façade

Exploring prewar Nazi Germany through the lens of art and architecture, FAÇADE follows a young German architect, his mentor, and his loved ones as they struggle against the forces of totalitarian control.

At the center of the story is young architecture student Johannes Schröding, whose school, the modernist Bauhaus, is raided by the Berlin Gestapo during the turbulent early weeks of Nazi rule. The fate of the Bauhaus will reveal the coming cultural course under National Socialism—not just for the arts, but the German people as a whole.

Left reeling by these events, Johannes chooses to hide behind a low-level position at a conservative Berlin architecture firm, by day rendering bland, conformist designs into finished drawings, by night secretly transforming them into works of openness and light.

His former Bauhaus professor, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, struggles to navigate the politics dictating the design of public, and eventually even private, buildings while endeavoring to develop the concepts that decades later will solidify him as one of the most influential architects of the 20^th century.

Meanwhile, amid the incremental loss of personal freedom, a wholesale supplanting of truth, and the growing threat of war, Johannes’s loved ones—each at risk of being erased by policies that champion the collective over the individual—are forced to make choices with lasting consequences.

When Johannes’s secret drawings threaten to come to light, the usefulness of hiding behind a safe public face is clearer than ever. But when he discovers the dark agenda behind Hitler’s architectural vision for Berlin, Johannes must decide to what lengths he’ll go, and at what cost, to assert the truth as he sees it.

Told from multiple perspectives, FAÇADE mingles fictional characters and historical figures into a story of identity and self-expression, courage and survival. From the minimalist freedom of Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion to the oppressive neoclassicism of Albert Speer’s “Germania,” FAÇADE examines ideology and the artist’s quest for truth, exploring how our choices make us and how hope can persist, even in the bleakest of spaces.

FAÇADE (105,000 words) will appeal to fans of WWII fiction like All the Light We Cannot See, as well as to readers who enjoy works of biographical fiction like Loving Frank, A Piece of the World, and The Secrets We Kept.

Read the opening scene of FAÇADE.