The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful--and Their Architects--Shape the World

CHAPTER 1

WHY WE BUILD

I USED TO KEEP A PHOTOGRAPH TORN FROM A TABLOID PINNED UP over my desk. Through the blotchy newsprint you could make out the blurred image of an architectural model the size of a small car jacked up to eye level. Left to themselves, architects use noncommittal shades of gray for their models, but this one was painted in glossy lipstick colors, suggesting it was made to impress a client with an attention span shorter than most.

Strips of cardboard and balsa wood had been used to represent a mosque with a squat dome fenced in by concentric circles of spiky minarets. The gaudy shapes and the reduction of an intricate decorative tradition to a cartoon, not much different from a hundred other attempts at having it both ways, tried—and failed—to be simultaneously boldly modern and respectfully rooted in the past. The questionable architectural details weren’t what made it such an unsettling image. What really grabbed my attention was the glimpse of the darker aspects of building that the picture captured.

None of the uniformed figures clustered respectfully around the model looked like the architects who usually feature conspicuously in this kind of picture, but there wasn’t much doubt about the identity of the thickset man with the heavy moustache, looking disorientingly like a World War II British army major in his vintage khaki sweater and beret, or the unblinking fascination with which he was gazing so adoringly at his model.

Saddam Hussein, like many authoritarians, was an enthusiastic patron of architecture. Unlike Napoleon III, whose fastidious tastes are still clearly visible in the parade-ground tidiness of the boulevards of Paris, or Benito Mussolini, with his contradictory passions for modernism and Caesar Augustus, Hussein had no obvious preference for any specific architectural style. He did, however, have an instinctive grasp of how to use architecture to glorify himself and his regime and to intimidate his opponents.

From the moment of its conception, the Mother of All Battles Mosque had a very clear purpose: to claim the first Gulf War as a victory for Iraq. Hussein was humiliated in that war. His army was expelled from Kuwait. Its desperate flight home left the highway disfigured by the grotesque train of incinerated Iraqi conscripts, trapped in their burnt-out plundered cars, the roadside strewn with loot. Hussein wanted to build his own reality to try to wipe out that image of defeat, just as the Kuwaitis used their tame parliament—designed by Jørn Utzon, architect of the Sydney Opera House, no less—to suggest that they were a Scandinavian democracy rather than a Gulf oligarchy. Building anything at all while Iraq struggled with the deprivations brought by Hussein’s manipulation of United Nations sanctions was a calculated gesture of defiance. And the mosque itself came loaded with an iconography that made this defiance all the more explicit.

The message of the newspaper picture of Hussein’s mosque is unambiguous. Architecture is about power. The powerful build because that is what the powerful do. On the most basic level, building creates jobs that are useful to keep a restless workforce quiet. But it also reflects well on the capability and decisiveness—and the determination—of the powerful. Above all, architecture is the means to tell a story about those who build it.

Architecture is used by political leaders to seduce, to impress, and to intimidate. Certainly those were the underlying reasons for Saddam Hussein’s building campaign. His palaces and monuments were tattooed all over Iraq, less indelibly than he would have liked, in an attempt to present the entire country as his personal property, both to his external and to his internal foes.

In the south, outside Basra, lines of bronze effigies ten feet tall follow the shoreline. They depict Iraqi officers killed in the meat-grinder war against Iran. The sculptures point across the Gulf toward the old enemy—an enemy with its own taste for monument building in the days of the Shah, the product of a failed attempt to construct a pedigree for the Pahlavi dynasty.

On the edge of central Baghdad, a pair of notorious outsize crossed swords span the highway, gripped by giant bronze hands modeled on Hussein’s own but cast in the quintessentially English suburb of Basingstoke. In Saddam’s day, nets filled with shoals of captured Iranian helmets dangled from the two sword hilts. Such monuments, kitsch as they are, are universal. They date from the victory memorials of the Peloponnesian Wars and the triumphs Imperial Rome granted its favored generals. The same ritual celebration of the defeat of an enemy is reflected in the monumental sculptures cast from captured Napoleonic cannon that adorn the centers of London and Berlin.

The idea of the crossed swords was filched without acknowledgment from Mike Gold, an architect based in London, who originally proposed it, minus the helmets, as an innocuously whimsical civic landmark for a motorway in Saudi Arabia. In Iraq, its meaning was completely transformed. Gianni Versace’s inflammatory caricature of sex and money could be worn with a sense of irony in Milan, but not in Slobodan Milosevic’s Belgrade, where the bandit classes took the glitter and leopard-skin look at face value. And in Baghdad, a piece of ironic postmodernism became the most literal kind of architectural propaganda.

But Hussein had an objective wider than celebrating his questionable victories and intimidating his enemies. His mosque-building campaign can be seen as an overcompensation for the essentially secular nature of his regime; it demonstrates his credentials as a devout defender of the faith, despite his taste for whisky and murder.

Yet architectural propaganda is not the exclusive domain of those commissioning a building. As the United States dispatched two more aircraft carriers toward Iraq at the end of 2002, The New York Times published a photograph of Saddam Hussein’s Mother of All Battles Mosque on its front page. Here, four years after the design was first unveiled, was the completed building. Without a hint of skepticism, the Times baldly repeated the conventional media wisdom that the minarets—an outer ring of four and an inner, slightly shorter group of four more—are representations of, respectively, Kalashnikov assault rifles and Scud missiles. This assertion existed mainly in the minds of the western media, and their taxi drivers, and might be a little more convincing if the minarets had tail fins, or were decorated with olive drab camouflage paint rather than white limestone embellished with blue mosaic. Nor does the outer ring come equipped with gun sights or the distinctive curved magazine and walnut stock of a Kalashnikov. They look much less martial—and much less elegant—than the pencil-slim Ottoman minarets of Istanbul, which certainly do look like rockets.

The Times reporter sounded disappointed after his tour of the mosque: Where once visitors were told what seems obvious, how the cylinders of the inner minarets slim to an aerodynamic peak, like a ballistic missile tapering at the nose cone, they are now assured that no such references were ever in the architects’ minds. But by then America already felt itself at war, and such a bombastic interpretation of the mosque was too much of a propaganda gift.

Although the mosque does not use literally militaristic metaphors, its underlying message is hardly reassuring. The image of the exterior is less a howl of defiance than a conventional piece of labored Gulf hotel glitz, looking more like a police academy in drag than a national monument. More telling was the paper’s photograph of the glass showcase at the heart of the mosque, which contains a 650-page transcription of the Koran. According to the Times, the mosque’s imam, Sheik Thahir Ibrahim Shammariu, claimed that the calligrapher used Hussein’s own blood, donated over a period of two years at the scarcely believable rate of a pint every fortnight, to fill his pen. Another photo accompanying the article showed the reflecting pool that encircles the mosque, allegedly shaped like a map of the Arab world. At one end a blue mosaic plinth juts out of the water to form an island. The Times claimed that this irregular mound took the shape of Hussein’s thumbprint. The paper didn’t go into how it could be so sure that it had correctly identified the thumb as Hussein’s own. If true it carries a message that could not be clearer. The mosque’s imam was disappointingly reluctant to confirm the warlike iconography of the mosque to the Times, but he was obligingly ready to spell out some of its more occult meanings. The outer minarets are 43 meters high, he pointed out, supposedly for the 43 days of bombing at the start of the first Gulf War. The four minarets of the inner ring, representing April, the fourth month, are 37 meters high, for the year 1937. The 28 water jets in the pool symbolize the 28th day of the month. Together they spell out April 28, 1937, Hussein’s birthday.

In the flesh, the mosque is not a particularly effective way of demonstrating Iraqi defiance. And since Hussein’s purpose was to present himself as a devout Muslim, it seems unlikely that he would have used the Christian calendar to do so. This emphasis on the power of numbers, if it really is intentional, was uncomfortably echoed in some of the seven finalists in the competition to rebuild the World Trade Center, revealed in New York in the same week that this story appeared. Richard Meier and Peter Eisenman’s plan featured a tower 1111 feet high, presumably on the basis that a mere 911 feet would have been too short to attract enough attention. Daniel Libeskind famously went for 1776 feet.

One interpretation of Hussein’s enthusiasm for building could be to see him simply as following in the tradition common all over Asia and the Middle East of employing fashionable western architects to design prestige projects to demonstrate how up-to-date he was. Indeed, Baghdad had a history of planning gargantuan architectural monuments throughout much of the twentieth century. In 1957 King Faisal II commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design an opera house in the manner of Moscow’s unbuilt Palace of the Soviets. A colossal thirty-story-high memorial sculpture of Iraq’s greatest caliph, Haroun al-Rashid, grand-son of Baghdad’s founder, took Lenin’s place as its centerpiece. It would have been a piece of nation building on an epic scale by an Iraq still emerging from British colonial rule. A commission for Walter Gropius to design a university actually was built. Le Corbusier also secured a commission in Baghdad from Faisal in 1956, designing an arena completed only long after Le Corbusier’s death in 1965; it was then named the Saddam Hussein Sports Center.

Hussein wanted to do more than look modern. He was also attempting to co-opt a much older heritage of monument making that stretched back five thousand years to Ur and the first urban civilizations on the Euphrates. He initiated a series of damaging restorations of Iraq’s ancient sites, not flinching from reconstructing the Hanging Gardens of Babylon using materials more commonly found in a suburban subdivision. He had each brick stamped with his own name in the manner of the ancient emperors, to demonstrate that he was their natural successor. He even posted guards in period costume, equipped with spears, at his version of Ishtar’s gate in his Babylonian theme park.

Hussein’s determination to use architecture as a propaganda tool to glorify his state and consolidate his hold on it was clear enough. Even though it was hardly effective, when measured against his objectives, architecture stands clearly incriminated for the part it played in his brutal regime. But what can you say about those commissioned to execute his ideas?

The mosque is certainly a banal piece of architecture. And those who designed it are guilty of a lack of imagination, but does the use to which Hussein has put it neccessarily implicate the architect in anything worse?

Architecture has an existence independent of those who pay for it. Simply because the architect of the mosque worked for one of the more brutal of recent leaders, there is no reason to assume that he is himself culpable, as we did of Albert Speer when he was convicted by the Nuremberg war crimes court. The mosque is not itself committing an act of violence; its architectural forms need not in themselves be the embodiment of a dictatorship.

Whether architecture can project an inherent meaning at all is still an open question, though one that is often asked. Are there, in fact, such things as totalitarian, democratic, and nationalistic buildings? And if they do exist, what is it that gives architecture such meanings? Can classical columns or glass walls really be described, as some have claimed, as the signs of fascist or democratic buildings? Are these fixed and permanent meanings, or can they be changed over time?

If Saddam Hussein had shown the wit, or the cunning, to invite Zaha Hadid, the most celebrated woman architect in the world, and herself born in Baghdad, to design that mosque, we might have been distracted enough to see his regime in a different light. If Hadid had accepted, we would certainly see her differently: at best a political innocent, at worst a naïve compromiser. Certainly her chances of getting to build anything in America would have been dramatically diminished.

A Hadid mosque would have sent another kind of message: still a glorification of Hussein’s state, still an act of defiance, but a claim of the cultural high ground too. It would have suggested a regime more sophisticated than the one that countenanced the cold-blooded murder of Hussein’s two sons-in-law and the gassing of thousands of its own citizens. But would Hadid—in the unlikely event that she had been asked, and the even more unlikely event that she had accepted—have been seen as playing a part in reasserting a more civilized Iraq? Or would she have been condemned as a pawn in a game of state, prepared to subordinate every other consideration in the pursuit of the chance to build?

It is not only architects who are driven by the overwhelming urge to build at any cost. Saddam Hussein’s obsession with building raises a series of questions about the psychology that motivated him. To explore the question of why he, and others like him, invested so much in building, we need to consider whether architecture is an end in itself, or a means to an end.

WE BUILD FOR EMOTIONAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL PURPOSES, AS well for ideological and practical reasons. The language of architecture is used to project power, as much by software billionaires endowing a museum in return for naming rights as by sociopathic dictators. When Michael Eisner, who was obsessed by architecture, set about building Euro Disney on the outskirts of Paris, he recruited every famous architect he could get his hands on and had a detailed opinion about every aspect of what they proposed. It was a characteristic that infuriated Aldo Rossi, the leading Italian architect of his generation, who ended up pulling out of the commission. I am not personally offended, and can ignore all the negative points that have been made about our project at the last meeting in Paris, he wrote to Eisner. The cavalier Bernini, invited to Paris for the Louvre project, was tormented by a multitude of functionaries who continued to demand that changes be made to the project. It is clear that I am not the cavalier Bernini. But it is also clear that you are not the King of France.

Architecture has been shaped by the ego, and by the fear of death, as well as by political and religious impulses. And it in turn serves to give them shape and form. Trying to make sense of the world without acknowledging architecture’s psychological impact on it is to miss a fundamental aspect of its nature. To do so would be like ignoring the impact of warfare on the history of technology and vice versa. Unlike science and technology, which have conventionally been presented as being free of ideological connotations, architecture is both a practical tool and an expressive language, capable of carrying highly specific messages.

Yet the difficulty in establishing the precise political meanings of buildings and the elusive nature of the political content of architecture have led today’s generation of architects to claim that their work is autonomous, or neutral. Conversely, they may believe that if there is such a thing as overtly political architecture, it is confined to an isolated ghetto, no more representative of the concerns of high-culture architecture than a shopping mall or a Las Vegas casino. It is a flawed assumption. There may be no fixed political meaning to a given architectural language, but that does not mean that architecture lacks the potential to assume a political aspect. Few successful architects can avoid producing buildings with a political dimension at some point in their career, whether they want to or not. And almost all political leaders find themselves using architects for political purposes. It is a relationship that recurs in almost every kind of regime and appeals to egotists of every description. That is why there are photographs of Tony Blair, François Mitterrand, and Winston Churchill (not to mention countless mayors, archbishops, chief executives, and billionaire robber barons) bowed over their own, equally elaborate architectural models, looking just as narcissistically transfixed as the beatific Hussein beaming over his mosque. This is not to equate George Bush the Elder’s presidential library, or Tony Blair’s Millennium Dome or his Wembley Stadium or any Olympic arena that Britain will build for the 2012 games, with Hussein’s mosque. To maneuver at the court of an elected prime minister to secure the chance to build involves an altogether less corrosive kind of compromise than the potentially lethal survival dance demanded by a dictatorship. But democratic regimes are just as likely to deploy architecture as an instrument of statecraft as totalitarians.

Versailles was built as Louis XIV’s court whose architectural splendor and physical location were meant to neutralize the power base of the nobility in the French provinces. Two centuries later, Napoleon III was once more using architecture as an instrument of political power when he engaged Georges Eugène Haussmann to rebuild Paris on a monumental scale. He was attempting not so much to curb the power of the Parisian mob as to legitimize his questionable claims to an imperial title. And François Mitterrand saw a Paris adorned by a transformed Louvre and the Grande Arche at La Défense as an essential part of his strategy to make Paris the undisputed capital of a modern Europe. For all three rulers, how those monuments looked was as much part of the strategy as what they contained. Mitterrand adopted an aggressive architecture of simplified geometric forms in steel and glass to symbolize French commitment to modernity, just as the Sun King made Versailles a temple to a royal cult to demonstrate the divine right of kings.

I STARTED TO COLLECT IMAGES OF THE RICH AND POWERFUL LEANING over architectural models in a more systematic way after I suddenly found myself in the middle of one, invited as an observer. The elder statesman of Japanese architecture, Arata Isozaki, had leased an art gallery in Milan owned by Miuccia Prada for a presentation to an important client. Outside, two black Mercedeses full of bodyguards were parked on either side of the entrance, alongside a vanload of carabinieri. Inside was another of those room-size models. Isozaki described it as a villa. In fact it’s a palace for a Qatari sheik, who at the time was his country’s minister for culture. And the palace has to do rather more than accommodate the sheik, his family, his collection of rare breed animals, his Ferraris, his Bridget Rileys, and his Hockney swimming pool, as well as his Richard Serra landscape installation. It is a deliberate effort to inject a sense of cultural depth into a desert sheikdom with little urban tradition. Each piece of the building has been allocated to an individual architect or designer. And Isozaki’s assistants are marshaling them for an audience with the sheik to present their projects. The architects wait, and they wait, drinking coffee and eating pastries dispensed by waiters in black tie until the sheik finally arrives, almost two hours late. Here is the relationship between power and architecture in its most naked form, a relationship of subservience to the mighty as clear as if the architect were a hairdresser or a tailor. (In fact the villa never got built, and the last that I heard of the sheik was when the British newspapers reported that he was under house arrest and summarily removed from his ministry, where he was responsible for the purchase of millions of dollars’ worth of art on behalf of the government.)

We are used to discussing architecture in terms of its relationship to art history, or as a reflection of technological change, or as an expression of social anthropology. We know how to categorize buildings by the shapes of their windows or the decorative detail of their column capitals. We understand them as the products of available materials and skills. What we are not so comfortable with is coming to grips with the wider political dimensions of buildings: why they exist in fact, rather than how. It’s an omission that is surprising, given the closeness of the relationship between architecture and power. Architecture has always been dependent on the allocation of precious resources and scarce manpower. As such, its execution has always been at the discretion of those with their hands on the levers of power rather than of architects. Pharaonic Egypt did not devote the surplus from its harvests to the construction of the pyramids, rather than to road building or abolishing slavery, because of any creative urge of the pharaoh’s architects.

Despite a certain amount of pious rhetoric about architecture’s duty to serve the community, to work at all in any culture the architect has to establish a relationship with the rich and the powerful. There is nobody else with the resources to build. And it is the genetically predetermined destiny of the architect to do anything he can to try to build, just as it is the mission of migrating salmon to make one last exhausting upriver trip to spawn before expiring. The architectural profession can be seen then, not as well-meaning herbivores, but as ready to enter into a Faustian bargain. It has no alternative but to trim and compromise with whatever regime is in power.

Every kind of political culture uses architecture for what can, at heart, be understood as rational, pragmatic purposes, even when it is used to make a symbolic point. But when the line between political calculation and psychopathology breaks down, architecture becomes not just a matter of practical politics, but a fantasy, or a sickness that consumes its victims.

There is a psychological parallel between making a mark on the landscape with a building and the exercise of political power. Both depend on the imposition of will. Certainly, seeing their worldview confirmed by reducing an entire city to the scale of a doll’s house in an architectural model has an inherent appeal for those who regard the individual as of no account. Even more attractive is the possibility of imposing their will in the physical sense on a city by reshaping it in the way that Haussmann did in Paris.

Architecture feeds the egos of the susceptible. They grow more and more dependent on it to the point that architecture becomes an end in itself, seducing its addicts as they build more and more on an ever larger scale.

Building is the means by which the egotism of the individual is expressed in its most naked form: the Edifice Complex.

On balance, Haussmann’s Paris steered clear of megalomania. Ceauşescu’s Bucharest did not. In both these cities, demolition was almost as essential a part of the process of transformation as new building. And destruction and construction can be seen as closely related. Whatever else it was, the assault on the Twin Towers, driven by visceral hatred, was a literal acceptance of the iconic power of architecture, and an attempt to destabilize that power even more forcefully through erasure. The fact that one of the hijackers at the controls of the airliners was himself an architecture graduate serves only to underline the point.

This book is an exploration of what it is that makes individuals and societies build in the way that they do, what their buildings mean, and the uses to which they are put. It looks in some detail at a selection of buildings, architects, billionaires, politicians, and dictators, mostly from the twentieth century, in the belief that understanding the nature of their shared obsessions can help us protect ourselves from their more malevolent ambitions.

Architecture has the ability to modify weather and light. In that it has power. Stone and steel last longer than flesh and blood. Over time architecture takes on the patina and the resonance of the events that have taken place inside it, and of the people who have occupied it. Buildings are historical markers that show the passing of time, and the changes of regimes; no wonder that the totalitarians were so keen about erasing those buildings that challenged their vision of what a country should be. No wonder that it is architectural imagery that underpins the otherwise banal cult of Freemasonry, with its great architect and its dividing-compasses symbol.

What an architect can offer a Hussein—or an Eisner, for that matter—is in part the sense that together they are making a place in which there is some sense of meaning and purpose. This includes a sense of belonging to a wider world, but at the same time celebrating the individual and his or her place in that world.

The nature of the relationship between the architect and the patron is complex and critical. For many architects it has been an act of faith to maintain that great architecture depends on a great client, the strong individual. This is of course a somewhat self-serving concept, calculated to flatter the patron, and is fundamentally just as unsatisfactory as the idea that great architecture depends on a single architectural genius. The latter concept results in the cult of celebrity, reducing the complex creative process to a caricature.

There certainly are individuals who commission an architect and, whether from vanity or the controlling instinct, see every decision as being essentially theirs. But it is not the only model for the relationship.

The appeal of construction lies in the special kind of pleasure that is to be had in the process of building, and in the transformation of an idea into a physical reality—sometimes slow and steady, sometimes in large steps. That pleasure is hard to replicate in the daily experience of a completed building. And it may explain why so many individuals, once they have built once, try to repeat the experience again and again.

But there is more to it than the process of watching a wall rise, or a space take shape. The appeal of architecture to those who aspire to political power lies in the way that it is an expression of will. To design a building, or to have a building designed, is to suggest that this is the world as we want it. This is the perfect room from which to run a state, a business empire, a city, a family. It is the way to create a physical version of an idea or an emotion. It is the way to construct reality as we wish it to be, rather than as it is.

In its scale and its complications, architecture is by far the biggest and most overwhelming of all cultural forms. It literally determines the way that we see the world, and how we interact with one another.

For the patron, it is a chance to exert a sense of control over events. And for a certain kind of architect it offers the possibility of control over people. It allows the architect to indulge in the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art, so mocked by Adolf Loos in his parable of the poor rich man in which the client has become just another part of the furniture:

Once it happened that he was celebrating his birthday. His wife and children had given him many presents. He liked their choice immensely and enjoyed it all thoroughly. But soon the architect arrived to set things right, and to take all the decisions in difficult questions. He entered the room. The master greeted him with pleasure, for he had much on his mind. But the architect did not see the man’s joy. He had discovered something quite different and grew pale.

What kind of slippers are these you have got on? he asked painfully.

The master of the house looked at his embroidered slippers. Then he breathed a sigh of relief. This time he felt quite guiltless. The slippers had been made to the architect’s original designs. So he answered in a superior way.

But, Mr Architect, have you already forgotten? You yourself designed them!

Of course, thundered the architect, but for the bedroom! They completely disrupt the mood here with these two impossible spots of color. Can’t you see that?

Some rather similar questions were explored more sympathetically by the Milanese architect Ernesto Rogers in his belief that the values and the aspirations of a culture, when expressed by architecture, could be distilled in such an intense way that it would be possible to deduce from the simplest of objects produced by a society, even a spoon, the nature of its largest artifact, the city.

Architecture is intimately concerned with the instinct to control. To order, to categorize, to shape life as it will be lived in a space, to choreograph every activity within every space, demands a certain view of the world, one in which humility is unlikely to figure very large. There is a deep-rooted belief that the architect has succeeded in his task only if he has managed to finesse the clients into building not just something that they don’t understand, but something that they don’t want. It is a view of the world that is the product of an architectural profession that has constructed a sense of itself as constituting a priesthood, defined by its arcane language, but also its sense of inferiority about its relative status with other cultural forms.

Architecture of course is about life as well as about death. It shapes the way we live our lives, even if not quite so directly as some architects imagine. It does have a practical purpose, but it is also pursued for its own sake, as a metaphor for something else. It is about control because of the possibility it gives of being entirely in command of our personal environment, and the people that we are sharing it with, if even only for a brief moment. Architecture has the power to frame the world, canceling out the things that the architect or patron doesn’t want you to see, concentrating on those that he does. It directs light, it creates the relationship between where you eat and where you prepare food. Of course any sensible architect makes this a loose fit. You can write in the kitchen, you can eat in the bath, you can sleep in the study. But the architecture has created a grain and a texture that you can go with, and which you can choose to ignore.

It’s the mind-set demonstrated by the German architect Frei Otto, who named his children in alphabetical order. It’s the experience of taking a drive in the backseat of Norman Foster’s chauffeur-driven Range Rover, on the way to his private jet, to find that both seat pockets are filled with pristine sketchbooks and freshly sharpened pencils (as well as a mobile telephone), just in case something should occur to the great architect in transit and be lost to the world because he is lacking paper and pen to record it before it passes across his field of consciousness and vanishes forever.

It’s the idea that design can be an instrument for control, as it is for the German modernist Dieter Rams. So distressing does he find the idea of visual disorder that he used to claim that he took a large paper bag with him on country walks to collect the rubbish. His own office is a study in neutrality, the Switzerland of the design world, the kind of room in which a single fingerprint on the wall or a paper out of place has the impact of a visual landslide. He designed everything in it, the furniture, the products on the shelves, the clock, the radio, the storage system, and the only color comes from the orange cigarette packet, permanently in Rams’s hands.

Rams devotes enormous effort and patience to designing perfect objects that defeat fashion and cancel out the passing of time by defying visual redundancy. He made the ideal calculator, with the most carefully considered rounded corners, and the perfect buttons, and the clearest sequence of operating functions, only to find the entire category of objects calculators had become redundant. He designed the most beautiful, the most functional record player, and the same thing happened. Not only have records all but vanished, so have the tapes that replaced them. And the compact discs that replaced them are rapidly on their way out too, leaving Rams and his attempts at control and order looking like the hopelessly deluded activities of a Canute, attempting to prevent the tide from washing away the grains of sand on a beach.

Architecture has its roots in the creation of shelter in a physical sense, but it has become an attempt to construct a particular view of the world, whether it is an individual house, a complex of streets and apartments, or a city plan. There is a very different kind of connection between an architect and the mayor who invites him to build a new housing complex, and the relationship between that architect and the individuals who will actually live in it. Architecture is still shaped by the powerful, and not the many. But that does not make it any less significant.

CHAPTER 2

THE LONG MARCH TO THE LEADER’S DESK

ADOLF HITLER WENT TO PARIS ONLY ONCE IN HIS LIFE. HE FLEW there in the wake of the French army’s collapse as the victorious leader of the Third Reich that he had created, stretching from the Atlantic to the Soviet frontier to wash away Germany’s humiliation at Versailles. He landed at Le Bourget just before dawn on June 23, 1940, and it was not generals or party leaders who sat closest to him on his personal plane. Extraordinarily, Hitler chose to savor his greatest moment of military triumph by sharing it with two architects, Albert Speer and Hermann Giesler, along with Arno Breker, the regime’s sculptor in chief. He skipped the obvious political sites. Instead of the Elysée Palace and the National Assembly, he took them to see Charles Garnier’s Opéra. Hitler spent more than an hour testing his memories of the plans he had studied so obsessively in his days of poverty in Vienna. He knew the building well enough in his mind that, as they toured the grandiloquent marble corridors, he could smugly point out a blocked door that had once led to a room lost in later alterations.

One of the twentieth century’s most unforgettable photographs was taken on the steps of Les Invalides later that day. It’s an image that is key to understanding the nature of Hitler’s pursuit of power. Hitler, the former corporal with a lifelong passion for architecture, had lingered over Napoleon’s tomb, and on the way out had entrusted Giesler with the task of designing something even more impressive, when the time came. As the group emerge into the sunshine, Hitler of course is in the center, wearing a long white overcoat. Everybody else is dressed from head to foot in black, in an eerie precursor of the universal taste for Commes des Garçons suits among architects of the early years of the twenty-first century. Most of them are soldiers; a couple belong to Hitler’s political entourage, led by Martin Bormann. But the uniformed man on Hitler’s immediate right, pointing into the camera, is Speer. At a respectful distance to his left stand Giesler and Breker, the sculptor in his Nazi forage cap.

Here is the leader surrounded by his architectural acolytes. He is a magic figure radiating light, like the Sun King hemmed in by lesser mortals lost in darkness. It is a scene as carefully designed as one of Speer’s party rallies, just as pregnant with meaning, and, in theory, as astonishing a tableau as if George W. Bush had decided to tour Baghdad in the company of Philip Johnson, Jeff Koons, and Frank Gehry. The dictator is demonstrating his priorities and making his intentions manifestly clear: Hitler, the great architect, is ready to redesign the world. And yet, somehow, we never entirely got the message; he wanted to be seen not as a military leader or a political figure, but as an artist. For so many leaders architecture represents simply a means to an end. There is the real possibility that for Hitler at least, it was always an end in itself.

BY THE TIME THAT EMIL HÁCHA FINALLY NEGOTIATED THE SECOND of the two pairs of outsize bronze gates forming the ceremonial entrance to the Reich Chancellery on Wilhelmstrasse, it was well after midnight. The Czech president had made the short drive through the empty streets of Berlin from his suite at the Adlon Hotel sitting beside Hitler’s foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop. A tiny crowd, no more than fifty people, waited in the rain to see them sweep by on the way to the most difficult three hours of Hácha’s life.

This was a brutal time to be embarking on a state visit, but March 15, 1939, was one of the more desperate days in European history. Hitler had reoccupied the Rhineland, annexed Austria, and seized the Sudetenland without firing a shot. If he could, he was determined to secure control of the rest of Czechoslovakia in the same way. The first and only president of the second Czechoslovak republic traveled to Berlin in a despairing and futile attempt to snatch his country back from oblivion. Czechoslovakia had already lost the Sudetenland, with its carefully prepared lines of pillboxes and fortifications on the frontier with Germany, in the betrayal of the Munich conference. Now Hitler wanted to destroy the beleaguered state altogether. Encouraged by Germany, the Hungarians and the Russians were moving to scoop up slices of Czech territory, leaving the rest to Hitler as a protectorate of the Reich. At the same time, the Slovaks prepared to secede to create their own satellite state, allowing Hitler a free run to attack Poland, his next target in the search for lebensraum.

Hácha had no cards but his dignity left to play. His officials had been telephoning Berlin for the last three days pleading for an audience with the Führer. By the time Hitler finally agreed to a meeting, 200,000 German soldiers were mobilized to move across the frontier.

In fact, the special train bringing Hácha, his daughter, his foreign minister, and a small entourage of other Czech officials was more than an hour late arriving in Berlin, delayed by troop transports moving south and east. Hácha’s position as a supplicant was made immediately clear. A guard of honor met the president at Anhalt Station, fulfilling diplomatic protocol to the letter, but the reception party numbered only insultingly junior functionaries and the German bandmaster skipped Czechoslovakia’s national anthem. Hácha must have wished that he had stayed in Prague and ordered his troops into action.

The negotiating process had started without the Czechs knowing it, and they had already lost the first round. Hácha went to his hotel, while his foreign minister, Frantisek Chvalovsky, called on Ribbentrop at the German foreign office. The terms they took to Hácha at the Adlon were so brutal that the Czechs at first refused to leave the hotel. Ribbentrop left them thinking it over for more than an hour while he went to see Hitler alone. According to one account, he passed the time watching a film with the Führer before finally returning to collect them.

Hácha had become president when his predecessor Edvard Beneš went into exile following Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 refusal to back his stand against Hitler’s territorial demands, and his acquiescence to the dismemberment of the first Czechoslovak republic. Hácha was a respected jurist and the head of the Czechoslovak Supreme Court, but he had little political experience and even less stomach for a fight. Whether his readiness to accommodate Hitler was an attempt to save his own skin or to spare his country from futile bloodshed