Architecture is never just shelter.

This work explores how it functions entirely. It's role as propaganda, vanity, intimidation, memory and often an expensive way for powerful people to explain themselves to everyone else. Sudjic looks at the complicated, intimate relationship between buildings and authority, moving through dictators, presidents, corporations, architects and cultural institutions to ask why power so persistently wants to become stone.

The book ranges from Hitler and Albert Speer’s plans for Berlin to Saddam Hussein, democratic monuments, presidential libraries, skyscrapers and the strange psychological bond between architects and their patrons. Sudjic is particularly good on the tension between architecture as creative practice and architecture as an instrument: the building may outlive the regime, but it still carries the assumptions that produced it. Accessible rather than narrowly architectural, this is as much political and cultural history as design criticism — a study of what buildings reveal when power starts imagining itself permanent.

Penguin Books, London, 2011. Paperback reissue; first published by Allen Lane in 2005. Light shelf wear and rubbing to covers, with minor edge and corner wear. Internally clean; binding firm. Very good condition.