When Architecture Becomes a Trophy, Cities Become Soulless
Monuments to Money, Not to Memory
There is something quietly sickening in the way wealth now dictates the very foundation of our cities. Where once public space offered a forum for shared meaning, beauty, dignity, and civic identity, we now have façades who only exist for profit, glass shells for hedge funds, and soulless concrete cubes everywhere you look, from Singapore to Stavanger, each indistinguishable from the next. You could throw a dart at a world map and find the same steel and glass monolith grinning back at you like a sort of sterile corporate mascot.
This is not just about aesthetics. It is about who gets to decide what beauty means, and who cities are for. Public space is no longer public in any meaningful sense if it is shaped not by the people who inhabit it, but by those who profit from its distortion. The city becomes not what it once was, a common inheritance, but a showroom for plutocratic vanity. And like all such showrooms, it must remain impersonal, antiseptic, and, most insultingly, global.
There was a time when cities wore their history and place with pride. You could walk through Vienna, Amsterdam, or Edinburgh and feel the sediment of centuries beneath your feet. Not just the grand cathedrals and palaces, but the well-worn corners, the half-hidden courtyards, the idiosyncrasies that no committee of consultants could ever have designed. Architecture was not merely a statement of taste, but a slow, dignified conversation between generations.
Today that conversation is being shouted down by capital. where it used to be a post office is now a boutique hotel. What used to be a public square is now a “mixed-use development.” What used to be a sense of place is now a line item in a property portfolio. The language of urban life is also, I would argue, dystopian and has been hijacked by euphemism and jargon. Developers no longer build homes, they deliver “residential experiences.” Parks become “wellness hubs.” Neighbourhoods become “districts,” preferably with a cosy name that hides the fact that it just another cement block: City Gardens, Riverside Park, each as interchangeable as the next luxury condo.
Yes, it’s true, wealthy patrons have always shaped cities. But the great ones, the Medici, say, commissioned Florence not for resale value but for glory. Today’s equivalent wants naming rights on the ugliest tower in the skyline. The pursuit of beauty has been replaced by the pursuit of branding. The church once gave us flying buttresses. The billionaire gives us a phallic smear of steel, slapped together to meet a deadline, then sold to someone who’s never seen it.
It is not only the skyline that suffers. The same disease has infected our universities. These ought to be temples of knowledge, sanctuaries of thought and discovery. Alas, they build bunkers. Concrete mausoleums with glass atria and meaningless names: the Global Futures Hub, the Nexus Building, the Centre for Advanced Synergies, NAT-MAT, NAT-TEK and such. Places designed not to uplift the mind, but to appease an administrative spreadsheet, and signal “innovation” to bureaucrats who wouldn’t know Cicero from silicon1. No arches, no cloisters, no sense of intellectual gravity, just a business park with Wi-Fi and a diversity quota.
What’s lost in all this is not just charm, or character, or “heritage” in some nostalgic sense. What’s lost is the sense that the city belongs to us, that it contains stories deeper than profit margins. That it remembers who we are.
This is not inevitable. It is not some law of nature that says taste must be determined by the size of one’s bank account. Nor is it the mark of progress to replace history with a Hilton. It is a choice. And unless we begin to make different ones, we may soon find that the places we once called home no longer speak our language at all. The ghosts of our past will be evicted, the future leased out to the highest bidder.
In the end, a city is not its skyline. It is not a brand. It is a memory made visible. And if we sell that memory, we lose more than buildings, we lose ourselves.
I once met someone who, astonishingly, had no idea who Cicero was, and when I mentioned in passing that their phone was made of silicon, looked at me as if I’d accused it of witchcraft.