What makes politicians and planners try to design and control entire cities? Architecture critic Deyan Sudjic argues that it is a combination of “excess, egotism, and greed” (p. 325). His book, The Edifice Complex, reviews the relationships between dictators, presidents, billionaires, and their architects.
The book’s opening chapters about Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and Mao make it clear that the impulse to rebuild cities is anything but democratic. Later discussions of democratically elected leaders such as Francois Mitterand and Tony Blair are not much more generous. And Sudjic’s comments on presidential libraries — especially the one for George H.W. Bush — are, if anything, even more scathing than his assessment of Albert Speer’s Berlin.
