Architecture isn’t neutral. It’s been shaping political power for millennia

Among his other ongoing projects, US President Donald Trump has spent much of his second term on a renovation. The Oval Office has been converted into a miniature palace festooned with gold bling, the rose garden has been paved over, a triumphal arch is planned and the new ballroom will be larger than the White House.

Why bother turning Washington into a royal “court”? Well, architecture makes a big difference to the ways power is practised and courted.

While it’s easy to see buildings and public spaces as somewhat neutral or superficial, it’s not. Like the frame of a painting, it frames the spaces in which politics takes place, both literally and symbolically.

The spaces and symbols of power work together to choreograph the action and shape the narrative. We can see this throughout architectural history. Here are some global examples.

Invisible power

The Forbidden City in Beijing is a nested set of walled and gated precincts with multiple courtyards, within which the Emperor was largely hidden from public view.

Here, power was sustained by being invisible.

When the five-year-old Tongzhi was crowned in 1861, his mother, the Empress Dowager Cixi, placed him on a throne in front of a thin curtain and governed from behind it.

Everyone knew what was going on, but the legitimating imagery was crucial as Cixi ruled China for more than 40 years through two child emperors.

The revolution brought new imagery. The Forbidden City was opened to the people as a museum, Mao appeared on Tiananmen gate (where his image remains), and the vast Tiananmen Square was created as the antithesis of the closed courtyard.

Party elites moved into the Zhongnanhai compound next door, but there is no presidential palace, nor any consensus on where the current president lives.

Power through surveillance

Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, now also a museum, was home to Sultans of the Ottoman empire from the 15th to 19th centuries.

There is much fascination with the ways the sultan’s quarters and harem were designed to manage complex interrelations between eunuchs, wives, concubines and slaves, and with the beautifully designed audience halls and courtyards.

The tallest building is the Tower of Justice, which is located between the Sultan’s quarters and the Imperial Council Chamber, through which the sultan ruled the empire.

From within it the sultan could sit behind a golden grill placed high in the wall of the chamber. He could overhear and oversee council discussions without being seen.

Here, the building becomes an agent of power without the presence of the sultan. The councillors must act as if he were there.

This is the panoptic power of surveillance that has morphed more broadly into the surveillance state and surveillance capitalism.

Telling stories

The Palace at Versailles was where Louis XIV retreated as his empire declined in the late 17th century.

The building was designed around a ceremonial route as visitors were led through a sequence of salons, named as planets (Venus, Mars and Mercury) as they approached the Sun King (Apollo).

The route then turned at the Salon of War, to enter the vast Hall of Mirrors. The view across manicured gardens produced an illusion of control over nature, which ever way one looked.

Hitler’s Chancellery in Berlin was modelled on Versailles, but designed to dwarf it.

The approach to the chancellor’s office was a long promenade from a Court of Honour, through a sequence of Greek, Roman and Nazi styled chambers to a vast and empty “Hall of Marble”. The marble was not just for looking at, as Hitler put it, visitors “should have practice in moving on a slippery surface”.

The chancellor’s office was mostly notable for its size: about 400 square metres. The Oval Office is just 75 square metres.

Both Versailles and the Chancellery were extremes of legitimating architecture, produced when the regime was fragile, whether at the end or the beginning of the empire.

If there is a thread connecting these examples, it’s that the trappings of power have an inverse relation to its legitimacy: the over-production of buildings and bling suggest a regime lacks credibility.

The corollary, however, does not hold. There is no ideal state where the trappings of power dissolve. Buildings are expensive and have great inertia, so most new leaders adopt the pre-existing centres of power along with the embodied legitimacy.

The British prime minister lives and works in a terrace house where the legitimating narrative lies in the idea of a house in “common” with its neighbours - number ten, first among equals.

Mythological power

One of the earliest centres of power is the Minoan “palace” of Knossos (1900–1375 BCE), in Crete.

The plan is in the form of a labyrinth, replete with corridors. All passages through the building are convoluted, and at its heart is a huge courtyard of unknown function (roughly the size of the proposed White House ballroom).

How power was practised at Knossos remains a mystery. There is little evidence of any king or queen, nor of the relative power of men and women, but it worked for about 500 years.

These ruins were famously a source for the later Greek myth of King Minos who had his architect Daedelus design a labyrinth to hide the big family secret: the half-bull, half-man figure of the minotaur.

According to this myth, the building worked by producing ignorance about how to get in or out, and by hiding a truth that can’t be told.

Of course, this is just a myth. But the architecture of power is built on mythologies of those who commission them.

Architecture embodies, hides and naturalises the politics of power, for better or worse.

Kim Dovey does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.