In August 1965, Le Corbusier's body was found washed up on a beach on the French Riviera, a possible suicide. Perched on the cliff above was a modernist villa designed by Eileen Gray, a sleek, white ocean liner with which the Swiss-born architect had an unhealthy obsession. Gray designed it as a present for her much younger lover, the editor of an architecture magazine, and Le Corbusier was a frequent guest there. In 1939, after the relationship disintegrated and Gray moved out, he was allowed to paint a series of erotically charged murals on its walls, which included a figure with a swastika on her chest.
There is an astonishing photograph of a bespectacled Le Corbusier at work on these seemingly pro-Nazi images, stark naked and brush in hand, his right thigh bearing a dramatic scar caused by an accident involving a yacht's propeller blade the year before. The architect never convincingly answered accusations of fascist sympathies. Apparently Gray considered his primitivist daubings a violation of her work by a jealous rival, and campaigned to have them removed. Le Corbusier's fetishisation of the house remained undiminished, and he tried on several occasions to buy it. In 1952 he built a simple cabin for himself that offered voyeuristic views over the villa.
Though his chapter about "the secret sex lives of buildings", told through the tale of Le Corbusier and Gray, suggests otherwise, Wilkinson is interested in going beyond the "kings and queens" version of architectural history. Bricks and Mortals takes readers on a chronological tour through 10 "great buildings" – an unexpected selection that includes Gray's – to show how architecture shapes people's lives. The book owes a debt to Edward Hollis's The Secret Lives of Buildings; both explore the changing fortunes of notable structures, whose solid walls are the screens for mutable projections of meaning. Architecture is portrayed as the battleground of history (during the second world war, Gray's house was used for target practice by German soldiers), a rich palimpsest of ideological struggles.
Each of Wilkinson's essays tackles a theme, which provides an excuse for numerous erudite and entertaining digressions. Case studies include the Tower of Babel (to illustrate power), Nero's Golden House (morality), the Djinguereber Mosque in Timbuktu (memory), Palazzo Rucellai in Florence (business), Henry Ford's Detroit factory (work), Finsbury Health Centre in London (health), as well as Gray's villa in Cap Martin (sex). The author allows himself a "meandering path, pinballing through time and space", and compares his loose structure to a game of snakes and ladders; for all architecture's apparent solidity, there are no firm foundations – it is rather a matter of shifting sands.
The Tower of Babel is one shape-shifting structure whose remains were discovered by a German archaeologist before the first world war. No one is quite sure what it looked like: Herodotus tells us it was a ziggurat or step pyramid, with eight levels capped by a temple to the patron deity of Babylon, Marduk. Nevertheless, Wilkinson notes, it "haunts our imaginations in paintings, legends, wars and revolutions". The sky-scraping tower teeters between utopia and dystopia in the collective consciousness, an image either of attempted unity of purpose or of oppression and failure.
Both Nebuchadnezzar and Alexander the Great sought to rebuild Babel, and failed. Babylon became a cautionary tale of metropolitan decadence and imperial hubris. In 1789, when the Bastille fell in Paris, parallels were drawn with its emasculated tower. Revolutionaries were disappointed to discover that the fortress held only seven prisoners, including two aristocratic sex pests, but nevertheless its scattered stones were marketed as "Relics of Freedom". For some, the World Trade Centre was also a Babel-like symbol of tyranny and oppression (Wilkinson reminds us that Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11 bombers, had studied architecture). On the other hand, Saddam Hussein, modelling himself on Nebuchadnezzar, hoped to unite the disparate tribes of Iraq by restoring Babylon. He reconstructed the Ishtar gate and the Ziggurat of Ur, later the site of an American airfield. The remains of the Tower of Babel fester in a pit of oily water nearby.
The image of the tower introduces and haunts Wilkinson's book. Cycles of boom and bust can be predicted, he writes, by clusters of enormous buildings. The Met Life Tower marked the 1907-10 crash; construction started on the Empire State Building just before Black Tuesday in 1929; the World Trade Centre and Sears Tower heralded the 1970s slump; Canary Wharf, the recession in the early 1990s; and the Burj Khalifa bankrupted Dubai. Bricks and Mortals leaves you with the sense that architects are not as influential as they might like to be, or think they are. They're rather the servants of corporate power, which has "shaped the modern metropolis with the apparent inexorability of glaciers hollowing a valley". When discussing the Shard, Wilkinson pessimistically notes that attempts have been made to "tame the business of architecture, but these are just pinpricks to Leviathan".
Elsewhere, Wilkinson is more optimistic, offering forlorn hope that things might be different: "disaster clears the ground for new beginnings, and perhaps one day soon the crash will come that sparks a real revolution in building." He paraphrases Le Corbusier, who wanted mass housing built "on the same principles as the Ford car", to make a modish call for architecture and revolution. However, as his book clearly shows, one man's utopia is another's nightmare. Ford believed in, as Wilkinson puts it, "permanent revolution, architecture that had to be open to change", but his assembly lines made cogs of all workers. Ford also pursued them home, instituting a sociological department that employed 50 investigators, Orwellian spies who ensured employees maintained his strict puritan values at all times.
The biggest challenge facing architects today, Wilkinson writes, is housing for ordinary people, "a responsibility that these days is consistently shirked". There is a corresponding nostalgia for paternalistic modernist projects, such as Berthold Lubetkin's Finsbury Health Centre (1938) – buildings that, as the architect put it, "cry out for a world which has never come into being". It then seems odd not to include any examples of mass housing projects in his list of great buildings. And it seems naive to conclude, when discussing favelas and slums, that when "the periphery reclaims the centre, architecture will at last be built for the people". Might history have offered more tangible clues as to how we might build a better future? For, as Lubetkin famously put it: "Nothing is too good for ordinary people."
• Christopher Turner's Adventures in the Orgasmatron is published by Fourth Estate. To order Bricks & Mortals for £18.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk.
