Tower power

In this new century, global financial institutions and the property developers that provide their accommodation are top of the pile when it comes to architectural expressions of power. In New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Frankfurt and London, a new breed of super-high-rise towers is being built and planned, all more than 40 storeys and over 200 m in height. The 244 m high Canary Wharf tower, the British progenitor of this super-breed, has recently been joined by two neighbours of similar height, while a 41-storey version, designed by Foster and Partners, is being built in the City of London. All four will be dwarfed by the proposed London Bridge Tower, planned to rise to 66 storeys or 350 m above London Bridge Station, making it the tallest building in Europe.

Just as there is no escaping the overwhelming scale of these buildings, the macho and aggressive symbolism of their forms is unmistakable. Foster's Swiss Re tower, dubbed the "erotic gherkin", is shaped like a monumental phallus or bullet, while the London Bridge Tower is a sheer spike tapering from ground level to the topmost pin-point. Where these mega-towers are less blatant in form, such as Canary Wharf tower's two recent neighbours, they are inscrutable and impenetrable behind their tinted taut-skinned curtain walls, and have abandoned the humanist proportions and scale of the golden-sectioned window modules which tempered the first Canary Wharf tower. Instead of finishing off with a flourish of fancy architectural pinnacles, these towers exploit their height with crude company adverts in scarlet – HSBC with its boxy logo and Citigroup with an umbrella.

The power that these towers of capitalism express is no less strong when viewed from the inside out. Paul Finch, head of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment's design review panel and an ardent supporter of high-rise buildings, comments: "Occupants of tall buildings feel powerful as they look out over surrounding lower buildings. There is a connection between wealth and height. It's no accident that rents go up the higher you go in the building."

Besides these gargantuan triumphal columns of 21st-century global capitalism, other traditional types of built power have sunk into innocuous sizes and shapes. Massive, impregnable stone fortresses, the original and most literal form of aggressive architecture, just do not have modern equivalents in the age of nuclear missiles and lightning air strikes. A collection of underground silos sunk below grass mounds and protected behind razor-wire fences may look sinister but do not express power visually.

Even government and municipal architecture, which in the 19th century set grand stone town halls above daunting flights of stairs, has shrunk in scale and weakened in monumentality as governments set out to ingratiate themselves with their electorates. The Greater London Authority, Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly buildings, all under construction, are relatively modest, their designs respectively stressing transparency, accessibility and vernacular forms.

The irresistible rise of corporate power and the corresponding waning of government authority is nowhere better illustrated than in London, where mayor Ken Livingstone has become the most vocal advocate of office towers. "He has become very interested in the idea of London as a global city," says Finch. "Anything that stands in the way of providing space for financial services organisations is threatening London's future as a world financial centre." What makes this attitude all the more ironic is that, in his previous incarnation as leader of the GLC in the 1980s, Livingstone refused permission for a wall of offices along the South Bank designed by Richard Rogers, now his architectural adviser, and disposed of the land for low-rise community housing development.

There are, however, benign countercurrents in contemporary high-rise office design. To sweeten their planning applications, developers and their architects are keen to express the greenness and sustainability of their plans. Foster's Swiss RE offers natural light, openable windows and internal gardens. London Bridge Tower is planned to house 10,000 occupants in a vertical city combining office, residential and leisure uses directly above a major transport interchange, which developer Irvine Sellars and architect Renzo Piano argue make it an extremely efficient building in terms of land and transport use. Gardens with mature trees are planned on upper storeys. The fact that the higher the building rises, the more inefficient its floor plans are is conveniently overlooked.

Other contemporary building types also express power, though without the brute immensity of the office mega-towers. High-rise apartments are increasingly in vogue among well-heeled city dwellers, who pay for a similar buzz of long-distance views as their office colleagues. Airports and railway stations, particularly the later phases of Paris' Charles de Gaulle and Nicholas Grimshaw & Partners' Waterloo International Station, emulate the sleek streamlined forms of aircraft and high-speed trains.

Even recent arts buildings have captured some of the monumentalism that has been relinquished by government and religious buildings, expressing the growing influence and economic might of the arts. Michael Wilford & Partners' Lowry in Salford sports a massive curved front canopy set on giant splayed legs that resembles a piece of industrial machinery. And the UK's greatest new visitor attraction, the Tate Modern, is set in what was the most literally powerful building in central London – Bankside Power Station.