To Abraham Lincoln, the building’s dome was a symbol of the country’s continuing authority even as the nation was tearing itself apart. On 6 January 2021, the Capitol became the scene, if not a symbol, of an attempt to disrupt the country’s ‘continuity’ when some of Trump’s more fanatical supporters stormed the building in an attempt to prevent the Senate from exercising its constitutional duty by ratifying the results of the 2020 election. That made using the rotunda for Trump’s second inauguration, albeit for reasons of weather rather than politics, especially piquant.

The rotunda is of course a grand neo-classical space, in keeping with the USA’s founding fathers’ image of themselves as Roman patricians. As in so much of American history, it encapsulates the uncomfortable juxtaposition of liberty and slavery. Classical architecture also has an appeal to Trump as shown in his executive order Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture which, following a similar order he issued towards the end of his first term as president, basically dictates that all federal civic architecture was be classical. That is continuity, of a sort, and beauty can exercise a type of power.

Architecture and power have a relationship that is mutable rather than fixed, influenced by contemporary beliefs and circumstances. Almost every political regime has turned to architecture to project its presence, some coming unstuck through the inevitable drain on resources. All social hierarchies, ranging from religious bodies to secular corporations and families, have used architecture to express authority, often by transgressing against established patterns of land use to proclaim their power.

Knowledge is one of the most complicated phenomena to project its influence via architecture. Universities generally follow one of several conventional typological patterns; so do libraries, while scientific research laboratories tend to be extraordinarily prescriptive. As a supposedly learned profession, architecture as a practice draws on a body of knowledge which is itself subject to change as circumstances evolve. It is this manifestation of power through the practice of architecture, perhaps more specifically the modality of evolution of its body of knowledge than the existence of that knowledge in itself, that has led to criticism and the erosion of the profession’s status over the last half century.

Amid these ‘supply side’ manifestations of architecture and power, where power flows from architecture to society and individuals, there is a ‘demand side’ question: could architecture ever be a means of empowerment for the otherwise powerless? This belief certainly motivated UK architects at the high point of welfare state architecture, when they were designing homes to impart dignity to people for whom proper sanitation was a novelty, or schools that would set children on a ladder towards social mobility.

Another example of power flowing from a repositioning of architecture was the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as president of South Africa, on the terraces below the Union Buildings in Pretoria. Originally designed by Herbert Baker to symbolise the ‘Union’ of South Africa after the Boer War, it is where Apartheid was developed and delivered. Mandela’s choice of location transformed this tainted site into a scene of celebration.

To explore this subject further, we need to turn to how architecture intersects with other power systems, such as money, law and social mores. A building like the Capitol – and indeed L’Enfant’s masterplan for Washington – can symbolise the country’s constitution (its make-up as well as its governance); it can provide spaces and buildings for it to be fulfilled, but it is not the Constitution. In the US that is a document, which is a manifestation of supreme authority (it is a rare and extremely convoluted process to amend it). America’s supreme court, the third arm of government after the executive and the legislature, exists first and foremost to ensure the constitution is followed. Any executive order at any level of government, or democratically-reached decision, can be struck down if a majority of the small pool of justices deem it unconstitutional. This why their appointments are so politicised. Such a system of government follows Enlightenment liberalism, but it does vest enormous authority in language, rational thought and lawyers, while downplaying other modes of thinking and interacting.

It is increasingly a model for Europe and, under the law-obsessed Blair and Starmer regimes, the UK. We have already more or less ditched ‘parliamentary sovereignty’ as the supreme authority in the UK in favour of charters of human rights and other legal instruments. There may be virtue in this, but all those charters and judgements are products of their moments in time, not of a process of evolution, where principles stem from previous experience. Why should the issues addressed by legal scholars of several decades ago dictate, rather than guide, what is right or wrong now? As TS Eliot put it (in his poem ‘Ash Wednesday’), Because I know that time is always time/ And place is always and only place/ And what is actual is actual only for one time/ And only for one place/ I rejoice that things are as they are… And why should interpretation fall only to those with legal training? The counter to this is Edmund Burke’s famous dictum that ‘society is a contract between those who are dead, those who are living and those who are to be born’.

If we accept that there may be even the smallest possibility that Eliot and Burke are closer to reality than legal scholars, the idea that power can be codified in language becomes questionable. There will always be gaps around the edge of words and grammar. Possibilities (for instance around mortal illness and end of life) arise which even the most far-sighted framers of a constitution could not anticipate. In these circumstances the cold, hard, rational logic of legal text may be inadequate in guiding decisions.

But what else might be available? This is where precedent and intuition could play a part. What might be more effective are phenomena that open the mind to new ideas, and in this architecture could have a role. Lacking the clinical precision of a legal text becomes an advantage. In this sense the emotions which the Palace of Westminster can inspire can, by association and intuition, coupled with the incremental, accretive nature of the English constitution, induce a frame of mind in legislators and judges to be flexible, responsive and effective in their decision-making. In this sense, ‘parliamentary sovereignty’ trumps written constitutions.

A side story at Trump’s inauguration was the presence of many of the world’s richest people – almost all self-made men whose fortunes come from digital technologies. Not surprisingly, this gives rise to concern about undue influence acquired through money, which represents another source of power. But money has always bought influence: think of Croesus in Ancient Rome, the Fuggers and the Medici in the Renaissance, the oligarchical fortunes of 18th century Britain and the USA’s robber barons of the 19th and early 20th centuries. This was often expressed in architecture and urban planning, often of a crude and normative form.

The Florentine elite of the 14th century (just prior to the fashion for building palazzi of the following century), the billionaires of their day, depicted their prowess through towers of increasing height and precincts of increasing ground coverage. Fast forward: the Rockefellers used similar tactics in Manhattan, with the Chase Manhattan Bank (presiding genius, David Rockefeller) Tower at the southern end, to the stadtkrone of the Rockefeller Center (or the UN headquarters on land donated by guess who?) in midtown, as far as the Cloisters (which houses the Metropolitan Museum’s mediaeval collections whose major donor was John D Rockefeller Jnr) at the northern end. Signore Bernado, Gherardini and Giocondo, eat your hearts out. Form may or may not follow finance, but power certainly does.

In 14th century Florence, increasing wealth, skill and status went into decorative arts so that Filippo Brunelleschi could be considered upwardly mobile by becoming a goldsmith when his father was a notary. But in the following century, as the economic historian Richard Goldthwaite notes, something strange happened. The Florentines turned from height and width to design to express their pre-eminence. First up was the Palazzi Medici which, as Goldthwaite notes, was smaller and less suited to purpose than their previous premises, to be followed by 40-50 more palazzi across the city, almost all of which had the same drawbacks and many of which precipitated their patrons into bankruptcy. Meanwhile painters like Masaccio were turning mere earth into extraordinary art, obviating the need for increasingly intricate craft.

To return to the ‘demand side’ of architecture’s potential for distributing power: Trump may believe that this will spring from ‘beautiful civic buildings’, but even if that were true our concept of beauty has moved beyond Vitruvius, Alberti, Laugier and Reginald Blomfield. And to millions of people in the south of the US, classical architecture may be more associated with plantation homes and the slavery that paid for them, beautiful perhaps, in the way a venomous snake can be beautiful. Finding a new language to deliver empowerment through architecture is both urgent, and a way of making the discipline relevant in the age of inequity.