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Hello. In today's NRTIME, I'll be discussing the role which architectures played in public life. Whether in homage to an individual or as a monument to an institutional ideology, architecture has always been a potent symbol of wealth, status and power.

From castles to cathedrals, from the pyramids to Canary Wharf, architecture has served to glorify and often exemplify in some way the animating idea of the time.

So why is architecture such a powerful form of expression? How much can buildings tell us about a country's idea of its past and its present identity?

And what does the architectural history of London in particular reveal about our own country?

With me to discuss this is Adrian Tinierswood, architectural historian and author of visions of power and his invention so fertile, a life of Christopher Wren.

Gavin Stamp, senior lecturer at the Macintosh School of Architecture in the Glasgow School of Art, and Julian Dali, architectural historian and biographer of Sir John's Son.

Gavin Stamp, why do you think that public architecture is such a powerful form of expression?

Because architecture can be big and it lasts other things fade away, but dictators and emperors are built for centuries if not millennia.

So you think the reputation of architecture, the reason we're talking about it now is basically because of the monumental aspect of it.

Well people look back and see the monuments of the past and they want to emulate them as they last.

Do you think that the impulse for this monumental building has been the same through different sorts of civilizations?

No, I think it varies, obviously, but the medieval civilization produce great cathedrals, very curious buildings to more and more investigates them, rather different from the big personal statements that modern monarchs and dictators have put up.

Do you find there was a collusion when you think about people in the past between the ruler and the architect that they consciously said to each other, we are going to be remembered and so we will build this massive, like block of stuff.

Oh yes, I think all architects long to work for dictators. Look how busier he did for all his talk about democracy. He really wanted to work for Vichy France, so he could have big things going up.

Architects love it. Hitler was the perfect client or Chachesco.

Yes, but before Hitler and Chachesco, if we go a little away back and say it's for two or three thousand years, there were no architects or other. So who are we talking about then?

Oh, there must have been architects. People have always designed the building.

People who built, but actually, you know, but what does not I do, but the idea of an architect popping up and saying, I will do that and I will work in collusion.

Didn't really work like that. I know we're like now, for instance, I guess not with not with the people in earlier civilizations.

There were builders and there were rulers who made the buildings. Mine just at the moment is more in the rulers and the architects.

We don't know the architects names. There were always people who designed. There must have been buildings that don't appear.

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