and the supply of water and electricity in Delhi, for example. The exclusivity or inclusivity of city power can be gauged by the city’s functionality.
Patterning of buildings
The pattern of buildings might be seen as a special aspect of the spatial layout. It refers to the relative location and size of buildings, above all in the city centre. What kinds of buildings occupy the most central location? How do the central buildings relate to each other?
For example, all over Latin America, except in Montevideo, Bogotá, and Brasília, the Presidential Palace is the overpowering or dominant central building, with Congress clearly offside. In Mexico, until recently, it was almost anonymous, and in Chile it was relegated to a refurbished hospital in Valparaíso. In Ottawa, Washington, Montevideo and Brasília, on the other hand, the congress or parliament building has centre stage. In the new Malaysian capital of Putrajaya, the dominant building is the prime minister’s office. City halls have no prominence in any American capital, while they are major buildings in Tokyo, Seoul and Copenhagen and clearly, if not quite successfully, compete with the state buildings in Vienna. When the Belgians created their national capital in the mid-nineteenth century, the Royal Palace was larger than the Parliament opposite it, but the largest building of all was the Palace of Justice. The main government building, whatever it is, is usually protected against construction competition by various rules of permissible height (as in Washington, D.C., for instance) and distance. But in Tokyo the official office of the prime minister is overshadowed by the non-descript corporate tower of an undistinguished insurance company. Some cities, Paris for instance, have no central representative governmental building at all: what does that imply?
The patterning of buildings takes other significant expressions, too, such as the uniformity and harmony or unrelated heterogeneity of buildings along main streets, or the extent of contrast between main-street buildings and back-street or peripheral buildings. Moreover, there is a noteworthy temporal dimension. When a regime embarks upon a building programme, what representative buildings are given priority and how are the priorities of time and money set between representation and utilitarian construction, service infrastructure or housing? Are there meaningful clusters of representative buildings?
These are just a few examples, and before jumping to conclusions of interpretation we had better see them, and others of their kind, as first of all raising questions and providing incitements to historical and contextual queries.
Architecture
Architecture is often what first catches the eye looking at a city. It has two dimensions. One is aesthetic, expressed in historical styles or in contemporary iconicity. The style chosen is loaded with meaning, which any urban scholar has to pay attention to. However, the meaning is historically path-dependent, depending upon the historical experience of the power-holder. The European Gothic of the Westminster Parliament is the style of the ‘free-born Englishman’, the Gothic of the Strasbourg Münster or the Kölner Dom is echt deutsch, that of the Vienna City Hall is the style of autonomous cities, in the Flemish tradition. Neoclassicism is republican in Washington and imperial in Paris and Saint Petersburg.
The second dimension is political, viewing built forms as expressing a ‘grammar of power’, as the Norwegian architectural theorist Thomas Thiis-Evensen has called it.22 I have found his sketch very useful. Six building variables and their power implications are listed in this ‘grammar’:
•Closure: the more closed, the more inaccessible
•Weight: the heavier
•Size: the larger
•Distance: the more distant from its immediate environment
•Symmetry: the more symmetrical
•Verticality: the taller the building, the more concentrated and the more authoritarian the power of the builder is likely to be.*
Five of the six may be interpreted as indicators of imposing awe, pomp, haughtiness, even arrogance. Symmetry is an expression of order, of a central mastering of the whole.
By size, modern power tends to be overshadowed by ancient, showing a certain popular approximation of power. The château de Versailles was 16 acres, the Moscow Kremlin 68 acres and the Vatican compound about 110 acres, which may be compared to the 175 acres of the Beijing Forbidden City, the 255 acres of the Delhi Red Fort and the 1,200 acres of the 200 BC er fang complex of Chang’an. But Saint Peter’s in Rome is much larger than the main temples of Tenochtitlán and, even more, of Cuzco. In terms of verticality, the Great Giza Pyramid of 2500 BC, at 146 metres, commanded the skies until the skyscrapers of the twentieth century.23
The ‘grammar’ will not be used for any declension exercises of a Latin-school type, nor for any taxonomy. It is a list of variables to bear in mind when looking at buildings and thinking about their meaning.
Monumentality
Monumentality is directly geared to the production of meaning. The Latin monere means to remind. Through its built ensembles, statues, plaques and museums, a city’s monuments try to remind us of events and persons and to convey a particular historical narrative, urban and/or national. A built landmark may also constitute a monument, without an intrinsic narrative but reminding us of the identity of a place. Beijing’s Tiananmen is such a monumental landmark, figuring in China’s national emblem. Though not in the national heraldry, the Brandenburg Gate and the Eiffel Tower play similar roles for the identity of Berlin(ers) and Paris(ians).
Monumentality is often neglected in hard-nosed urban social science and was dismissed by the modernist architectural and urbanist vanguard of the years between the two world wars. However, in 1943, three leading figures of CIAM (Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne, the architectural vanguard movement) – its soon-to-be president Josep Lluís Sert, the long-term secretary Sigfried Giedion and the painter Fernand Léger – published ‘Nine Points on Monumentality’, pleading for a modernist reconsideration.
Monuments are human landmarks which men have created as symbols for their ideals, for their aims and for their actions … Monuments are the expression of man’s highest cultural needs … They have to satisfy the eternal demand of the people for translation of their collective force into symbols … Monuments are therefore only possible in periods in which a unifying consciousness and unifying culture exist.
From their sixth point the authors then move on to argue for a new, modernist monumentality without being very concrete, other than arguing for ‘modern materials and new techniques’, for ‘mobile elements’ and projections of colour.* They evade answering their own implied question, whether a ‘unifying consciousness unifying culture’ still exists. We do not need to answer that question here, because monumentality can also thrive among divided consciousnesses and cultures.
Madrid at the end of 2014 is a good illustration. On 15 October the Spanish king inaugurated in Madrid a big monumental statue to the eighteenth-century admiral Blas de Lezo. It had started as a private initiative, which soon got the enthusiastic support of the then right-wing mayor of Madrid. This happened in the build-up to the Catalan crisis, and knowledgeable Catalan nationalists soon pointed out that de Lezo had taken part in the bombardment (and final Spanish capture) of Barcelona in 1714. The Barcelona municipal council formally demanded the withdrawal of the statue, something the Madrid mayor declared she would never do under any circumstances.24
In Budapest in the same autumn of 2014, liberal opinion was very upset by a new sculptural ensemble with a monstrous bird descending on an angelic Hungary, commemorating the ‘German occupation’ (from March 1944 to the end of World War II). It is
