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Democratic representation: since the beginning of the state, all governments have built to demonstrate their power. How can modern democracies find expression when many perceive that terrorism is a major threat?

Architectural Review, The, Nov, 2004 by Peter Davey

Do governments have to build symbolically when they are making architecture for themselves? Most of them have thought so since the first emperor, Augustus, said that he had found Rome 'in brick and left it in marble'. Vitruvius, in the cringingly fawning dedication to Augustus of the first of his ten books on architecture announced that, 'I observed that you cared not only about the common life of all men, and the constitution of the state, but also about the provision of suitable public buildings; so that the state was not only made greater through you by its new provinces, but the majesty of the empire also was expressed through the eminent dignity of its public buildings. Hence I conceived that the opportunity should be taken at once of bringing before you my proposals about these things: the more so, because I had been first known to your father, (1) ... whose virtues I revered'. (2) Few architects have expressed their devotion to power and money so nakedly, but down the ages almost all have known the sentiments, however much more carefully they have been clothed in public.

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Traditionally, of course, most governments have built to impress the people from whom they exact their money. Augustus may not have had a huge palace in Rome, but he built magnificent temples throughout the empire, and in Rome the wonderful Ara Pacis survives, on which the emperor, his family and friends paraded as a perfect example of noble civic propriety. Some five centuries later, Justinian created his amazing church of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, which was intended to awe the populace with reverence for emperor and pantocrator equally. The Gothic castles of the Middle Ages were much more direct in their message: might is right. Baroque palaces were intended to put across the same frightening power in the era of gunpowder.

In the nineteenth century, as usual at the time in all architecture, there was much confusion about how to represent purpose. Emerging democracy could draw on few precedents. In the brave new United States, Classical models were favoured, demonstrating the notion of democracy for free males (with no interference from women, slaves or the poorest--a society in some ways consciously derived from an idealization of the Roman Republic). The Capitol (completed 1867) would certainly have been recognized as the major building of the nation by the ghosts of the fathers of the Roman Republic and emperors as dissimilar as Augustus and Justinian.

In Britain, Barry and Pugin built the Houses of Parliament (completed 1868), drawing on Gothic and Tudor precedents, to show how British democratic institutions were descended from a strangely idealized noble and free society of medieval yeomen and aristocrats (with no interference from women or the poor). In Germany, struggling to realize Bismarck's cautious acceptance of a degree of democracy within what had been imperial absolutism, the Reichstag, designed by Paul Wallot, was completed in 1894. As Brian Ladd has pointed out, Wallot 'despaired of the difficulty of his task: he had to create a symbol of Germany and German parliamentarianism, when there was no model for either, and little consensus about what they meant'. (3) He ended up with a huge and stodgy Baroque palazzo (to symbolize authority) topped by a great glass dome over the chamber (to symbolize modernity and openness). Kaiser Wilhelm II thought the place 'the height of tastelessness' (4) and it was only in 1916 that the famous motto DEM DEUTSCHEN VOLKE (To the German People) was added, much to the emperor's chagrin.

Hitler loved the Reichstag (perhaps because of its lumpen heaviness), and demanded its retention, even after the notorious fire of February 1933. It remained in partial use until it was destroyed by the Soviet army in 1945. Then it remained as a badly converted ruin until it was transformed by Foster as a symbol of the unification of the country (AR July 1999). Within Wallot's masonry shell (now restored as a symbol of the continuity of history), (5) there is a new chamber in which the Bundestag meets. On top, the new transparent dome, in which the public strolls up and down the helical ramps gazing over the panoramas of Berlin, has become a symbol of the relationship of the legislators in the chamber below to their electors.

In some ways, the symbolic relationship of public to the legislature had been foreshadowed by the Australian parliament building by Mitchell/Giurgola and Thorp, which is partly buried in a grassy hill in the middle of Canberra (AR October 1988). The symbolic aims were to allow the electorate to wander over their MPs, and perhaps to suggest that legislation should emerge from the very bowels of the country.

Some 40 years before, in a different way, and at a very different scale, Aalto had suggested a mystical relationship between public, legislators and the earth at Saynatsalo. Here is a tiny town hall, the smallest possible, set on an outcrop of rock and built round a small green court. The perfect little brick acropolis is in the middle of the forest, and its mullions echo the rhythms of the surrounding dark tree-trunks. From the court, the activities of the councillors and their staff can be seen through glass walls: electors are able to see whether or not their representatives are getting on with their work, and how they are going about it. Here, in the middle of the forest, is surely a monument to the democratic process.

Democratic representation: since the beginning of the state, all governments have built to demonstrate their power. How can modern democracies find expression when many perceive that terrorism is a major threat?

Architectural Review, The, Nov, 2004 by Peter Davey

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