In September 1946, Sigfried Giedion gave a lecture to the Royal Institute of British Architects on “The Need for a New Monumentality.” Giedion's call for a New Monumentality and its reverberations throughout the architectural community demonstrated a grave worry for modernist architects. Functionalism, long the watchword of Le Corbusier and his colleagues, “was not enough.” According to the editorial introduction to The Architectural Review 's symposium entitled “In Search of a New Monumentality,” modernism needed to broaden the term “to include a building's moral and emotional functions in addition to its material functions” (117). It is evident from the symposium's tone that architecture's role in fascism weighed heavily upon these European thinkers:

Although for Giedion the architect must question the politics of his craft, particularly in the wake of fascism, the pre-war years were not without models for a New Monumentality. In his contribution to the symposium, Sigfried Giedion suggests that ephemeral spectacle may serve as a unifying social force, citing as his example the sound and light shows of the 1937 Expo: