What came before architecture?

A new exhibition explores pre-architecture, searching for a utopian ecological past where humanity and nature lived in profound harmony.

What came before architecture? Or, to put it another way, was there ever a time when humanity lived “without architecture”?

The question of design’s origins – the adaptive techniques humanity developed to inhabit a hostile world – echoes throughout modern history. It surfaces as an archaeological inquiry that traces the genealogy of techniques and practices, but more importantly, as a myth. A myth that, by looking toward a distant, often imagined prehistory, interrogates the present and seeks values and proposals for the future. Like all myths, it doesn’t just anchor identity; it sharpens a critique of contemporary life. Thus, the idea of pre-architecture – a state preceding design and history, marked by deep correspondence between humanity and nature – should not be read as a historical projection. Instead, it emerges as an inverted utopia, resonating in a world grappling with ecological crisis and the unsettling proliferation of technology.

Jacques Gillet, Maison sculpture a Angleur. Courtesy GAR- Archives d'architecture ULiege, fonds Jacques Gillet, Liege

This concept – pre-architecture – serves as the foundation for a fascinating exhibition now on display at CIVA in Brussels. Bringing together a constellation of historical and contemporary works, the show spans movements from the avant-garde of the last century to the digital investigations of Forensic Architecture. Each piece challenges the linear progression of modern architecture’s functionalist rationality, seeking elsewhere for design’s origins and essence. These works visualize a state of human habitation that precedes and contradicts history and technology.

Gianni Pettena, About Non-Conscious Architecture, 1972. Courtesy Galleria Giovanni Bonelli, Milano

As curators Silvia Franceschini, Nikolaus Hirsch (director of CIVA), and Spyros Papapetros (professor at Princeton University) explain, the term “pre-architecture” first appeared in the theoretical writings of 19th-century architect Gottfried Semper. As the curators noted: “Alongside the earliest global histories of architecture, architectural theory, informed by archaeology, reorganized natural objects – mountains, streams, and trees – into monumental signs and tectonic structures, which predated human constructions and provided a model for their origins.”

The exhibition aims not only to document but also to shift the discourse and practice of architecture toward meaningful systemic change by rethinking the discipline from its origins.
Paulo Tavares autonoma, An Architectural Botany, 2018-2023. Courtesy l'artista

The exhibition invokes a rich interplay of ideas, resonating with current debates about anti-modernity, the anthropological or ethnographic intersections of architecture, and its links to the natural sciences. Beginning with Hans Hollein’s radical visions and Gianni Pettena’s Non-conscious Architecture (1972) – an exploration of the American desert in search of human traces – it progresses to Ettore Sottsass’s Metaphors (1972–1979), photographic mythologies of “foundational scenes” of design. 

 The exhibition’s heart, however, is a presentation of manuscripts from Austrian-born American architect and theorist Frederick Kiesler’s unpublished book Magic Architecture (1946). Arranged in a circular layout evoking temporal cyclicity and ritual, the manuscripts allow visitors an almost emotional encounter with this mythical, visionary, and rarely seen work: drawings, collages, sketches, and diagrams outlining a provocative counter-history of habitation, from animal settlements to slums, from fetishes to monuments. Like these documents, the exhibition itself unfolds as a richly synoptic tableau, where memory and myth converge. Mythology may not be science, but it is memory nonetheless. It may lack rigor, but it is a root – a foundation.

Kader Attia, Hypomnemata, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Mor Charpentier, Paris

Sottsass, in his 1962 Domus essay “Design,” wrote: “Design begins at the point where rational processes end and magical ones begin.” The exhibition then expands to non-European contexts, featuring Gilgamesh: She Who Saw The Deep (2022), a film by Anton Vidokle and Pelin Tan that reimagines the epic of Gilgamesh with an all-female cast. Monumental installations by Kader Attia and Mariana Castillo Deball, alongside Paulo Tavares’s investigations into Habitat – the magazine founded in 1940s Brazil by Lina Bo Bardi and Pietro Maria Bardi – and the Ka'apor people’s botanical inventories documenting their Amazonian community of trees and people, further enrich the narrative.

Architectural theory, informed by archaeology, reorganized natural objects – mountains, streams, and trees – into monumental signs and tectonic structures, which predated human constructions and provided a model for their origins.
Frederick Kiesler, The Discovery of the Superfluous preliminary drawing for Magic Architecture, 1946-47 circa. Courtesy the Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation in Vienna

As the curators explain, the exhibition aims not only to document but also “to shift the discourse and practice of architecture toward meaningful systemic change by rethinking the discipline from its origins. A study of prehistory might uncover not only causes of modernity’s present crisis, but also signs of architecture’s future past. By connecting the fossil traces of prehistory with the anxieties and cosmological speculations of posthistory, postwar architects ultimately invented a fictive prehistory of modern architecture.” This approach underscores the importance of reflecting not only on solutions, practices, and technologies but also on the myths that modernity has handed down – myths that continue to resist it.

Exhibition:
Pre-architectures
Location:
CIVA; Brusselles, Belgium
Dates:
from 6th November 2024 to 30th March 2025

Opening image: Anton Vidokle and Pelin Tan, Gilgamesh: She who saw the deep, 2022. Courtesy the artists

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