Thinking about Architecture, in an era of total transformation of the Earth through human interventions, calls for a reinterpretation of its purpose and meaning. Architecture, understood as the art of inaugurating habitation, has always been a reflection of the human relationship with its environment and a mirror of the entire species’ relationship with itself. Architecture, as a technique for establishing a living space, is originally driven by the search for protection against an overwhelming nature—a direct and material response to the imposition of the realm of necessity that weighs upon human existence. Architecture consolidates itself throughout the development of technical consciousness and the growing possibility of deliberately shaping mundane matter, resulting in the total appropriation and colonization of the most diverse earthly spaces and landscapes.
To conceive of Anarchitecture as the anarchic future of architecture signifies the opening of an unfounded way of dwelling and, therefore, the demand for and possibility of a non-possessive relationship to construct the contingency of human life, to establish a practical ethic, a transitive dwelling as a renewed dwelling with the Earth. Therefore, this anarchitectural thought contemplates the lack of foundation in dwelling, considering the nomadic being in the world before the onset of sedentarism, but not to contrast the nomad with the sedentary, which would be hypocritical in times of humanity’s growing urbanization and for the multitude of human beings living in precarious conditions without the possibility of adequate dwelling. It makes no sense to idolize the nomadic mobility of the modern urban cosmopolitan individual, tied to a linear, point-in-time history based on monocratic and monotheistic capitalism. On the contrary, the nomad is understood here as the common, the cyclical, not monotheistic, but pantheistic or animistic, a dwelling not of individualistic individuals, but of tribes (packs, schools, groups, clusters, etc.) or societies in motion and in flux, open to breaking all kinds of foundations and fundamentalisms.
Individualism, therefore, would not be an appropriate self-affirmation, but a continuous openness to the other, for it is not a matter of establishing universal values solely for humans (anthropocentrism), but of finding justice in all species within anarchic nature and in relation to the world. Anarchitecture is first and foremost a dissolution of property, which in itself exceeds the existence of the individual and falls within the realm of the exercise of power. This means that representative architecture and the emblems of power must be rejected because they fully reflect modern subjectivity, described as an appropriative subjectivity. The first step toward moving beyond modern subjectivity is the abolition of accumulated property and its dissolution through the restitution of the appropriations that occurred during the process of modernity. This means the de-colonization of property and, consequently, its just redistribution.
Dirk Michael Hennrich