The myths of society’s origins hold more political weight than ever in today’s world. They not only suggest the purity of a particular race or the claim of a particular people over a land, but also how society/peoples have sustained through history; providing fertile ground for politicians to argue for a return to better prospects. Benedict Anderson writes of such ‘imagined communities’ as being sustained through the media we consume but such a reflection of society’s stake in its origin can easily be traced in architectural historiography as well.
In the 19th century, the hypothesis of the “pre-architectural” condition emerged “accompanying the crystallization of ‘modern’ natural and human epistemes, following centuries of bewildering transcontinental encounters with indigenous cosmologies that do not conform to the established prescriptions of Western epistemologies,” write Silvia Franceschini, Nikolaus Hirsch and Spyros Papapetros in the introduction to a publication accompanying the current exhibition at CIVA, Pre-Architectures. The notion of a pre-architecture or a pre-history—“a structural ‘condition’ that survives the inventions of history and of architecture”—was essentially invented by modernity to serve as justification for colonialism by proposing a linear view of time that disregarded anything outside of Western historiography.
The return to the origins of architecture through a consideration of ‘primitive’ or pre-architectonic states was also a pertinent theme in a post-Second World War architectural culture. We can think of Le Corbusier’s sordid fascination with Algerian women, or architectural historian Sigfried Giedion who writes about pre-historic caves in Southern Europe as “not architecture” but presenting an alternative architectonic conception. What then would a world without the notion of architecture look like? How might we reconceive architecture’s origin and what might that tell us about the discipline today? The Brussels-based design museum and archive centre asks these very questions with an exhibition centred on the narratives around and of the prehistory of the discipline, on view from November 06, 2024 – March 30, 2025.
If the current world is any indication, it’s worth questioning where and how stories of origins are born. For the architectural exhibition, participants range from contemporary practitioners such as Kader Attia, Anton Vidokle & Pelin Tan, Paulo Tavares, David Wengrow & Eyal Weizman with Forensic Architecture to historic figures such as Frederick Kiesler, Gianni Pettena, and Ettore Sottsass. These architects, artists and researchers working in transdisciplinary fields, bring to light what for the curators, Nikolaus Hirsch and Silvia Franceschini, is central to their speculation of “what architecture could have become, but ultimately disavowed”. The curators note in the official release that by “referring to the beginnings of human habitat and the ‘birth’ of design, the exhibition speculates about the cultural, social, economic and political foundations of spatial organisation.” The exhibition design adds to this idea, developed by Pauline Clarot plunges visitors into a dark room, where a world without architecture seems all the more possible.
At the opening of the show, STIR spoke to Nikolaus Hirsch, on the pre-sumptions of origin narratives, architecture as a speculative model and the latent potential of the discipline.
Mrinmayee Bhoot: Could we begin with you elaborating on how you developed the research question that forms the crux for Pre-Architectures and how it comes together for the showcase?
Nikolaus Hirsch: The idea to work on the notion of pre-architecture came about through conversations with Spyros Papapetros, a researcher and professor of history and theory of architecture at Princeton University. He has been working extensively on this topic, mainly in relation to architects like Frederick Kiesler, the great Austrian-American architect and Gottfried Semper, a German architect from the 19th century.
One of the main motives to curate an exhibition around themes of prehistory was this feeling that we live in a very deep crisis, where we question what architecture is and what it does to society. Moreover, we live in a world where we are experiencing multiple crises on environmental, political, social and economic levels. This kind of context shakes the architectural world and how we as architects define ourselves and our roles. It feels as if the traditional ways of doing architecture, of acting as an architect have come to a certain historic turning point. We felt it would be interesting to look back at the early beginnings of the practice and its historiography.
Mrinmayee: In the press release, you refer to “the beginnings of human habitat and the birth of design” as one of the core themes for the works on display. Could you tell us how the works respond to this?
Nikolaus: In a way, the key to the exhibition is the work of Frederick Kiesler. The exhibition begins with a big table that shows manuscripts of an unpublished book by Kiesler which he worked on shortly after the Second World War, called Magic Architecture, developed as a reaction to modernism. It’s an incredible book and research project, where in 10 chapters, he develops a vision of how architecture exists in the world and what it does. It not only includes conceptions of the first human habitats but it also includes instances of how animals build ‘architecture’. For instance, termite colonies or ant farms are examples of non-human architectures.
The other part, which I think is an important aspect of the show, is that the word ‘pre-architecture’ is on the one hand fascinating, meaning somehow going back to the roots. On the other hand, it’s also an idea that has been misused. In the 19th and also in the 20th century, it was a colonial tool to persuade people that presented communities as people who have no history or are outside of Western history. There are two examples of this in the exhibition. One is a work by Kader Attia, a Berlin-based artist who works closely with architecture.
He presents a sculpture that looks like an architectural model of a dense city, with forms that remind one of vernacular architecture from North Africa. It’s almost a cliche-esque image of buildings from the region, but it’s made from packaging material in beige colours, resembling rammed earth constructions. It’s meant to be a critique of how Westerners perceive and appropriate vernacular practices and the problematic effects of this view on local cultures.
The other example of these colonial and modernist techniques of appropriation can be discerned in Paulo Tavares’ work. He researched the work of Lina Bo Bardi, one of the figureheads of modernist architecture. She was involved in slightly problematic appropriations of Indigenous cultures in the post-Second World War era in Brazil. Essentially, she participated in an exhibition that displayed Indigenous objects and people in photographs, taken out of their contexts. Tavares reconstructed that display for CIVA; reinterpreting the work. It’s a very critical take on the function of museums in telling stories about early civilisations.
Nikolaus: What you can read as a visitor of the exhibition and through the little book that accompanies it is that many of the projects on display present the latent potential of the discipline. It’s an architecture that—going back to the idea of Magic Architecture—has something to do with rituals and a deep cultural understanding of it. This is the red thread of the exhibition because it addresses a kind of utopian moment for architecture. You can see this in two works in the show.
One is a work by Forensic Architecture along with a British archaeologist, David Wengrow. The Nebelivka Hypothesis is centred on a site in Ukraine where archaeologists found some sort of human habitation, which had no hierarchy (or very little hierarchy). This counters the idea that the first settlements had very hierarchical politics. Through their video, you can speculate on a different society that is much more horizontal in its organisation.
The notion of speculation is quite important as well within the showcase. Such a speculative society is explored in a film by Anton Vidokle, a US-based artist and Pelin Tan, a sociologist from Turkey, shot in the Tigris area ie Mesopotamia, which many consider one of the earliest examples of a city-based society. You could argue that with the event of the city, many problems started in human history, like a dichotomy between cities and nature, industrialisation and extraction to name a few. The film, Gilgamesh: She Who Saw the Deep (2022), goes back to the eponymous epic set in Uruk, one of the oldest cities recorded in history and retells its story.
Mrinmayee: In the introduction to your book you write about how historians came to study prehistory, essentially in troubling times, say post-Second World War. Similarly, are there any themes that we could relate to in today’s context, marked by environmental collapse and the ravage of capitalist systems?
Nikolaus: You won’t see direct answers in the exhibition. At CIVA, we’ve put together a number of exhibitions previously that were more hands-on, you could argue. One of them, Power, was about different forms of energy and politics. There you could attempt to create some solutions to phenomena such as the climate crisis.
But I’d be careful with this. I think the very word ‘solution’ is problematic for architecture. Arguably, our profession has been reduced to a problem-solving discipline. I would rather label this aspect of the profession as ‘building’, whereas architecture is more than just building. For me, architecture always includes a utopian moment. You could argue, in the best way, architecture is a kind of model; an abstraction of a different life that you can inhabit. Of course, it has a practical, functional side, but to me, the best architectures also include an aspiration of something else, of a better life.
Nikolaus: First of all, we don’t do many monographic exhibitions. I’m interested in thematic exhibitions that address larger societal topics. We already spoke about the question of energy with Power, a big topic these days. We did the show shortly after the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war, which created shifts in energy politics and energy costs for even simple households, whether in Brussels or somewhere else on Earth.
Another exhibition that we curated with Beatriz Colomina was called Sick Architecture which explored the intersection between hygiene, sickness and architecture. There is this modernist fascination with hygiene that architecture succinctly reveals. We opened this show shortly after the pandemic. I would say our curation is an attempt to pick up relevant topics and to deliver a very specific reading of them, hopefully with intelligent commentary that makes visitors think not only about architecture as a discipline, but think about their own lives through architecture.
For me, it is interesting to do exhibitions not solely on architecture, but through architecture to show themes that are strong undercurrents in society. Architecture might have a lot of problems, but it seems to be a medium that makes politics and society tangible. While socio-political phenomena are very difficult to detect or grasp, architecture as a visible medium portrays these well. Most buildings do tell a story but it’s important to reveal them and make architecture speak.
Nikolaus: I think it’s relevant in the sense that it questions the foundations of the discipline. That’s what this exhibition can do. It should make you question how architecture is produced. There’s a strange momentum these days when you think about us human beings in the world, around the notion of origin. In the works by Paulo Tavares and Kader Attia, you can gauge that a naive reading of the origins is something we have to be careful with. Sometimes when you say, go back to the origins, it can present itself as a problematic conception because, well, what is the origin?
Moreover, we live in an era where strong national identities are played out through societal relationships and through the built environment. Often, those in power create mythologised origin narratives, pretending that they are purer compared to other cultures. In this case, it’s also interesting for us to present ‘origin’ as a political question. This is something prevalent in many countries—the US, India, the UK—where there’s a lot of political antagonism. This does affect architecture, something we hope visitors will think about. People who talk about origins do this usually with a certain intention. So that becomes relevant to the show.