Turf roofs in Norway are a tradition and you will see them everywhere. Roofs in Scandinavia have probably been covered with birch bark and sod since prehistory. During the Viking and Middle Ages most houses had sod roofs. In rural areas sod roofs were almost universal until the beginning of the 18th century. Tile roofs, which appeared much earlier in towns and on rural manors, gradually superseded sod roofs except in remote inland areas during the 19th century. Corrugated iron and other industrial materials also became a threat to ancient traditions. But just before extinction, the national romantics proclaimed a revival of vernacular traditions, including sod roofs. A new market was opened by the demand for mountain lodges and holiday homes. At the same time, open air museums and the preservation movement created a reservation for ancient building traditions. From these reservations, sod roofs have begun to reappear as an alternative to modern materials.

“America is no longer land of the brave. It is a country in decline. The power and strength, once manifested in the architecture of the American Dream, is falling apart. If buildings are strongholds of safety - a projection of a stable economy and society - it is no surprise that American architecture is depicted in contemporary art and literature as a dark, decaying mess. American Gothic is no longer the haunted houses of the deep south but reflected in urban or suburban collapse. In Bret Easton Ellis last novel ’ Lunar Park’ the main focus of horror was his home, an eerie reflection of his disintegrating mind. Here walls insidiously morphed from wood to stucco to wallpaper, a ghostly physical attack on Ellis’ psyche. Home wasn’t safe any more.”

“The Most Humble City of Valletta” is the official title of Malta’s capital, which was founded in response to Moorish threats and withstood the onslaught of Nazi bombers. But ‘La Ċittà Umilissima’ is now facing a humiliation brought about by its own rulers, who have commissioned the modernist architect Renzo Piano to reshape the entrance to the oldest quarter of the city. ‘Starchitects’ like Piano are so called because their temporal success lies more on their ability to create hype about their sensational and novel designs than on the quality and timelessness of their work itself.

The only “Egyptian” pyramid in Europe and the legendary tomb of Remus

We can deduce a lot about a power by looking at the structures it erects. The return to neo-classicism under Stalin after the earlier Russian deconstructivist architecture of the 1920s is telling, as is the almost universal (and only seemingly contradictory) adoption of socialist Bauhaus architecture for the headquarters of New York corporations in the post-war period, or the turn to Brutalism by the governments of numerous Western liberal countries in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. While the apartheid government adopted a guise of conservatism, its revolutionary re-ordering of South African society was so radical that, for example, the old Edwardian railway station was demolished and completely rebuilt in order to better accommodate the separation of the races.

Frequently, too, did modernist architecture cause precisely the social ills it sought to alleviate. The most obvious example is the public housing projects, ostensibly designed as cool, futuristic, noble spaces — majestic towers, intersticed with sloping, green lawns — that were supposed to confer upon their proletariat inhabitants a certain nobility but which did precisely the opposite. Disconnected from a vibrant urban street life, constructed in their monolithic, drab way, rejected by workers and populated by the unemployed, the projects bred isolation and antisocial activity: The only people who made use of their sloping, green lawns were the drug dealers. Wolfe recounts the story of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis, into which millions of curative dollars were poured but which nonetheless proved hardily resistant to habitability. At a commission meeting in 1971, a task force asked residents for their suggestions for improving the place. A chant arose: “Blow it … up! Blow it … up!”

Built according to the taste of its masters, Krak des Chevaliers is a typical example of Gothic architecture, uprooted from Western Europe and transferred to the middle east. Even today, it is one of the best preserved examples of European medieval military architecture.

In Visions of Space, Robert Hughes tackles the work and lives of three remarkable 20th-century architects: Antonio Gaudi, Albert Speer and Mies van der Rohe - whose work did so much to shape the modern world. Hughes looks at how each one used space in different ways to express our response, respectively, to the power of religion (Gaudi), the power of the State (Speer), and the power of the corporation (Mies van der Rohe).