1.
Besides making fire, hunting animals, or cooking food, building a shelter must have been one of the first conscious activities humans undertook from the moment they could stand on their feet. The birth of architecture must have been concomitant with the ascent to verticality—that is, the moment humans acquired the ability to walk upright as a consequence of the development of the cerebral apparatus. From this moment onwards, the hand ceased to be a mere tool. Tightly connected to the brain, it turned into a “driving force” linking tools and language, image and meaning.
The urban revolution described by Gordon Childe was preceded by the domestication of plants and animal species. Partly a result of the combination of trade, conquest, and migration, it led to the transformation of social institutions and paved the way for new modes of building houses, temples, and public monuments.1 The management of humane settlements for the urban poor and the construction of dwellings at an unprecedented speed and scale have been hallmarks of modernity.2 Part engineering (energy and transport), part medicine (water, sanitation and hygiene), part agriculture (food security), and part information and communication, architecture today is woven into the entire fabric of material and immaterial life and existence. It is a key dimension of what André Leroi-Gourhan once called “systematic technology.”3
2.
Just like writing or printing, building a shelter was a cornerstone of the mutation the human species has undergone. A form of enacted cognition, it has contributed to the enhancement of vital human capacities such as the control and disposal of waste, requirements for food and water, practices of mutual care, defense and protection, and even sexuality and other modes of individuation.
Because the art of building a human shelter was the same as the science of staying alive, architecture was defined in precolonial African metaphysics as one of the many utensils of life. A vivid testimony to this project of staying alive is the stone, mud, and earth architecture of the Dogon (Mali). Typical Dogon houses were made of dry-stone structures and covered with earth. They were generally built on the face of cliffs. Never far away were the small rectangular granaries shaped by hand with a thin layer of earth that allowed the structure to “breathe.” Their roofs were covered with straw in order to protect from the rain. Plastered with earth from the inside in order to seal gaps, the interior was made up of several compartments for storing different grains.
In an environment shaped by sandstone plateaus, steep escarpments, cliffs, and plains, a long tradition of mud brick building and handmade loam granaries had taken root. The form and structure of these houses were molded by geology and climate, and bore witness to the continued impact of multiple erosion phenomena. This style of mud or earthen architecture was inseparable from Dogon cosmogonies, social organization, and ritual life. The earth was the mother of life and the sky was the father who, through rain, made the earth fruitful, which made life possible.4 Niches and doors were often decorated with sculptured motifs reflecting the Dogon’s metaphysics of life and death, day and night, gender and reproduction, animals’ and humans’ exchanges and interactions.5
In other parts of Africa, humans were always more than human. With tools, they could augment themselves.6 As a result, building a house was more than an act of engineering; a manual, physical, muscular effort. It involved, from the origin, the outcropping and deciphering of images and concepts. It merged conceptual, sensory, and immersive aesthetics (light and shadow, volume, texture, scent, sound) with necessary practicalities. A shelter was not merely a container. It was by definition a dialogic space of enclosure and openness. It was the expression of human’s dwelling on earth and the means through which the human took form and existed in companionship with every other living form and entity.
This is why there was no architecture without the presence, however shadowy, of language within matter. Architecture consisted in the turning of matter or materials into an image and a concept. It was akin to the symbolic transcription of vital forces, the infusion of life substances and release of energy onto matter and materials. It was a constitutive part of the vital infrastructures and semantic and material artifacts that were required to sustain the lifelong process of becoming full human persons.
If meaning could be designed through materials, materials in turn could serve as shelter and conduits for the dissemination of images, concepts, and language. Language, images, symbols, concepts, and meaning were destined to find home in the elemental, inducing the latter to release vital energies necessary for personhood. This is why the destruction of a human shelter or a human dwelling—the highest level of dread—was considered a thoroughly inhumane act.
3.
A key feature of our age—the age of brutalism—is the extent to which power “cleans out” territories and manufactures destitution. “Unhoming” should be the name for this cataclysm. Unhoming is the act of deliberately targeting homes, destroying shelters, and making life shorter for entire classes of human populations deemed superfluous. It is a process of excretion whose final goal is to turn unwanted humanity into waste. In the process of unhoming, peoples’ survival capabilities are severely crippled, and their generative life capacities over many generations are compromised. Unhoming is not a random act. It is a program of active uprooting and deprivation of the most essential resources needed to live as a human person in society, starting with the need for food and shelter. It is not only a key trigger of destitution (such as, in the South African case, forced removal programs).7 In the brutalist age we have now entered, unhoming is the new means of social and political selection.
4.
But what is unhoming if not a way of waging war against enemies whose living environments and conditions of survival have been destroyed in advance—through the use of armor-piercing uranium ammunition and forbidden weapons such as white phosphorus; through high-altitude bombardments of basic infrastructures; through cocktails of carcinogenic and radioactive chemicals deposited in the soil and filling the air; through the toxic dust in the rubble of razed cities and the pollution caused by hydrocarbon fires.8
And what is unhoming without bombs—conventional blind bombs converted by the installation of inertial navigation systems in the tail; cruise missiles with infrared homing heads; microwave bombs designed to paralyze the enemy's electronic nerve centers; bombs that explode in cities, emitting lightning-like beams of energy as they pass; other microwave bombs that do not kill, but burn people and increase skin temperature; thermobaric bombs that trigger walls of fire, absorbing the oxygen of more or less closed spaces, killing by shock waves and asphyxiating almost everything that breathes; fragmentation bombs, whose effects on civilian populations are devastating, since they open above the ground and disperse without precision and over large areas; minimal munitions supposed to explode on contact with the targets; all kinds of bombs, the demonstration ad absurdum of an unheard-of power of destruction.9
This form of war of stupefaction—calculated and programmed, carried out with new means—is a war against the very idea of dwelling. Bombs do not target singular bodies, but certain human masses whose every organ must be the object of a specific incapacitation, inheritable from generation to generation—the eyes, the nose, the mouth, the ears, the tongue, the skin, the bones, the lungs, the intestines, the blood, the hands, the legs. All those maimed individuals, paralytics, and survivors; all those pulmonary diseases like pneumoconiosis; all those traces of uranium on the hair, the thousands of cases of cancers, abortions, infantile malformations, congenital deformations, damaged thoraxes, dysfunctions of the nervous system—the great fissuring.10
5.
The age of brutalism is akin to the age of rubble and dust. We are surrounded by countless cities of rubble and dust: Grozny, Homs, Aleppo, Gaza. Memory is now sheltered in the mud, in the rubble and in the dust.
In the age of brutalism, going home cannot be taken for granted. Few in any case have homes to return to.
In these hallucinatory times, architecture is about rebuilding lives. It is about the restoration of livelihoods and the provision of shelter for those who, having lost everything and, having been left homeless, “can be at home only in their bodies.”11
It is about reprovisioning shelter and building citadels of survival. Reprovisioning shelter starts with identifying and removing hazardous waste, including Unexploded Ordnances (UXO), medical waste, clearing and recycling million tons of rubble. Architecture becomes a rubble clearance project so that the destitute will have safer shelter as they begin to rebuild their lives.
Gordon Childe, “The Urban Revolution,” The Town Planning Review 21, no. 1 (April 1950): 3-17.
Alan Mabin, “A Century of South African Housing Acts 1920–2020”, Urban Forum 31, (2020): 453–472.
André Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993).
Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, Le renard pâle (Paris: l’Institut d’Ethnologie, 1965).
Marcel Griaule, Conversations with Ogotemmêli: An Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas (London: Oxford University Press,1965).
See Amos Tutuola, The Palm-Wine Drinkard (London: Faber & Faber, 1952) and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (London: Faber & Faber,1954).
Laurine Platzky and Cheryl Walker, Forced Removals in SA (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1985).
Catherine Lutz and Andrea Mazzarino eds., War and Health: The Medical Consequences of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (New York: New York University Press, 2019); Barry S. Levy and Victor W. Sidel, “Documenting the effects of armed conflict on population health,” Annual Review of Public Health, vol. 37, (2016): 205–18.
Read Joseba Zulaika, Hellfire From Paradise Ranch: On the Frontlines of Drone Warfare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020); Katherine Chandler, Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2020). See also Jairus Victor Grove, Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019); and Mbembe, Necropolitics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).
John R. Logan and Deirdre Oakley, “Black lives and policing: The larger context of ghettoization,” Journal of Urban Affairs 39, no. 8 (2017): 1031–1046; Calvin John Smiley and David Fakunle, “From ‘brute’ to ‘thug’: The demonization and criminalization of the unarmed Black male victims in America,” Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment 26, nos. 3–4 (2016): 350–66.
Arjun Appadurai, “Spectral Housing and Urban Cleansing: Notes on Millennial Mumbai,” Public Culture 12, no. 3 (2000): 638.
