From the Tower of Babel to Henry Ford's factory in Detroit, Christopher Turner explores how architecture can shape people's lives

In August 1965, Le Corbusier's body was found washed up on a beach on the French Riviera, a possible suicide. Perched on the cliff above was a modernist villa designed by Eileen Gray, a sleek, white ocean liner with which the Swiss-born architect had an unhealthy obsession. Gray designed it as a present for her much younger lover, the editor of an architecture magazine, and Le Corbusier was a frequent guest there. In 1939, after the relationship disintegrated and Gray moved out, he was allowed to paint a series of erotically charged murals on its walls, which included a figure with a swastika on her chest.

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Each of Wilkinson's essays tackles a theme, which provides an excuse for numerous erudite and entertaining digressions. Case studies include the Tower of Babel (to illustrate power), Nero's Golden House (morality), the Djinguereber Mosque in Timbuktu (memory), Palazzo Rucellai in Florence (business), Henry Ford's Detroit factory (work), Finsbury Health Centre in London (health), as well as Gray's villa in Cap Martin (sex). The author allows himself a "meandering path, pinballing through time and space", and compares his loose structure to a game of snakes and ladders; for all architecture's apparent solidity, there are no firm foundations – it is rather a matter of shifting sands.

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The biggest challenge facing architects today, Wilkinson writes, is housing for ordinary people, "a responsibility that these days is consistently shirked". There is a corresponding nostalgia for paternalistic modernist projects, such as Berthold Lubetkin's Finsbury Health Centre (1938) – buildings that, as the architect put it, "cry out for a world which has never come into being". It then seems odd not to include any examples of mass housing projects in his list of great buildings. And it seems naive to conclude, when discussing favelas and slums, that when "the periphery reclaims the centre, architecture will at last be built for the people". Might history have offered more tangible clues as to how we might build a better future? For, as Lubetkin famously put it: "Nothing is too good for ordinary people."