The Supreme Court of Canada sits on a bluff overlooking the Ottawa River, a few blocks west from Parliament Hill. Where that latter complex twists Gothic spires aloft, the Supreme Court is a flat stone hulk, with a copper château-style roof seemingly bolted on as punishment. Long-tenured prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King demanded the addition after walking his dog past the half-finished building. A charmless bachelor who owed his position to a Stalinesque fluency with bureaucracy, Mackenzie King also shared Joseph Stalin’s habit of meddling with architecture. He thought the Supreme Court should mimic the archaic and exquisite skyline behind it — a model of dutiful Canadian conformity.

During school trips to Ottawa, the cityscape always bemused me. I had visited the United States’ capital once, and that town at least made sense: clustered in marble temples, its rulers could play Cicero while segregating themselves away from the underclass. Why did our own places of power all look faintly camp?

In his new book, Artificial Islands, Owen Hatherley describes that Supreme Court as a “bland facade,” raised “solely to create a silhouette.” An architecture critic of Marxist sympathies and Jacobin commissioning editor, Hatherley recently published a six-hundred-page guide to modern British buildings. Artificial Islands does not aim for the encyclopedic. Instead, it gives passing impressions of uncanny architecture throughout the old imperial “dominions” in Melbourne, Auckland, Wellington, Ottawa, and Montreal. These lands were colonized following the Irish model: dissolve indigenous society amid your own settlers, commerce, and imported environments.