Power Houses.

• Author: Campbell, Kurt M.
• Position: Post-Cold War military powers

IN THE YEARS following the end of the Cold War, security issues and defense establishments were supposed to retreat into the background of world affairs, but in some respects military organizations have taken on great prominence, or at least their buildings have. Indeed, one can tell a lot about military attitudes in a particular country by looking at the state of its defense ministry buildings. In the past few years, several countries, including Japan, Germany, China and Russia, have either reclaimed historically significant former headquarters or built lavish, sometimes ostentatious, new defense ministries. Even the venerable Pentagon, the five-sided gray monolith on the wrong side of the Potomac, is getting a multibillion-dollar facelift and addition.

Why this building boom in the defense sector? Part of the rationale is purely practical. Modern military institutions require facilities equipped with coaxial cable, fiber optics and computer wire, all the necessary tools for effective command and control. Also, as military officials take on more important diplomatic missions (particularly in the United States, China and Germany), they need furnishings and surroundings that suitably impress and compare favorably with the traditional elegance of foreign ministry offices. Yet each of these military monuments represents something more, a kind of heritage in stone, carefully conceived and constructed with one eye on history and the other squarely on the future.

It is not surprising that architectural historians and military strategists see different things when they look at these constructions of steel and stone. "I have always believed that architecture is intensely political and can serve as a vehicle for propaganda, and military architecture is certainly no exception in this", argues Michael Hays, professor of history and architectural theory at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design.

The paradox here, however, is that overt symbolism of the state-sponsored variety reduces the depth and complexity of the architecture's meaning in favor of one overt message, and the history of architecture suggests that this kind of blatant symbolism often coincides with periods of political regression or hypernationalism.

Others see a mixture of anxiety and ambition behind these buildings. "These capital investments in new military headquarters reflect an underlying neuralgia and anxiety about the emerging security environment, an environment that is neither as sanguine nor as predictable as we had collectively hoped", reflects Richard Armitage, a Reagan-era Pentagon official and now deputy secretary of state in the Bush administration...