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Hitler's chief architect, Albert Speer, oversaw Prora's design competition, which was won by Clemens Klotz - more on the strength of his party connections than his architectural talent. Nazi architecture tended towards either monumental classical modernism - such as Speer's famous Nuremberg grounds - or the folksy, resolutely German Heimatstil. But Prora is neither of these. Its precedents were modernism's bold experiments with the "linear city", in which all urban functions were organised into an infinitely extensible system, leaving clear landscape on either side. Ivan Leonidov proposed such a plan for the Russian mining town of Magnitogorsk, as did Le Corbusier with his Plan Obus design for Algiers. In practical terms these ideas were almost science fiction but Prora made them real. Behind the hotel block would have been a mini town of sanctioned leisure facilities: gymnasium and swimming pool; concert hall; movie theatre, and as the centrepiece, a festivity hall large enough for all 20,000 visitors. Tellingly the latter was handled by a dif ferent architect, Erich zu Putlitz, in a stripped-down classical style more in keeping with Nazi tastes.