In Belgium the phrase “espèce d’architecte” is a grave insult. Deyan Sudjic has, for more than a quarter of a century, written about architecture, edited architectural magazines (Blueprint, Domus), curated architectural exhibitions. He has been Synthetic Modernism’s dogged laureate. He has been notably sympathetic towards the institutionalised avant-garde of the architectural establishment. Which is what makes his book, The Edifice Complex, all the more astonishing.

It is a work of damning apostasy. Sudjic is not merely biting the hand that fed him but mauling the entire body. His implicit lesson is: a principled architect is an architect who does loft conversions. The qualities on which a career in the big time depends include venality, opportunism, egomania, self-delusion, a vacuous manifesto, an insatiable appetite for sycophancy and a willingness to treat with tyrants. A gift for plagiarism is also useful.

The book’s structure is cunning. The early chapters scrutinise Hitler’s and Stalin’s compact with their architects. The work produced by those barbaric regimes is not, perhaps, as stylistically kindred as Sudjic maintains. Hitler deplored the Gothic as “Asiatic”, had no taste for the baroque and prescribed folksy bogus-vernacular settlements as the construction arm of blood and soil. Stalin — described by Lenin as “Asiatic” — adored gaudy pomp, encrusted ornament, and quasi-oriental kitsch.

Sudjic then proceeds energetically (and often very funnily) to a gamut of apparently different subjects: corporate skyscrapers; Attaturk’s Ankara; Nicholas van Hoogstraten’s Sussex palace; American presidential libraries; Britain’s emptily tokenistic regeneration “landmarks” and so on. Halfway through the penny drops.

The conventional wisdom that despots and their architects inhabit a hermetic milieu, that they are are atypical exceptions, is subtly overturned. Sudjic’s heretical implication is that they were, and still are, the rule. The rich and the powerful suffer a Pharaonic desire for the immortality that apparently attaches to a built “legacy” — which is also their architects’ legacy. There exists a commonality of interest.

In a wonderful simile Sudjic describes the architect’s desperation to build at any cost, no matter how compromising, as being like “the mission of migrating salmon to make one last exhausting upriver trip to spawn before expiring”. The list of “heroic” Modernists who begged to serve dictators is long and dismal. There are a number of factual errors: Ribbentrop, having already added von to his name, would doubtless be delighted to discover that he was a baron; Himmler’s speech of genocidal intent that Speer denied having heard was made at Posen, not at the Wansee Conference, which neither attended; the Jubilee Line station at North Greenwich is by Will Alsop not Norman Foster. But these slips hardly detract from a thrilling and passionately indignant trawl through vanity’s most polluted depths.

The Edifice Complex by Deyan Sudjic (Allen Lane, £25; offer £20)

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