A combat architecture – Liberation
What solutions offers architecture to adapt to the unpredictability of the world, rethink the existing and imagine new ways of living in space? A file carried out in partnership with the French Institute on the occasion of the Venice 2025 architecture biennial (from May 10 to November 23). All articles are to be found here.
When this night at the end of April, I hear the din of explosions in Kyiv’s sky, when the walls of my room are shaking and the windows seem to hold out only a breath, I materialize the impact internally. I imagine the building cup fairly quickly in which I find myself and understand that there is no secure place. 225 missiles and a noisy night later, where the waves of Iranian drones, ballistic missiles and old things from the 1950s succeeded each other every thirty minutes, I wake up under an insolent sun. A funny atmosphere lives in the city, specific to these little mornings after. After the strikes, after the Nuit Blanche, after the dead and the injured, after the rescue interventions.
Obviously the targets are civil, and not military. Obviously the city is the target. Places of life, gathering, schools, hospitals, historic places, places of memories, cultural places. Obviously life resumes in Kyiv, between the news on the dead and wounded, and the daily life of a capital who learned to « live with ».
And architecture in all of this? As Paul Virilio shows this during his exhibition « Bunker Archeologie » (1976), the war generates constructions of which we do not want to see the architectural qualities or cultural springs. We see a lot what is destroyed today in Ukraine, but we can see what is being built. Despite geopolitical insecurity, she also says a lot about the hope of a future. Unlike the Atlantic Wall, Ukrainian contemporary architecture is home to life, schools, hospitals, even underground. Unlike German bunkers, she is not only military, she is first civil, and is designed to endure war, as for peacetime. She witnesses the preparation for a long -term fight against a Russian aggressor without limit, without border, without calendar. Finally, this warning architecture emerges from an imperative need to count on its own resources. Local and renewable resources. This is where ecology and geopolitics come together. Any attacked country must be independent in energy and resources. For the period of crisis and for that of reconstruction.
“Reconstruction is the continuation of war horrors. If the war was total, the post-war period is totalitarian ”, Continues Paul Virilio, speaking of Nantes and its 8,000 bombed buildings and rebuilt according to a serial and industrial approach. About as much as the city of Kherson, occupied and then released at the end of 2022, and now on the front facing the Russian lines.
Yes, post-war periods are often the worst pages (or the best) of architecture and town planning. It is therefore essential that architecture becomes a theme of reflection in wartime. And that war architecture becomes a theme in peaceful countries. The creativity of the solutions provided, the extreme resilience of projected equipment, the essential circular and frugal economy that this implies, but also the multifunctionality of « shelters » which are also climatic shelters: we have everything to learn from these extreme situations where constraints are superimposed.
The architecture of the 21st century, like that of the XXth after the Second World War, will necessarily be shaped by this geopolitical and climatic instability. Getting out of the comfort of our routine is also preparing for a combat architecture, capable of facing systemic changes from the 21st century while remaining a cultural vector.
