Meanwhile, in the democratic, or built-by-committee, category languishes Ground Zero, where the site of national tragedy—having proved inhospitable to the type of cultural facilities that Abu Dhabi is betting its future on—will soon host a sextet of office towers that would be more at home in Houston. And New Orleans, where nearly three years after Katrina, city planning remains paralyzed by inaction at every level of government. There are exceptions—Spain, even as its young democracy matures, has become a hotbed of contemporary architecture. But for the most part, if you're an architect who dreams of changing the world with your designs—or simply safeguarding and extending your legacy—your best bet is to sign on with an ambitious autocrat as quickly as possible.

Consider the case of Rem Koolhaas, who at sixty-three remains the most influential architect on earth. In early 2002, his Rotterdam-based Office for Metropolitan Architecture was invited to take part in two very different design competitions: one for a master plan at the World Trade Center site and the other for a new Beijing headquarters for the Chinese state broadcasting service, CCTV. "We discussed the choice over Chinese food," Koolhaas recalled in an essay in Wired magazine. "The life of the architect is so fraught with uncertainty and dilemmas that any clarification of the future, including astrology, is disproportionately welcome. My fortune cookie that night read: 'Stunningly omnipresent masters make minced meat of memory.'…We chose China."

Six years later, the decision looks prescient. Construction at Ground Zero Architecture Cities has barely inched forward, and nearly everyone associated with the rebuilding effort—architects David Childs and Daniel Libeskind and the young memorial designer Michael Arad among them—has seen his reputation take a serious hit. Meanwhile, the CCTV project—imagine two seventy-odd-story L's flipped upside down and attached by their shorter legs—is now rising steadily into the smoggy Beijing sky and is due for completion any day now.

One by-product of the astonishing changes in Beijing and Dubai is a growing nostalgia in the West for the days when we too built with ambition and even abandon. Parisians are reappraising the work of Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, who sliced grand boulevards through the historic fabric of the city. And then there is New York, which has lately been experiencing a longing for Robert Moses, who built most of the bridges, tunnels, highways, and public parks that crisscross and dot the city's five boroughs. When I was studying architecture and urban planning in the early 1990s, there was no bigger villain than Moses. Robert Caro's devastating doorstop of a biography, The Power Broker, portrayed him as a racist bully who ran expressways through neighborhoods he saw as blighted and unredeemable. But in a recent three-part exhibition curated by Columbia architecture historian Hilary Ballon, Moses emerged as a man who Got Things Done, who made New York City fit for modern life.