Hadrian, the once emperor of Rome, called for a reconstruction of the great Pantheon nearly two centuries after its initial erection. Across its marble face, the date 25 - 27 BC is etched. The grooves are deep, sharp in a way. The gestures turn on themselves as in battle with their tail. A chisel must be struck with such power to pierce rock –that must cede the hand’s control in a way, yes it must, the chisel will swivel and rock against the palm – it must bring a blister of puss, it must do. The Pantheon is tall and plucks many eyes to its façade, one pair of which were Adolf Hitlers. In 1938 he gawked at its majesty. Massive, of history and statue – the universe could sink through its great open oculus and here, he thought, here ‘God and the world are one’. Yet, his Pantheonic lust had preceded this private visit – years before he handed a sketch to the German architect Albert Speer. Speer, the Nazi, used Hitler’s sketch to design a Great Dome. The Dome, referred to as the Volkshalle, would bully its Pantheon brother. The building would serve as a skin to the German people. Here Hitler would be taller than all, amongst a crowd of nearly one hundred and fifty thousand imagined admirers. It would be the capital of a championed Nazi world, all will see Berlin and all shall beckon to its great Volkshalle. Albert Speer knew that authority demanded an architecture of absolute regularity, like the rhythms of jackboots on concrete. Its purpose was to promote unity, not to articulate feeling. Yet, as many propositions of almost pious ambition do – Babylon another – the design never left the page. It remains as a paper-ideal, the building that almost was, and yet never will be. Never will be, because of the realisation that as a man stands amongst the many his injured frame is most apparent. Hitler would be propped as a ruler, but with such distance his humanness could project at its most apparent. And humanity is for the weak, an Aryan would be created by God as the most perfect man, of a near divinity. Volkshalle needed abandoning by the risk it posed to its counterfeit doctrine. The mass state conceded their ambitions of scaling politics to such great dimensions. Wise too, in less than twenty years, Hitler’s subject could stride into everyone’s sitting room under the buzzing gloss of television – no need for a stadium of Roman proportion.