Donald Trump has at least one thing in common with the fascist leaders of the 20th century: architecture When production designer Drew Boughton was tasked with creating a fascist vision of the Manhattan skyline circa 1962, he didn?t have to dream up any new buildings. He didn?t even have to look past downtown Vancouver, B.C.?where The Man in the High Castle is filmed for Amazon Studios?to find an example of the kind of visually oppressive architecture that the Third Reich might have built. That is, if Germany, as the alt-history of the show goes, had won World War II and colonized the East Coast of the United States.

Boughton says the show?s creators imagined that New York was not bombed significantly, and iconic structures like the Empire State building and Chrysler Building were left intact. Furthermore, they designed the show?s city under the premise that the Nazis had put most of their money into rebuilding Berlin after the war, which Hitler and his chief architect Albert Speer designed extensive plans for in the 1930s and ?40s. Instead of remaking all of New York City, "We went along with the theory that they would build one major monumental building that would lord over the other buildings in Manhattan." He and his team based the fictitious Nazi structure on Vancouver?s MacMillan Bloedel Building, a Brutalist concrete skyscraper designed by architect Arthur Erickson and built in 1965. With its imposing height, sharp angles, and lack of ornamentat...