Morality of bricks and mortar
Judith Flanders
THE EDIFICE COMPLEX: HOW THE RICH AND POWERFUL CHANGE THE WORLD by Deyan Sudjic Penguin/Allen Lane, £25, pp. 345, ISBN 0713997621 ✆ £23 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 Buildings are so much part of the literal as well as figurative fabric of our existence that it is easy never to think about them at all. Even for those who do think about them, it is more likely that they can date a building by the shape of its windows than, say, who commissioned it, or why.
Deyan Sudjic, in this wide-ranging if somewhat diffuse book, performs a service by reminding us that buildings have not only physical dimensions, but also political ones: why they exist is as important as how they exist. Sudjic wants to explore why men and societies build the way they do, what the resulting buildings mean, and to what uses the buildings are put. That he fails to achieve this overwhelming brief is not to his detriment.
He focuses largely on buildings commissioned by totalitarian rulers, or by their less objectionable cousins, politicians of varying stripe. The opening chapter, describing how the Czech president was so overcome by the brooding mass of Hitler’s Chancellery that he signed away his country, is a model of imaginative recreation. However, it also begs two questions that Sudjic spends the rest of the book wrestling with: is the fact that a building is commissioned by an evil man a reflection on the architect? And, by extension, is there such a thing as a fascist, or democratic, or totalitarian building?
Sudjic has trouble with the latter question: he veers between implying we can have, say, ‘a genuinely democratic building’ and warning of ‘the implausibility of defining the nature of a Nazi or a socialist architecture’. The first question should be simpler: after all, lawyers represent evil-doers without themselves being tarnished. But, as Sudjic shrewdly notes, architects have spent so long persuading us of the ‘eternal truths’ embodied in their work that they should not be surprised when we judge them on the values incorporated by their clients.
It is the clients who form the core of the book — or, at least, they are meant to. Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and their building plans are dealt with in three long sections. There are further discussions on Mitterrand’s ‘grands projets’ for Paris; Nelson Rockefeller’s redevelopment of New York’s state capital; and a mélange of other subjects including the ‘national styles’ dreamt up by developing nations, a breakneck tour of US presidents’ libraries, and then a whizz past a clutch of smaller (by comparison) commissioners of architecture: Gianni Agnelli, Nicholas van Hoogstraten, and the quarrelling coalition that is in charge of the rebuilding of the World Trade Center.
Had Sudjic cut the number of examples down, his argument would have had more force. Every building — and every architect, and every commissioner — has a host of conflicting aims, dreams and desires. To analyse a few might be possible; to deal with so many is a lost cause. Before we get to grips with each new cast of characters we are hurried on to the next sight by our impetuous tour guide.
The cast is truly formidable, and often we fail to be properly introduced: who is Michael Graves? Gordon Bunshaft? What was the Abercrombie Plan for London? Sudjic’s familiarity with his subject is so great he often forgets about his willing but less-informed reader. ‘SOM’ was mysteriously invoked half-a-dozen times before a stray reference led me to decode it as the somewhat better-known firm of Skidmore Owings and Merrill; the London Assembly building is discussed for a page before Norman Foster’s name is mentioned; Rem Koolhaas’s building project in Beijing is compared to the ‘Three Gorges Dam’ — in what way, I still can’t say. At the same time, Sudjic doubts our general knowledge to such an extent he feels the need to remind us that ‘in the mosque, the representation of the human form is unacceptable’.
However, he is at his considerable best telling us why good architecture is good: his dozen pages on Enric Miralles’s Scottish parliament building makes every penny overspent on that much-maligned construction seem like a shrewd and sensible investment. Sudjic knows that architecture is not just a backdrop to our lives. It matters, and he is able to tell us why, clearly and vividly. His skill at descriptions is especially fortunate, given his publisher’s woefully foolish decision to include no pictures, or even architects’ drawings.
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