Room for Thought

Abstract

Just as it is as well to keep a careful eye on those leaders with a taste for writing poetry, so an enthusiasm for architecture is a characteristic that should ring alarm bells when present in a certain kind of political figure. This wry observation by architecture critic Deyan Sudjic is made in the course of his recent diagnosis of the ‘Edifice Complex’, a psychological condition said to have afflicted most of the 20th century’s totalitarians, but not to be limited to dictators, with perfectly respectable software tycoons, presidents, museum directors, bishops and fashion designers all infected too (Sudjic, 2006). Such building can be aggressively competitive, and it is motivated in more than a few cases by the desire to memorialize oneself, whether in the form of the ‘Mother of all Mosques’ or — Sudjic’s particular bete noir — in that of a Frank Gehry house. It is not just that the victims of the condition want things built in their name, Sudjic complains: they suffer from the delusion that they can design architecture themselves.