In his new book, The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful Shape the World, writer, curator, educator, and critic Deyan Sudjic examines the role of buildings as propaganda—and urges that instead of merely celebrating the power of architecture, we should spend more time deconstructing the architecture of power. Sudjic has been called “probably the most influential figure in architecture you’ve never heard of” (by Christopher Hawthorne, architecture critic of the Los Angeles Times). Though he left the University of Edinburgh with an architecture degree, Sudjic decided it was his “patriotic duty” not to practice. Instead, he became founding editor of Blueprint magazine, was director of the Architecture Biennale in Venice in 2002, and until recently edited Domus magazine. He is currently the Observer’s architecture critic and dean of Kingston University’s Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture. On the occasion of U.S. publication of The Edifice Complex, he sat down to talk with Dwell contributing editor Jane Szita.
It’s the psychological condition that compels powerful people to employ architecture to construct the world as they’d like it to be, in other words, as a mirror image of their own ego—whether they are political leaders using architecture to seduce, impress, and intimidate or rich people building a house that will have more rooms than they can ever use.
I was intrigued by a photo of Saddam Hussein, standing over an architectural model, surrounded by his generals. Then I attended a presentation by Arata Isozaki, who was unveiling plans for a new villa to a Qatari sheikh. Each piece of the building was to be executed by a different architect or designer. At the presentation, in a Miuccia Prada–owned art gallery in Milan, the architects all sat and waited for the sheikh, who arrived two hours late. It was an illustration of the relationship between power and architecture in its most naked form, with the architects as subservient as hairdressers or tailors. For the first time, I realized the implications of the relationship between client and architect, and decided to research this book.
I was utterly shocked by the case of Jacques Attali, a French civil servant who built vast, Napoleonic, marble-lined interiors to his own glory in a London office, spending more on the conversion than his organization, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, gave out in loans that year. I found the relationship between Adolf Hitler and his chief architect, [Albert] Speer, very disturbing. Hitler was passionate about architecture, absolutely driven by it—so much so that some have argued that it was one of his primary motivations to acquiring power, so he could build “Germania.”
I’ll never forget interviewing Speer’s son, also an architect, who is now working in Beijing. He was trying to promote a north-south axis for Beijing on a far greater scale than that once planned for Berlin by Hitler and Speer senior. He told me that his tactic was to find a politician, and persuade him to think that the idea was his own. It was very unnerving.
No. You see it in rather more benign manifestations, in Tony Blair’s Millennium Dome and the U.S. presidential libraries, for example. And in Los Angeles, a Gehry house is the ultimate status symbol, way beyond a Learjet. It’s cheaper than a Picasso, but more rare. People who commission houses by Frank Gehry are a group unlike any other.
Take Peter Benjamin Lewis, who initially hired Gehry for a modest conversion job which then, over the space of ten years, sprawled into a monstrosity of 42,000 square feet. Throughout, Lewis exhibited this monumental design indecision. Should he have two guest houses or one? Should he be able to see the garage from the front door or not? And underlying it all was the theme of trying to get even with the neighbors: a 75-foot-high Claes Oldenburg golf bag would have been visible from the country club that he felt had humiliated him as a boy. And Gehry gave form to it, dignified this deeply flawed process. Although the house was never built, a film crew even completed a documentary on the project, with a voice-over by Jeremy Irons.
Eli Broad, on the other hand, is a very different kind of client. He describes himself as a “venture philanthropist,” which means, among other things, that he gets to put his name on a lot of buildings. He commissioned Gehry to design his house, but was too impatient to wait for the working drawings. He went ahead and built it himself, with the result
that Gehry has never set foot in it.
These two examples are the essence of edifice complex —the compulsion to shape the world you live in, to control how people see you. It’s like designing a life for yourself, whether that paralyzes you with indecision or leads you to take over the architect’s job.
With the case of the Lewis residence, you see allegedly rational requirements, referred to as “needs,” used to justify a totally irrational use of space. With much status-oriented architecture, size is the only criterion. But then, everything is bigger today—cars, fridges, and, of course, people—for no practical reason. What is all that space for? In part, it’s a symbolic compensation. You dream about your new kitchen when you eat in restaurants; you imagine the rooms the kids will play in when you never see your kids; you fantasize about the dining room you’ll entertain friends in when you haven’t got any friends.
These overblown houses are monuments to lives that don’t exist, our equivalent of the tombs of the ancient Egyptians, which were stuffed with everything they’d need for the afterlife.
Of course—architects will always say that. But The Edifice Complex is an attempt to write from a different angle. So much that we read about architecture is from the architect’s point of view, and in these accounts building becomes a sort of fairy tale. Reality isn’t really like that—the truth is messier. Today’s architects tend to see their work as neutral and autonomous, apolitical in other words; but the political dimension is always there, whether we like it or not. Architecture is always about power.
The book isn’t meant as a hatchet job on architects. I just wanted to explain the circumstances that architects operate in. If you listen to architects, the client appears as an idea, an abstraction; but the unsanitized reality is dirtier. The truth is that clients are influenced by motives like wanting to elevate themselves and put down other people, while architects will just do anything to be able to build. It’s a two-way relationship in which both sides use and abuse each other. With someone like Philip Johnson, you can read the work as a way of satirizing the clients he flattered to their faces and abused behind their backs.
It’s my vanity as a writer. But seriously, I wanted to get away from the usual architectural tendency to seduce people with images.
Architecture is too important to be left to architects. There aren’t enough books about it that are written by non-architects—Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House is an all-too-rare example. Architecture needs to be considered from a general angle—a different perspective is a healthy thing.
I hope it will appeal to people who wouldn’t be seen dead reading an architecture book. I’ve tried to rescue architecture from those people who hijack it and talk about it as though it’s a secret priesthood, in terms that nobody can understand. Architecture now is much more visible, conspicuous, and talked about, but I’m not sure it’s really understood on a nonaesthetic level. There should be more awareness of its psychological dimensions. A building has a mission to change the world—every building.
I’m not sure we should want to—even militant humility in building is a kind of edifice complex in reverse. If the book has a message, it’s that nothing ever changes. The same impulses were at work 10,000 years ago. The whole point of architecture is to create a sense of order, however flawed, in a random universe, so the edifice complex is not something we can just throw out. And abusive architectural relationships have produced wonderful buildings. It’s rather like The Third Man, when Harry Lime talks about Switzerland and the cuckoo clock—although in architecture’s case, Switzerland did produce Le Corbusier.
