Chaos and Order
Disciplines
Cultural Resource Management and Policy Analysis | Historic Preservation and Conservation | Other Architecture | Urban, Community and Regional Planning
Abstract (300 words maximum)
Wars and occupations happened all over the world throughout history. As Eyal Weizman has demonstrated in “Hollow Land,” architecture actually partakes in wars and occupations. Architecture facilitates the occupation’s goals of control and dispossession through spatial and formal means. Weizman breaks architecture’s effects on the political environment down into six main categories: anchor point settlements, vertical architecture, uniform design, the dynamic battlefield, the spatial arrangements of settlements, and threshold spaces. These strategies exemplify the way design has been used in an effort to instill fear and erase identities of cultures.
Weizman’s book, along with Lebbeus Woods’ writings and drawings, has investigated the effects of war, and corresponds to the key ideas of isolation and fear as contributive emotions that relate to the elements of the sublime. Further, architectural work of Woods, Piranesi, Bachelard, and John Hedjuk explore the way design can instill fear and create the feeling of the sublime, where suspense, curiosity, horror, and pleasure are all joined into one. By analyzing the formal and spatial organizations of these precedents and relating them to relevant literature, my research aims to inquire about design strategies used to create these feelings and to ask how the narrative can be flipped, bringing awareness to the techniques of how architecture oppresses a population.
Weizman, Eyal. Hollow land: Israel’s architecture of Occupation. London: Verso, 2017.
Academic department under which the project should be listed
CACM - Architecture
Primary Investigator (PI) Name
Arief Setiawan
Chaos and Order
Wars and occupations happened all over the world throughout history. As Eyal Weizman has demonstrated in “Hollow Land,” architecture actually partakes in wars and occupations. Architecture facilitates the occupation’s goals of control and dispossession through spatial and formal means. Weizman breaks architecture’s effects on the political environment down into six main categories: anchor point settlements, vertical architecture, uniform design, the dynamic battlefield, the spatial arrangements of settlements, and threshold spaces. These strategies exemplify the way design has been used in an effort to instill fear and erase identities of cultures.
Weizman’s book, along with Lebbeus Woods’ writings and drawings, has investigated the effects of war, and corresponds to the key ideas of isolation and fear as contributive emotions that relate to the elements of the sublime. Further, architectural work of Woods, Piranesi, Bachelard, and John Hedjuk explore the way design can instill fear and create the feeling of the sublime, where suspense, curiosity, horror, and pleasure are all joined into one. By analyzing the formal and spatial organizations of these precedents and relating them to relevant literature, my research aims to inquire about design strategies used to create these feelings and to ask how the narrative can be flipped, bringing awareness to the techniques of how architecture oppresses a population.
Weizman, Eyal. Hollow land: Israel’s architecture of Occupation. London: Verso, 2017.