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about disorder and order, apparent disorder. It seems random, chaotic, but
there's a very clear structural rationale.” 60 Herzog adds that the design was
aimed to support the “Chinese love” of public spaces, off ering a “play-
ground.” h ey make a clear distinction between “creating a building that
fosters a country's ideology—say, Albert Speer's work for Hitler—and one
that seeks to transform it.” 61
But is there such a clear distinction between craven handmaiden to dic-
tators and determined enlightener? Herzog and de Meuron's disavowal of
Albert Speer, Hitler's favorite architect (called by one historian “the archi-
tect of the Devil”), aims to counter those critics who liken the 2008 Beijing
Olympics to the 1936 Olympic Games and their explicit promotion of Nazi
ideology. But despite their disavowal of Speer, the comparison is inevitable,
if only because his son, Albert Speer Jr., designed the Beijing Olympic Park
under the guise of a “green” facelift. 62 At three times the size of Central Park,
the 2,864-acre site incorporates the China National Garden and ecological
sanctuary. He designed a sixteen-mile-long north-south axis that con-
nected the center city with the Olympic Village, the Forbidden City, and a
new railroad station in the southern section of Beijing (the Water Cube and
the Bird's Nest lie on opposite sides of the axis). One writer highlighted the
connections between the father and son: “Speer's Berlin was to have been a
nexus of monumental arches and grand boulevards, a capital to end all capi-
tals. Speer Jr.'s blueprint for Beijing is equally monumental, the kind of
large-scale urban concept possible only under a totalitarian regime.” 63 In the
run-up to the Olympics, more than three hundred thousand residents lost
their homes, and the historical hutong neighborhoods made way for new
apartment block housing. As many writers and residents have documented
and lamented, the Beijing Olympics created a monumental physical land-
scape that not only has little space for ordinary people, but has actually
actively destroyed a vital urban fabric in hundreds of neighborhoods around
the city. 64
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