The Terror End of Beauty

Abstract

Notwithstanding well-known difficulties of fitting the
concept of beauty to architectural form, beauty has been a mainstay
when it comes to talking about classical and neoclassical buildings. The
classical conception of beauty in the West is closely allied to ideas of
moral goodness, imparting to classical and neoclassical architecture a
positive ethical accent. This paper investigates another strand of ancient
conceptions of beauty that has been impactful in architecture, archaic
beauty. I argue that something like archaic beauty surreptitiously reenters
twentieth-century architectural theory and practice and adapts classicism
to it. That is, some forms of neoclassical architecture take a hybrid of ar
chaic and classical beauty as their principle. This provides a worthwhile
lens through which to consider German fascist architecture. The ideal of
the good that fascist beauty expresses involves personal submissiveness to
charismatic leadership and a deindividualized experience of awe. Fascist
architecture, then, exists at the “terror end of beauty,” neoclassicism at
the threshold of the archaic.