Architects have had a long and not terribly complex relationship with power. They like it. A bit of dictatorship always helps with the planning permission. It's a professional hazard these days that most of the world's money, ergo power, ergo egos, ergo construction business, is to be found in spots with a somewhat challenging relationship with polling booths and political transparency - Dubai, Moscow, Shanghai, Florida - spawning a new trend - oligarchitecture, they call it, though it's arbitrarily applied to anyone from Russian oil magnates to over-decisive clients in Nuneaton. Let's just say that most aren't on Amnesty International's Christmas card list.

Despite being plagued with a social conscience and a reflex desire to rush off to disaster zones and build designer emergency housing, the Mr Hyde in architects just can't help being tempted by unlimited power, riches and gold taps. Can't think why.

The late American architect Philip Johnson was famous for many things but morality was not one of them. “I'm out to work for the Devil himself if he's building,” he quipped, though the closest he got was designing a mirror-glass facsimile of the Houses of Parliament for Kuwaiti oil interests on the South Bank in London (mercifully unbuilt). Asked in the 1990s whether he would have built for Adolf Hitler in 1936, he replied, “Who's to say? That would have tempted anyone.”

Last week, though, Daniel Libeskind went and spoilt everything. He did a Spielberg. Speaking in Belfast, the Polish-born architect of Berlin's Jewish Museum attacked architects working in China: “I won't work for totalitarian regimes,” he thundered. “Architects should take a more ethical stance.” That would be a first. Before Libeskind came along with his pinko views, Western architects had been making a perfectly decent killing building monuments for regimes that you definitely wouldn't want to bring home to meet the folks.

Trace the money behind any building and at least a fraction is bound to be dirty. Do you do as Libeskind does? In which case, you had better make sure that everything you do, buy, eat and wear, right down to those questionable cowboy boots, is whiter than white and organically handwoven by FairTrade peasants living in Neverland. Libeskind, for instance, has worked in Israel, anathema to some.

Or do you follow Lucifer Inc Architect's Declaration of Human Rights: “Never let the plight of the poor buggers who sweat blood in a dusty field building our monuments get in the way of a decent cross-section”? Or do you pick a shade in between, according to how well you can sleep at night? Here's our pick of those projects that just seem to race through planning permission.

Crystal Island, Moscow

Architect: Foster and Partners

What architect is going to turn down potentially the largest building in the world? Not Norman Foster, whose recent volte-face from the trademark tasteful neutrals he's been plying for five decades to Liberace gold and sequins shows all the telltale signs of a late-life crisis. (Was all that grey glass and concrete just a façade, Norm?)

The cause? The firm's move into what might be euphemistically termed expanding markets. There are few effective one-party states that Foster isn't working in.

This glass mountain - Foster's second collaboration with the Russian oil and property magnate Shalva Chigirinsky - is four times the size of the Pentagon, houses a new quarter for Moscow's nouveau riche, and is seemingly named after an Aaron Spelling heroine. Vulgar? It's as if Foster has eloped with Britney Spears.

Okhta Tower, St Petersburg

Architects: RMJM

Aka the Gazprom Tower. Gazprom? Don't tell me, I'm sure I've heard the name. That wouldn't be the world's largest extractor of natural gas, umbilically connected to the panto villain Vladimir Putin, and with its hand on the geopolitical stability of most of Europe and Asia, would it? What else would its HQ be, but shaped like a giant dagger plunging into the earth?

Curiously its design - 394m of hard steel, by the British firm RMJM, positioned right in front of Smolny Cathedral in a refined, 18th-century city not hitherto renowned for enormous skyscrapers - has caused some local consternation. Hundreds turned out to protest in January. I doubt we'll be seeing them on the streets again.

The Heydar Aliyev Cultural Centre, Baku, Azerbaijan

Architect: Zaha Hadid

Hadid is more renowned for her musings on Prada v Issey than on Central Asian politics, but even she must have had a moment's pause when invited to design a memorial to a former KGB chief. The monument to Heydar Aliyev, Azerbaijan's late ruler - heavily criticised by Amnesty International for human rights abuses and electoral corruption - has been commissioned by the country's current ruler, which, goodness, happens to be his son, Ilham, ushered into power after his father's death in 2003. Fancy that. In September Hadid even laid flowers at Aliyev's grave. Maybe she misheard. It was KGB, Zaha, not D&G.

CCTV HQ, Beijing, China

Architect: Office for Metropolitan Architecture/Rem Koolhaas

Koolhaas gets away with building the HQ for the mouthpiece of the Chinese state by looking serious, calling it tactical and branding his critics from the left, such as Mike Davies, as Western neocolonialists. It's a neat trick. It's almost convincing. After all, just how many other one-party command economies have been magicked into multi-party democracies by one building?

The latest explanation: it was all One Big Architectural Metaphor! The “unstable” design - a 234m-high, impossibly teetering loop - reflects, you see, the “unstable” nature of China's political future as it opens up to capitalism. That's all right then.

Central Astana, Kazakhstan

Architects: Kisho Kurokawa, Foster & Partners and others

As if Kazakhstan doesn't have enough on its plate fending off Sacha Baron-Cohen, now it's got Western architects flooding in to help it to spend its oil cash. In using the booty to build an unnecessary new capital in the middle of nowhere, dotted with self-aggrandising monuments aping the Pharoahs, rather than, for example, ushering in universal freedoms and cake for all, President Nursultan Nazarbayev is doing only what any self-respecting central Asian plutocrat who has ruled without genuinely democratic elections for 17 years would do.

Note to self, Norm: if you have to call a building the Pyramid of Peace and Reconciliation, it generally means that it isn't.

Editor's choice

• Here comes summer: our cultural must-sees
• Friends reunited: Sex and the City
• New country for old men