The Globe and Mail

Architecture can do the most humiliating things to people. This is what I was thinking when Saddam Hussein was pulled from a mud hole by American troops. The cave dweller they found was wildly bearded. Only months before he ruled from golden palaces. And then he found himself in a new kind of bedroom -- the size of a coffin with a single fluorescent tube for lighting. Architecture witnesses all of the big human dramas. It records the winners, and the losers -- what people will do in moments of desperation. There goes Hussein squeezing himself through a spider hole to evade his captors. There go those wacky Americans about to build themselves the world's tallest tower.