Book Review: The Edifice Complex

His implicit lesson is: a principled architect is an architect who does loft conversions. The qualities on which a career in the big time depends include venality, opportunism, egomania, self-delusion, a vacuous manifesto, an insatiable appetite for sycophancy and a willingness to treat with tyrants. A gift for plagiarism is also useful...Sudjic describes the architect’s desperation to build at any cost, no matter how compromising...[The Edifice Complex is] thrilling and passionately indignant trawl through vanity’s most polluted depths.