Category Archives: Architectural Theories

Destruction of the Glencairn Tower in Motherwell (near Glasgow) / Photograph by Sam Hardie

Explosions are so ubiquitous in Hollywood Cinema, and the emotion is so intense when one torn-down reality that we do not quite seem to realize what they really are. In 2007, Mike Davis was trying to historicize the car bomb and its urban consequences in his book Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (Verso, 2007) but his analysis was legitimately anthropocentric, which I want to avoid in this specific article. “Leaving the human” can sometimes be risky as it potentially leads to the depoliticization of things – depolitics being a form of politics too and a rather totalitarian one – but it also allows to think of a better understanding of the material world in which we live, and from which we exist as a body.

What is an explosion at the pure physics level? A bomb is an apparatus that contains folded within itself the potential liberation of an important volume of energy in the form of an exothermic reaction. Such a volume of energy and the speed with which it gets released provoke a sudden disaggregation of the material bodies (animate or inanimate) that surrounds its center. Insisting on the suddenness or the violence of the explosion would be another anthropocentric way to consider it as it would necessarily associate the scale of time in which it occurs to the scale of time of human perception. In other words, the Big Bang could be considered as a sudden explosion at a certain scale of time even though, 14 billions years later, the universe is still affected by its original release of energy. In a materialist interpretation, the speed to which an explosion is effectuated is therefore irrelevant and such an “event” can be compared to any other modification of matter like erosion or entropy. If we define destruction by the operation in which physical bodies are being “broken down” into smaller material assemblages, we can however define an explosion as a destructive transformation of matter without being anthropocentric.

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This article is not a sequel as such of the previous one, but rather starts where the last post ended. I was evoking the possibility for the corpse of Remus to have been buried in the thickness of the line traced by his twin brother Romulus to found his city. This narrative reminds me of another that I published almost two years ago: the sad sadian tale that Eduardo McIntosh created to tell us how far can architecture be an accomplice in the realization of the worst crimes. In that case, Afghans masons were forced by the Talibans to build an architecture with the dead bodies of the Northern Alliance (commanded back then by Massoud) used as human bricks. The imagery created by Eduardo helped any viewer to fathom the horror introduced by the narrative.

Some other stories are ever worse however. Back when I presented Eduardo’s narrative,  I evoked another article written few days earlier about the book Camouflage written by Neil Leach, in which he tells the Central European tale of Mason Manole who had to immure his own wife to grant success to the Monastery he promised he will build (see the full story in the same article). As he had the opportunity to point out, N. Leach’s interest in this story is focused on the notion of sacrifice, the price to pay to give a soul to a building; what I am more interested (for the moment) to examine is the role of architecture in this particular form of murder. Just like a gun or any similar weapon, architecture in its inherent violence is able to kill a body subjugated by its power. In this regard, the cries of the wife in the tale of mason Manole are particularly expressive in their characterization of the absolute violence on the body it develops:

Manole, Manole, Master Manole! The wall presses me too hard and breaks my little body! [...] Manole, Manole, Master Manole, the wall presses me too hard and crushes my breasts and breaks my child.

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