“Where the World Goes Quiet” The Ability for Architecture to Provide Existential Comfort Amidst Socio-Political Instability

Responsive Architecture:

One Photographer’s Portrait of Social Isolation (Sameer Raichur)

The Overwhelm of Contemporary Life

It takes only momentary reflection of our present moment in time and world history to realize how tremendously overwhelming it has all become. In decades and centuries past, the scope of our individual awareness has been dramatically reduced to what it has become today. We only knew of the detailed and intimate affairs of those closest to us, the immediate happenings of neighboring states and countries would have been a total mystery until as recently as the 1920’s with the mass adoption of the radio. Before then, daily newspapers contained high-level updates on a 12-hour delay or more. Now? Life-changing news is broadcast to every member of the public in minutes from every corner of the globe. Our ‘Net of Empathetic Expectation’ or the radius of individuals we are expected to care and advocate for has expanded from a few dozen to 8-billion. In the past, empathy for and the collective flourishing of all humanity was espoused as a nice thought in the abstract, today we are confronted every minute with our responsibility to fight for the well-being of others as harm and injustice befalls them. This phenomenon is understandably a complete overload of our finite capacities, cultivating a constant feeling of inability, inferiority, and futility of effort. Given this, what is our potential as architects, designers of the built environment we all occupy, to soothe these feelings?

A street in Levittown, Pennsylvania, in the 1950s, the archetypal mass-produced suburban community.

Architecture as a Response

Architecture and the built environment is often thought of, especially in the era of accelerated information, as largely monolithic and unchanging, something of a reliable backdrop to an all too busy world. In reality, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Architecture and the individual projects that it is composed of, are constantly responding to economic, social, and political needs of the moment in which they are designed and built. This act of response transforms the built environment from a stagnant backdrop to a dynamic fabric which can actively provide for its occupants. The response of principal interest to this work is that of how architecture responds to conflict and socio-political instability: How has it been done throughout history, and what is its proper course of action in the face of our contemporary plights?

Historical Vignettes:

The Eastern Wall of Dover Castle, Kent, Dover, England (2019) Photo Courtesy of English Heritage

Feudal Architecture as a Response to Conflict

In the middle ages, the scale of conflict and inter-settlement violence was, while more geographically present, comparably smaller in scale to contemporary socio-political disputes. As a consequence of this scale, it was largely the most practical course of action for medieval civilizations to physically barricade and insulate their citizens against territorial violence through the use of dense monolithic architectural forms such as castles and kingdoms. One of the most geographically significant examples is Dover Castle on the southern tip of the United Kingdom. Dover Castle, often referred to as the “Key to England” has been the nexus point for most if not all conflicts between England and France in the middle ages.

Physical Safety & Metaphysical Distance

Castles and kingdoms as architectural typologies were distinct to other settlements in the middle ages primarily due to their tremendous security measures, and symbolism as centers of socio-political power. Because of this, they are an apt distilled example of an early architectural response to conflict. In their case, the response was incredibly straightforward,  the threats were entirely physical and as such, thicker walls, secure gates, thin openings, were sufficient to provide protection from siege. In addition to this physical safety, the lack of visibility to the conflict on the part of the average citizen creates a metaphysical distance between them and those forces that would wish to harm them. If you lived in the most insulated parts of a castle or larger kingdom, you could go days without even knowing an attack was occurring. This mental distance took the extra step in cultivating feelings of security among the inhabitants of this iconic medieval typology. The same is true for the famous Dover Castle, as an archetypal example of medieval architecture, it aligns with all of the common features of these monoliths of a pre-industrial age.

The error however in the medieval architectural response lies in its oversimplification of human need and connection to nature. With safety valued over all else, conditions inside castles were often horrendously unclean, isolated from nature, socially segregated, and generally miserable for a majority of inhabitants. As a result, the medieval response is categorically unequipped to respond to the aforementioned modern plight.

Picture of a family infront of their Levittown house (Cape Cod design), Tony Linck for LIFE Magazine, 1947 /// Found by Olivia Ahn

The Nuclear Response in the Late 20th Century

Shifting our collective focus much closer to our contemporary era, when the scale of destruction in socio-political warfare far outreaches our capacity to create effective physical defenses, our architectural response transforms in lock-step with this development. In the mid-to-late twentieth century following the conclusion of WWII and our use of nuclear weapons in the pacific theatre, The Cold War illustrated the terrifying impetus of the scale of devastation presented by nuclear conflict. During this time, the leaders of architectural academia in the United States proposed potential solutions to safe-guard the public against this existential anxiety. One such leader, Jose Luis Sert, the Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design at the time, published a book titled “Can our Cities Survive?” through the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (C.I.A.M.). The essay argues for suburban sprawl and the flight of urban citizens away from cities on the basis of nuclear survival, the supposed logic being that if we as a populous are not as concentrated and are instead spread out across the great landmass of the states, less of us would die in the event of a nuclear strike. While a little dubious in its reasoning, the work ties a clear line to developing architecture in the twentieth century and nuclear anxieties. Unfortunately this response to conflict had latent ulterior motives, the repercussions of which are still being felt to this day.

Cutout illustration of a family fallout shelter from the Cold War era. (Flickr)

An Architecture of Distrust & Isolation

“Beyond the official historical version that insists on the ability for each member of the American middle class to become the owner of its own house, lies a political agenda that unfolds itself through the weaponization of the totality of scales of design.”

# WEAPONIZED ARCHITECTURE /// From the Highway to the Pill: Counter-History of the American Suburbia - The Funambulist

These motives are all too commonly found in history, the tired story of an oppressive class obfuscating its oppression under the unwitting banner of ‘the common good’. In the same breath that Cert and others made the suburban case as one of distance, safety, and community building; city housing authorities made explicit discriminatory actions towards black and brown communities by ‘warehousing’ them in the worst parts of cities and created suburbia with the foundational purpose of establishing white utopias. As the quote from The Funambulist alludes, this political agenda is a key example of the features of architectural design, at a variety scales, that can be leveraged in the pursuit of discrimination.

Suburbia, in its replicated, sanitized, hyper-individualistic design, removes people from one another, cultivating distrust, isolation, and loneliness instead of gathering and community. This is accomplished in the very fabric of its density and delineation of space. Every inch of land in the suburbs is cordoned off and meticulously dictated as each individual's private property, completely eliminating opportunities for public gathering within neighborhoods, offloading that responsibility to parks and commercial districts. The resultant issue then is clear when it is considered that parks and commercial districts with sufficient public or ‘third’ spaces for gathering are few and far between in suburban areas and cities. Zooming in to the scale of the homes themselves, there is very little fenestration and visibility to one’s neighbors and the outdoors beyond the property which is owned by the resident. This leads directly to a residential typology which primes the public for distrust, division, and paranoia towards their neighbors. The evidence of this rests in the very decades which preceded the establishment of the suburbs themselves. With the onset of McCarthyism amidst the Cold War, the era of ‘The Red Scare’ had settled in across the country. Primed by the architecture of the suburbs, the American people were all too easily pitted against one another, encouraged to turn over to the authorities and label a communist anyone who was determined to be too different from the superficial and fictitious ‘model citizen’ crafted by particularly insidious political figures at the time.

Now, it can be seen, through an analysis of previous architectural responses to conflict, how the built environment can have an active and substantial impact on its occupants. With this in mind, the question must be asked, what does the proper architectural response to our contemporary material conditions look like? How can architecture provide us refuge from the overwhelming nature of the present?

A New Response on the Horizon: 

UNStudio – BSD – Helmond – Autumn Harvest | Copyright: Plomp

Overstimulation and Retreat

A proper answer to this question necessitates an inventory of the needs associated with contemporary life that are not currently being met by existing residential typologies. The overwhelming nature of our instantaneous connection to media, crisis, and drafted algorithmic facades, as discussed previously, creates a metaphysically fundamental need for rest, retreat, and respite from the onslaught of information disrupting our every moment. If we are afforded, via the environment in which we live, the opportunity to easily step away and take intentional time away from the noise, we would be able to better manage the emotional and informational onslaught when we are prepared to. As a design response this could take many forms, from prioritizing the community which a residence will serve from earlier on in the design process, to crafting outdoor community spaces for shared activity and flourishing. It is new residences such as this which must be prioritized if we are to effectively develop our built environment into one that reinforces our health and happiness instead of diminishing our collective spirit. 

Dreamhamar project, in Hamar, Norway

The Importance of Silence, Community, Emotional Stability and Safety

In an effort to dive further into what such residences could look like, there is a specificity that ought to be achieved in the programming of new private and third spaces which both serve to fill our collective need for solace in an overwhelming age. Considering residential typologies not as singular entities but instead holistically as communities will go a long way to crafting private spaces which allow for retreat and integrated ‘third’ spaces to cultivate community and emotional well-being. There is a need, in order to adequately respond to contemporary overwhelm, to allow residents to seek refuge in silence as well as in community with others. Everyone responds to crises and the overwhelming nature of contemporary life differently, and as such, proper community building must be definitionally flexible in providing space for all different types of recovery and re-integration into a unified public realm. It is for this reason that Silence, Community, and Emotional Well-being are fundamental priorities to an ethical built environment for the future.

LIFE Hamburg | Image courtesy: LAVA

The Direction of Architectural Refuge

In summary, within a contemporary context of overwhelming information, both real and unreal, crisis’ at a multitude of unfathomable scales, and overburdened empathetic capacities; the built environment is a capable fabric to respond to this context by creating residential communities which offer multi-faceted opportunities for retreat, unified community, and emotional well-being. This seismic shift of the built environment has tremendous potential to empower and lift the spirits of the public in order to better manage and fight to improve our contemporary condition. Given this potential it becomes the imperative of emerging professionals and impassioned architects to push for a change in design and industry incentives in order to bring about a new era of ‘Architectural Refuge’ for all!

Rome, Italy | Photo by Gabriella Clare Marino

Bibliography:

1. Ahmed, Toqa. “Destructivism: How Does War Affect Architecture?” Arch2o. Accessed December 22, 2025. https://www.arch2o.com/destructivism-how-does-war-affect-architecture/.

2. Brown, Lance Jay. “Can Our Cities Survive? Redux.” Consortium for Sustainable Urbanization, November 23, 2020. https://csu.global/articles/can-our-cities-survive-redux/.

3. “Designing For or Designing With Communities?” ArchiVibe. Accessed December 22, 2025. https://www.archivibe.com/designing-with-communities/.

4. Deutinger, Theo, and Brendan McGetrick. Handbook of Tyranny. Zürich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2023.

5. “Dover Castle.” Wikipedia, December 21, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dover_Castle.

6. “Medieval Castle Defence: Defending a Castle.” Exploring Castles, August 30, 2017. https://www.exploring-castles.com/castle_designs/medieval_castle_defence/.

7. “# Weaponized Architecture /// from the Highway to the Pill: Counter-History of the American Suburbia.” THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE, January 7, 2022. https://thefunambulist.net/editorials/weaponized-architecture-from-the-highway-to-the-pill-counter-history-of-the-american-suburbia.

This work has been published in the 93rd Issue of CRIT Journal which can be found here