The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful Shape the World

The Edifice Complex
Deyan Sudjic

Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (November 28, 2006)
ISBN-10: 014303801X
ISBN-13: 978-0143038016
Hardcover: 405 pages

Deyan Sudjic’s latest offering is a witty, sometimes lighthearted look at some really very real issues pertaining to the world of architecture and its promiscuous relationship with power.

The book looks towards architecture and the role it plays within dominions of power and leadership, and how it is being wielded on today’s global construction sites, where iconic just so happens to be the overused word of the day; a phenomenon undeniably launched by the advent of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim museum in Bilbao. The building holds an interesting place in this discourse: Once touted as the single reason for post-industrial Bilbao’s successful urban regeneration, it has now become the subject of scrutiny as the culprit for the now famous/infamous Bilbao Effect. Referencing age old examples like Francois Mitterand’s Grand Projets in Paris, or Adolf Hitler and Albert Speer’s Germany, to more recent instances of architects’ brushes with the powers that be, that include the activities of the offices of Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid, Sudjic makes exceptionally clear his thesis that architecture has and continues to be utilized as an instrument for the raw expression of power.

Architectural space, language and tectonics – are explored in detail, with Sudjic in one instance describing Speer’s design of the German Chancellery and its very physical and political role in the war; and in one riveting and revealing chapter, charts the gradual physical-political crumbling of then-Czech president Emil Hácha as he traversed through the endless catacombs of what was really a superfluous display of Adolf Hitler’s power. Needless to say, Stalin and Mao and their respective pet projects are given equal attention in what emerges to be a study of the (very architectural) devices of power.

Far from being one-sided, Sudjic draws attention to an equal and complimentary attitude of architects; that of the undying hunger and thirst to build, and the unimaginable lengths to which architects would go to just to realize a project. Philip Johnson, and even Mies gain honorable mention, as Sudjic digs up the latter’s lesser known past of having flirted with building for Hitler’s Third Reich, showing that even the Modernist master himself could not resist the idea of building for the progressive elite, in hope of even further commissions of a similar nature.

Through explicit descriptions of spaces and environments, and voyeuristic demonstrations of the manipulation and games that go on behind the doors of the rich and powerful, Sudjic also sheds light on architecture’s rat pack of the day – Koolhaas, Gehry, Hadid, Foster – among others, and brings to mind the world’s current fascination with the icon, and its inexorable relationship to - the very real, and sometimes ugly - human instinct to wield and display the extent of one’s power. Architecture, as Sudjic argues, must be understood primarily not as art, but as an expression of power over a landscape that will last far longer than we do – a unique instrument of statecraft.

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JJ is the co-founder of 5ft Creatives and he is now a legal alien in the USA