How Can Architecture be Democratic?

I appreciate Herbert Gans’s discerning comments, and in essence am in agreement with all he says. The one point I’d like to underscore, though, is that architecture, whatever else it is (or isn’t), is a form of symbolic representation. Although buildings change ownership and get put to varied ideological uses by different regimes (there are many notorious examples of this kind of “reuse,” for example, in the context of Nazi Germany, where modernist buildings by some of the most progressive architects of the twenties were appropriated for nefarious purposes in the thirties), they also belong to their historical moment and have real cultural effects along with the spatial ones. Because the leading architects today are public figures (in a few cases with the status of lower-echelon rock stars), the claims they make, even if spurious, need to be taken with some seriousness.