Architecture has never been neutral.
Every building makes an argument. Most of the time, the argument is modest: that this is a place to live, work, or gather. But occasionally, architecture is pressed into service for a larger and more dangerous kind of argument: that a particular power is permanent, that a particular order is natural and inevitable, that the people who built this are the kind of people who build things that last. This is the architecture of power, and it is as old as the first ruler who understood that a large enough building could do political work that armies could not.
The earliest and most honest example is probably the Egyptian pyramid. There is no pretense in a pyramid. It does not claim to be a place of assembly or a monument to shared values. It is a machine for demonstrating scale, and scale, in the ancient world as in this one, is a proxy for significance. To stand at the base of the Great Pyramid of Giza is to have a physical experience of your own smallness, and that experience was entirely intentional. The pharaoh who commissioned it was not interested in your comfort. He was interested in your subordination.
The Romans understood this, too, but they were subtler about it. The Pantheon, completed under Hadrian around 125 AD, is one of the most technically accomplished buildings ever constructed, a concrete dome of such extraordinary precision that it remained the largest in the world for more than a thousand years. But it is also a statement of imperial confidence so complete that it barely needs to assert itself. The building does not shout. It simply exists, with a certainty that implies it will always have existed, and always will. This is the most sophisticated form of political architecture: the kind that makes power feel inevitable rather than imposed.
Louis XIV at Versailles understood this lesson perfectly. The palace he built outside Paris, beginning in the 1660s, was not a residence in any domestic sense. It was a stage set for the performance of absolute monarchy, designed by Jules Hardouin-Mansart and André Le Nôtre with an almost theatrical attention to the mechanics of spectacle. The Hall of Mirrors was not a corridor. It was a room in which the Sun King could be reflected back to himself and to his court at the precise moment of maximum grandeur. The gardens were not gardens. They were a demonstration that nature itself had submitted to the will of the king.
What the twentieth century added to this tradition was scale and ideology in combination, and the results were among the most disturbing buildings ever designed. Albert Speer, Hitler's favored architect, envisioned Berlin as Germania, a city that made Versailles look modest. The proposed great hall alone would have been large enough to contain its own weather system. When Speer showed Hitler the scale model, Hitler reportedly wept. The buildings were never built, which is perhaps the only fortunate architectural outcome of the Second World War.
Stalin's Seven Sisters, the wedding-cake skyscrapers that still punctuate the Moscow skyline, are the Soviet version of the same impulse. Completed between 1947 and 1957, they are buildings of genuine technical ambition dressed in the rhetoric of proletarian triumph. Each one is capped with a star. Each one is oriented so that no matter where you stand in central Moscow, you can see at least one of them. The city was reorganized around their presence.
What is interesting about all of these examples is that they work. Not in any moral sense, but in a purely experiential one. Standing in the Hall of Mirrors, or in the shadow of one of Stalin's towers, or looking up at the dome of the Pantheon, you feel something. The architecture produces an emotional response that is not entirely distinguishable from awe, even when you know precisely what it was built to do and by whom.
This is the uncomfortable truth about the architecture of power. It is usually very good architecture, at least by the standards of its time. Tyrants, historically, have had excellent taste and unlimited budgets, and they have attracted the best available architects, not always unwillingly. Philip Johnson designed the AT&T Building in New York, the most prominent postmodern skyscraper in America, and had also attended the Nuremberg rallies as an enthusiastic observer. Speer spent twenty years in Spandau prison and then wrote a memoir that became a bestseller.
The lesson is not that beautiful buildings are fascist, or that monumental architecture is inherently suspect. The lesson is that architecture is a medium that can be used for almost any purpose, and that its emotional power does not discriminate between the just and the unjust. A building can move you to your core and has been built by people who deserve no admiration at all.
Understanding this does not diminish architecture. It makes it more serious. The emotional force of a well-made building is a real thing, and real things can be used well or badly. The question to ask of any monumental building is not just how it makes you feel, but who benefits from that feeling, and who was diminished in the making of it.
Architecture is never just architecture. It is always an argument. The only question is whose argument, and whether you agree.