Architecture and urban planning played a key role in the image cultivation of the NS regime and their power and symbolic political significance was also corresponding significant. Two scientists from the University of Stuttgart, Prof. Tilman Harlander (Institute Housing and Design) and Prof. Wolfram Pyta (Historical Institute) have now published a book, which documents those „ Fuehrer words made of stone“ in 14 new research contributions and numerous photographs. The volume going under the title of „NS-Architecture: Power and Symbolic Politics“*) also throws a light on the traces of NS architecture in Stuttgart as well as the role of the architecture reform movement “ Stuttgart School”, which was closely associated with the Faculty of Civil Engineering at the then Technical University of Stuttgart“. The contributions are based on the results of a symposium of the same name at the University of Stuttgart in 2009, sponsored by Internationales Zentrum für Kultur- und Technikforschung (International Centre for Cultural and Technological Studies).
Construction in the NS period in no way became jaded in the initially dominating blood and soil architecture and Neo-Classical ceremonial and state buildings erected in Troost or Speer style. As early as the 1980s, research work has been drawing our attention to the great significance of functionalist, in part „modern" planning concepts and utilitarian architecture. On the basis of additionally developed archive contents and bequests, recently there has been a multitude of important works closing research gaps on the significance of architecture and urban planning in National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy, on NS planning institutes such as Deutscher Arbeitsfront (DAF) (German Labour Front) or Deutscher Wohnungsakademie (German Housing Academy), on NS (spatial) planning politics in the east or in Alsace, on architects such as Paul Bonatz, Rimpl Office or the Olympic Village of 1936, but also on Stuttgart’s „Redesign Plans". The focus of the contributions is the link between architecture, power and symbolic politics already addressed in the title. The starting point is thereby the architectural language of form with which dominance was represented and certain political fields were expressed architecturally and in term of urban planning.