace (complete with artificial lakes populated by crocodiles) that were among Houphouët-Boigny’s other projects. So great was his hubris that even travel to Ivory Coast saw no expense spared – its international airport was equipped with a runway long enough to accommodate, and associated facilities to support the handling of, Concorde.

Further around the world the authority of another elected leader, albeit one with rather more humanitarian aims, had gifted modern-day Australia with a new capital at the turn of the century. The country had only come into existence in 1901 following the Federation of the Colonies, and a dozen years later Minister for Home Affairs King O'Malley kicked off construction of Canberra. Founded from the outset for that purpose, it was a formally planned city designed after an international competition although the final result was a mix of various schemes. Based, like its American cousin, on radial avenues, vistas terminated by great monuments and geometric patterns, over the next few decades all the built features one would expect of a capital city were put up including houses of parliament, ministries and government offices, many integrated with large-scale landscaping or aligning with natural landmarks such as hills and mountains.

Work continued into the 1960s, with university buildings, the centrepiece lake finally being completed and a high court and the national library following. The theory that prevailed during the half-century and more that saw what was, at the outbreak of the last world war, the youngest capital in the world emerge was that of the ideal city.

Few agreed on what that meant then and even fewer would today, but compared the other examples explored above, who is to say this was not achieved?