Speer Jr takes on 1936 sports site

Tempelhof airport, subject of The First Post's cover story today, is not  the only building from Berlin's Third Reich period whose future is in  question. The Poststadion, a dilapidated sports complex used for football  matches in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, is up for renovation ­ and the  architect hoping to overhaul the site is none other than Albert Speer Jnr, son of Hitler's favourite architect.

Albert Speer Snr (left) was also Hitler's wartime Armaments Minister and spent 20 years in Spandau jail after his conviction at the Nuremburg trials in 1946 for using slave labour at factories under his command. His son has spent half a century trying to shake off the association. "I am 73, and at that age you become tired of always being treated as the son of someone else," he said recently.

He recounted winning a prize early in his career. "When they opened the  envelope, everybody was baffled. ?'What?' said one of the members of the  jury. ?Albert Speer? I thought he was in jail!' That's how I began."

As a result, he has spent much of his career working abroad, and the €16m renovation of the Poststadion near Berlin's Hauptbahnhof - the main railway station - is a rare domestic project for Albert Speer and Partners.

Worldwide projects have included a waterfront development in Baku, a  criminal court complex for the Saudis, holiday resorts in Russia and the  revovation of great swathes of Beijing in time for the summer Olympics. This ambitious scheme led to comparisons being made with the grand designs drawn up by his father to turn Berlin into Hitler's dream capital of Germania.

Both contained a vast boulevard running along a north-south axis, but Speer dismissed the similarities: "What I am trying to do in Beijing is to  transport a 2,000-year-old city into the future. Berlin in the 1930s - that  was just megalomania," he said. ·