Look on my works, ye markets

This week, the European Central Bank broke ground on construction of its grand new headquarters in Frankfurt. A decade in the planning, the building will consist of two towers - one 41 floors, the other 44 - linked by a vast conference centre. Symbolising a reliable, stable storehouse of value, the taller tower is said by some to represent the euro's emergence as a second global reserve currency.

Supporters of the euro project, of whom I count myself one, should wish that Jean-Claude Trichet and his colleagues had read their Parkinson as well as they studied their Keynes. Another Englishman whose career began as Keynes's was in his latter innings, C. Northcote Parkinson is known for his "law" that work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

But Parkinson has another finding of critical significance for the ECB. As he explains, when an institution is creatively and productively engaged, it has no time to plan the perfect headquarters. Leisure for such planning comes only when it has completed its important work or lost sight of its mission. Parkinson concluded that "perfection of planned layout is achieved only by institutions on the point of collapse." Call it an edifice complex.

Parkinson reviews centuries of construction to illustrate his proposition. Consider the "Palace of Nations" in Geneva, home of the League of Nations. This project was meant to symbolise the institution that would preserve the peace made in the Versailles treaty. When it finally opened in 1937, Hitler's troops had reoccupied the Rhineland, the Italian army had occupied Ethiopia and, as Parkinson notes, "the League had practically ceased to exist".

Earlier there was Westminster, the quintessential expression of parliamentary rule. By 1868, when it opened in its final configuration, the Reform Act of 1867 had become law, transferring "all initiative in legislation from parliament to the cabinet".

Parkinson's closest analogy to the new ECB headquarters may be New Delhi, where British architects envisaged their own Versailles. Each step towards the project's completion corresponded precisely to a stage in political collapse. The British Viceroy moved into his new palace in 1929, the year in which the Indian National Congress demanded independence. As Parkinson concludes: "What was finally achieved was no more and no less a mausoleum."

When did the ECB receive construction bids for its new headquarters? The reader who has tracked Parkinson can guess: December 2009, the month in which the Greek debt crisis exploded. The project is slated for completion in 2014, by which, if Parkinson's insight holds, the euro will have been relegated to the museum of retired currencies.

The writer is director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government