The Terror End of Beauty

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 archaic 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.