This article is taken from the May 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
Is there such a thing as democratic architecture? This is the compelling central question of Princeton professor of politics Jan-Werner Müller’s new book, Street, Palace, Square: The Architecture of Democratic Spaces. It’s a timely topic. The recent quarrel over mass prayer in Trafalgar Square and controversies over the artworks that have dared to top its Fourth Plinth, show that architectural space (and what it’s used for) matters, especially in the realm of public debate.
So it’s easy enough to agree with Müller’s basic premise that architecture is “necessarily political”. Architecture asks us, how do we want to live? What sorts of signs and symbols should we surround ourselves with? And what, if anything, should buildings reveal or say about their inhabitants and about our civilisation? These are effectively questions of self-governance, and it is why the late, great Sir Roger Scruton saw architecture as a deeply moral form of artistic endeavour.
But what “democratic architecture” means in practice is much harder to pinpoint. Müller’s approach is methodical. He begins with the square, or more specifically, the birthplace of modern democracy — the Ancient Greek agora; then, he turns to “the people’s palaces” (parliament buildings and the like) and, finally, he steps into the streets.
Müller draws on an impressive range of buildings from all over the world. It’s a pity that, more often than not, these examples receive only superficial treatment. The gothic splendour of Pugin and Barry’s Palace of Westminster; Cape Town’s impressive Edwardian City Hall; that icon of art deco, Senate House; the vast Palatul Parlamentului in Bucharest (the heaviest building in the world); Tiananmen Square; the Reichstag and many, many more all receive a fleeting name-check, but mostly in service of Müller’s overwrought theoretical arguments. What makes these places visually captivating isn’t even an afterthought.
Instead, Street, Palace, Square ties itself in knots relying heavily on abstract conceptual terms that will mean little to the lay reader. Phrases such as “prefigurative politics”, “performance”, “programming surroundings” and “manifestations” (by which Müller just means a gathering of people) do a lot of the intellectual legwork. The book would benefit from less academese and more, well, buildings.
Müller is a professor of politics, not architecture, so understandably he focuses on how built environments “can concretely facilitate democratic action by citizens” rather than on aesthetic issues. But this is where his argument ultimately falls down. When it comes to designing the places in which we live and work, beauty is a virtue and — in the spirit of democracy — should be for everyone.
By ignoring beauty altogether, a great chunk of background as to what motivates us to build monuments in the first place is missing. As a result, Müller’s understanding of democratic architecture is pretty faceless. He argues that “democracy is not one practice, not one thing, and, therefore, also does not rely on one space … or one building”. Its ideals, we’re told, are too complex to be rendered in stone.
This leads him to conclude, rather anticlimatically, that democratic architecture — insofar as it exists — is defined by a nebulous kind of openness: a variety of structures and forms, shapes, sizes and styles is presumed to likewise accommodate multiple points of view. This is, in effect, the same argument found in Müller’s earlier work, What is Populism? (2016), where democracy is inherently “pluralist”, in contrast to the single-minded “anti-pluralist” tendencies of populism, totalitarianism and other -isms.
So how does this play out in architecture? Warning bells ring when Müller cites the Scottish Parliament building at Holyrood (perplexingly cast here as “one of the most remarkable political edifices of the post-war period”) as a real-world example of democratic plurality. The parliament’s architect, Enric Miralles, insisted he wanted neither a palace nor a dome, but “a campus, an assemblage of buildings with different functions”. The result is a grey, insipid, characterless monstrosity. Many people regard the building as an eyesore — so if this is democratic architecture at its finest, perhaps majority rule doesn’t count for much after all.
Wittgenstein believed architecture should ”immortalise and glorify something”. When it comes to legislatures, however, Müller disagrees: democratic buildings should “dignify, but not glorify; they should be serious, but not severe” because “severity” is apparently the one common denominator of fascist architecture.
Not only is this a tad simplistic — by Müller’s own admission “not every fascist building looked like the stereotypical gigantic classical edifices intended for [Albert] Speer’s Germania” — but it is also a strangely uninspiring ideal. To remove glory, pride and magnificence from the aims of architecture, especially for Houses of Democracy, is to neuter our own civilisation’s achievements.
In stripping architecture of this deeper symbolism, Müller leaves himself with no real way of explaining how buildings come to embody political meaning at all. A good example of this arises when he compares the Casa del Fascio in Como, built in 1936 to serve as the local branch of the National Fascist Party in Italy, with the French Communist Party’s HQ in Paris, designed in the late ’60s by the Brazilian modernist, Oscar Niemeyer. A fertile contrast if ever there was one.
Casa del Fascio, the brainchild of Giuseppe Terragni, was the physical embodiment of Mussolini’s infamous ambition that Fascism should be a “glass house into which everyone can gaze” — a politics, at least rhetorically, of transparency.
The Communist HQ, too, is a veritable maison de verre, a house of glass. Whilst these two iconic buildings have their innovative use of glass in common, they are also wildly, excitingly, visually different. But Müller sadly wastes the opportunity to delve deeper.
This tendency recurs throughout the book, with little attention paid to proportion, ornament, texture or form. Müller praises, for example, the British architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, for the “allusions to India’s diversity” in his sweeping plans for the city of New Delhi in the early 20th century but doesn’t bother to explain what these allusions were (incorporating local motifs like chhatris, chhajas, jaalis and mughal water gardens).
That said, his analysis of contemporary architectural mega-projects such as Saudi Arabia’s vast linear city, dubbed “The Line”, is genuinely fascinating. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s futuristic vision is invoked as a cautionary tale of hubris and despotism. As Müller points out, a linear city in which the energy and transport grids are centrally controlled and which offers no vast public expanse such as a traditional square, makes it far harder to organise protest. Citizens, in his words, will have to “get in line and stay in line”.
Street, Palace, Square asks all the right questions, even if it hasn’t necessarily thought through all the answers. Müller never quite gets to the bottom of what democratic architecture may mean beyond the void. According to him, it has no settled form, no recognisable visual language, no clear symbolic content and no aesthetic standard beyond a loose preference for openness, pluralism and the right sort of politics.
But architecture more broadly — of all political stripes — does have a story to tell. As this book reminds us, Winston Churchill observed in 1943, after an incendiary bomb ravaged the House of Commons, “we shape our buildings, and, afterwards, our buildings shape us”. It is the story of our society, our values and — yes — what we choose to admire and glorify.
If Müller is right about one thing, it’s that “for the most part, we are not receptive to the message [of architecture]” because “we don’t look up at buildings as we walk”, instead remaining glued to our phones. We might all benefit from looking up and insisting that what we find there is something truly magnificent.
