It is a truism that architecture can reflect or express political or corporate power. Every regime worthy of the name has sought to aggrandize itself through building. A few years ago, Witold Rybczynski wrote about how it always seems that corporations fall apart just after they build their imposing new headquarters. Companies that are busy growing, he suggested, do not have time to concern themselves with building headquarters. Only when a company grows fat and complacent does it expend its resources on pure self-aggrandizement. Often by that time a company has peaked.

In his splendid new book, “The Edifice Complex” (Penguin Press, 416 pages, $27.95), Deyan Sudjic, an architecture critic based in London, writes that the same is often true of political regimes. “Enough empires have collapsed immediately after their rulers have finished building a sumptuous capital city – ostensibly for the national good, but more likely to personify and glorify their regimes – to suggest that architecture is not always a particularly effective political tool,” he writes. Case in point: “The British left New Delhi just twenty years after Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker completed an imperial capital intended to last for centuries.”

I am not sure I followed Mr. Sudjic’s thesis in this book, and, truth to tell, I don’t think he really has one. The first and last chapters, which treat his subject in a general, reader-feels-a-thesis-coming-on manner, are by far the weakest. What comes between, however, is captivating. One virtue of this book is that the reader need not share the author’s tastes to enjoy it, nor even care whether the author convincingly argues something. The best architecture critics, though they may play at thesis-making, are at heart non- or anti-theoretical, interested in and skillful at description above all. And in this realm, Mr. Sudjic excels.

He starts with Hitler, which sounds unpromising. After all, what could Mr. Sudjic add to Frederic Spotts’s scintillating book of two years ago, “Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics”? Mr. Sudjic does not add much in the way of facts, or even of interpretation. What he does offer is a breathtaking description of Czech President Emil Hacha’s 1939 visit to the Reich Chancellery on Wilhelmstrasse.

Mr. Sudjic describes the courtyard, stairs, corridors, and halls through which the beleaguered Hacha passed in an exhausting, disorienting, intimidating trek to the Fuhrer’s “study” – “though ‘theater’ was a more appropriate description.” “To walk from the door to the desk” of this 4,000-square-foot room “took a nervewracking full minute.” As Hitler later told Albert Speer, “I had so belabored the old man that his nerves gave way completely, he was on the point of signing [a document ceding Czechoslovakia to Germany], then he had a heart attack.”

Seldom do we see architecture at work so directly upon its subjects. But that is what Albert Speer, the Fuhrer’s architect, knew how to do. Would we not then have to say that Speer was an evil genius of an architect? The architect Leon Krier wrote a book in the 1980s arguing that Speer’s accomplishments as an architect could be studied as architecture quite apart from the ideology that called them into being, just as we study the architecture of, say, the Colosseum – in spite of the horrendous spectacles it was built to house.

After Mr. Sudjic’s brilliant seven-page description of Hacha’s “state visit,” it is hard to credit Krier’s view. But it is also hard to credit the views of those who call Speer’s architecture “kitsch.” (Do not forget that “kitsch” was Hitler’s own favorite term of aesthetic opprobrium.) Evil is cunning. It may appropriate aesthetics – it may even, in the end, be aesthetics. The most valuable thing the critic can do may be to describe it. This Mr. Sudjic does, and in so doing enthralls us.

Megalomaniacal builders are inherently fascinating, more so, typically, than the architects who prostitute themselves to such builders. Mr. Sudjic covers a wide range of examples, from Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini (one of whose architects,Terragni, has been celebrated by Peter Eisenman), to communist China, the grands projets of Francois Mitterrand, the Millennium Dome, Saddam Hussein, Shah Reza Pahlavi, and more. Close to home, Mr. Sudjic devotes a chapter to the relationship between Nelson Rockefeller and Wallace K. Harrison.

Mr. Sudjic has actually visited the Albany Mall – and I wonder how many American critics have done so, let alone European ones. In spite of Harrison’s currently lofty reputation among the cognoscenti, Mr. Sudjic is right to call the Albany Mall the monstrosity it is. In so doing, he shows how that vast, absurd complex that Rockefeller obsessed over for years, convinced that he and Harrison were creating a work for the ages, aptly symbolizes Rockefeller’s sad end.

After all, Rockefeller never came close to winning the presidency he so intensely sought, and (though Mr. Sudjic misses this one) he was deeply implicated in the fiscal morass in New York City and State in the 1970s. Though Rockefeller was hardly a dictator, he did show how dictator-scale megalomaniacal building was possible in a liberal democracy when there was the right combination of ungodly amounts of money, significant political power, and clever, sycophantic architects.

On the whole, however, liberal democracies offer the architect little in the way of designing the megalomaniacal projects that, it turns out, many architects long to create. The Rem Koolhaas, for example, who emerges from Mr. Sudjic’s chapter on China is an even sadder figure than Wallace Harrison. (Alas, Mr. Sudjic fails to note that Mr. Koolhaas has claimed Harrison as a cardinal influence!) In any event, architects, in Mr. Sudjic’s account, are a none too edifying lot. Mr. Koolhaas happily designs for his communist masters in Beijing one day, and for Prada the next. To an architect, where’s the contradiction?

Mr. Sudjic tantalizes us in his last, ultimately formless chapter, when he briefly notes that George Orwell understood the relationship of fascism and monomaniacal building, and might indeed have predicted that Rem Koolhaas would end up serving very unsavory masters. But Mr. Sudjic seems to abandon this stream. Shortly after, he writes: “Architecture is constantly about the same things: power, glory, spectacle.” Odd that he should write this in a paragraph following one that mentions, in passing, Christopher Alexander – an enormously influential architect whose works and ideas have as little to do with “power, glory, spectacle” as one can imagine.

Architecture is not “constantly about” anything. But it is sometimes about a lot of things, and some of those things have been captured in masterful prose by this gifted critic.

fmorrone@nysun.com