Albert Speer photographed in his cell at Nuremberg, Germany, during the Nuremberg trials, 1945, Gelatin silver process on paper, image courtesy of the Harvard Law School Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

I t is one of history’s cheekier pranks that the first architect ever to appear on television was that thirty-year-old prodigy with the movie-star face, Albert Speer. Nazi Germany was the first country to introduce television broadcasting, just in time to cover the 1935 Nazi Party Rally in Nuremberg. If you search for it, you can watch a short clip as Speer drives his...