ABSTRACT
Taken together and seen in relation to the history of designed capitals, the capitol complexes in Papua New Guinea, Kuwait, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh constitute a broad array of attempts to symbolize political power and design national identity. If the range of conceivable design approaches is envisioned as a spectrum encompassing everything from the most willfully international to the most obstinately local, then all four capitol designs fall somewhere in the middle. Yet they do not group easily together.
