The Architecture of Power
Look at what human beings build when they want power to become visible.
The Great Imperial Crown of Russia almost doesn’t look real.
Made for the coronation of Catherine the Great in 1762, it contains 4,936 diamonds weighing 2,858 carats, 75 enormous pearls, and a 398.72-carat red spinel at its summit. Even more absurdly, court jeweller Georg Friedrich Eckart and diamond craftsman Jérémie Pauzié produced it in roughly two and a half months.
But after staring at it for a while, something occurred to me.
This isn’t really jewellery.
It is political architecture in miniature.
Every diamond is saying the same thing. Every pearl, every arch, every impossible millimetre of workmanship:
The person underneath this object is not like you.
That was one of the great technologies of monarchy. Power is abstract. You cannot see sovereignty. You cannot hold authority in your hand.
So human beings gave it a shape.
A crown.
A throne.
A palace.
A cathedral.
A procession.
An army standing perfectly still.
The crown does not actually contain Catherine’s power. Take it off her head and put it on a table and it commands nobody.
But put it on the head of the ruler of the Russian Empire, surround her with soldiers, priests, aristocrats and a palace built on a scale no ordinary human being could dream of possessing, and something extraordinary happens:
power becomes visible.
We still do this.
Vladimir Putin does not wear the Great Imperial Crown. Modern Russian power uses different architecture: the Kremlin, military parades, vast halls, presidential motorcades, state ceremony and, more importantly, institutions capable of turning presidential decisions into consequences. Russia today has a highly concentrated political system; Putin has dominated its politics for decades, while his allied United Russia party retained a constitutional parliamentary majority in the 2026 election.
America speaks the language differently.
Donald Trump doesn’t require a crown either. The presidency already sits at the centre of an enormous state: armed forces, diplomacy, executive departments, Air Force One, the White House and all the visual machinery accompanying the office. That power is constitutionally constrained and divided among institutions—but its physical manifestation is staggering.
And then there is Trump’s new White House ballroom.
Whatever one’s politics, look at it through the same lens as Catherine’s crown. The White House says the project will create approximately 90,000 square feet of ornate space capable of seating 650 people, replacing the East Wing and costing about $250 million, funded by Trump and other donors.
Suddenly the connection becomes fascinating.
The crown and the ballroom are separated by 264 years, two continents and completely different political systems.
Yet both demonstrate an ancient human instinct:
important power tends to build things large enough—or beautiful enough—that you can feel it before anyone explains it to you.
The pyramids did it.
Versailles did it.
The Vatican does it.
The Kremlin does it.
Washington does it.
Aircraft carriers do it.
Even a presidential motorcade does it.
None of this means power is good.
Awe is not approval.
You can oppose a ruler, a government, a war or an ideology while remaining astonished by the machinery humans have constructed to exercise authority over millions of other humans.
And perhaps that is what makes the Great Imperial Crown so mesmerizing.
It is almost five thousand diamonds arranged around one extraordinarily simple idea:
I have power.
A crown is power miniaturized.
An empire is the crown expanded until you are standing inside it.