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Warchitectural Theory
a
Andrew Herscher
a
University of Michigan , USA
Published online: 05 Mar 2013.

To cite this article: Andrew Herscher (2008) Warchitectural Theory, Journal of Architectural Education, 61:3, 35-43, DOI: 10.1111/
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 ANDREW HERSCHER
University of Michigan
Warchitectural Theory

The term ‘‘warchitecture’’ emerged in Sarajevo as a name for the catastrophic destruction of
architecture during the 1992–1996 siege of the city. Blurring the conceptual border between
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‘‘war’’ and ‘‘architecture,’’ the term provides a tool to critique dominant accounts of wartime
architectural destruction and to bring the interpretive protocols of architecture to bear upon that
destruction. Reflection on warchitecture can therefore open up new ways to examine and under-
stand violence against architecture and to connect this violence with emergent discussions of war,
violence, and modernity in and across other disciplines.

It is not only my world that has been a complicated relation to the siege (Figures 1
deconstructed but language as well. A library, and 2). On some occasions, these images seemed to
for example, is no longer a building filled with substitute for images of the injured and the dead,
books but a burnt-out ruin. while on other occasions, they seemed to conjure
—Semezdin Mehmedinović, Sarajevo Blues their presence. Some images appeared to posit
a particular building as the target of violence, while
others appeared to posit the city-as-such as target.
Warchitecture: Sarajevo and Beyond Images of destruction at times provoked calls for
During the four years when Sarajevo was under ending the siege, but at times, the provocation of
siege, from 1992 to 1996, shelling by the Bosnian such calls seemed to be the only labor that images
Serb army inflicted catastrophic damage on the
city’s architecture. Sarajevo’s entire range of
buildings and urban spaces suffered damage,
including homes and apartment houses, cultural
and educational institutions, commercial and
industrial facilities, houses of worship, markets,
streets, and urban infrastructure. This destruction
comprised both violence against architecture and
violence against those who inhabited architec-
ture—over ten thousand people were killed and
over sixty thousand were injured during the siege.
Victims sometimes condemned destruction; per-
petrators sometimes condoned it; and destruction
was sometimes simply ignored as a reality of the
city’s ongoing violence, at once unremarkable and 1. Shelling of Elektroprivrede Building, Sarajevo, 1992. (Photo by 2. Shelling of Bosnian Parliament, Sarajevo, 1992. (Photo by Mikhail
lethal. Images of architectural ruination bore Kemal Hodžić, c. 1994 by Miroslav Prstojević, Sarajevo, ranjeni grad.) Evstafiev, licensed under Creative Commons.)

35 HERSCHER Journal of Architectural Education,

pp. 35–43 ª 2008 ACSA
 could perform. After the siege finally ended, post- This destruction, so the army claimed, was inflicted (or the wartime equivalent, civilian) spaces, and
cards produced in and of Sarajevo documented not either as a ‘‘military necessity’’ or through ‘‘collat- hence beyond the scope of military necessity, but
only the thoroughness of the city’s destruction but eral damage’’—the two predominant terms for also as a deliberate targeting of those same spaces,
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also the ruin’s status as a metonym for the city itself legitimate violence against architecture and civil- and hence beyond the scope of collateral damage.
(Figure 3). ians during the war. But the victims of this The language of perpetrators of violence,
For the Bosnian Serb army, it was individual destruction, the citizens of Sarajevo, experienced it produced and circulated to legitimate violence, is
buildings that were destroyed, not the entire city. differently: as an unsanctionable targeting of civic radically unlike the language of victims, produced

3. ‘‘Sarajevo,’’ postcard, 1997. (Photo by Parla-Sarajevo, collection of author.)

Warchitectural Theory 36
 and circulated in the very attempt to accommodate
their experience. This difference, however, is not
simply between types of language but issues from
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the limit of language to encompass violence.1 How,
then, to do justice to the destruction of Sarajevo?
What name to give to that destruction? In an
exhibition produced in Sarajevo in 1993, the city’s
Association of Architects created an unprecedented
neologism to describe the city’s wartime ruin:
‘‘warchitecture’’ or war carried out through and as
the destruction of architecture (Figure 4).2 The
result of warchitecture, which provided the main
title of the exhibition, was registered in the title’s
second part—‘‘Urbicide Sarajevo’’—itself employ-
ing another neologism whose genealogy stretches
back to American urban renewal in the 1960s.3 The
authors of the exhibition applied architecture’s
4. ‘‘Warchitecture: Urbicide Sarajevo,’’ cover of exhibition catalogue
(c. 1994 by Asocijacija arhitekta DAS-SABIH, Warchitecture: Urbicide
Sarajevo).
37 HERSCHER
techniques of spatialization and visualization to
the destruction of Sarajevo. They mapped damage
in terms of its architectural space of infliction
(roof, facxade, and direct hit on building) and its
architectural effect (roof damage, partial burning
of building, complete burning of building, and
complete destruction of building) (Figure 5). They
then inserted the targets of this damage into
a new architectural history of Sarajevo, a history
that was composed in terms of the received
historical-cultural categories (Ottoman, Austro-
Hungarian, modernist, and contemporary)
but whose architectural exemplars were all in
varying states of war-induced ruin (Figures 6
and 7).
In the past two decades, architecture’s
wartime destruction and involvement in political
violence more generally have begun to be histori-
5. Map of destruction in Sarajevo’s Bazaar (c. 1994 by Asocijacija arhitekta DAS-SABIH, Warchitecture: Urbicide Sarajevo).
cized and theorized in a number of disciplinary
and interdisciplinary contexts. This work has
occurred in conjunction with the emergence, in
postsocialist Eastern Europe but also in post–Cold
War Africa and the Middle East, of what some
political theorists call ‘‘new war’’: political violence
between non- or para-state actors in which activi-
ties proscribed by the rules of war, like the
systematic destruction of civilian architecture, are
commonplace.4 Yet, discussions of this destruction
have often been marked by received and prob-
lematic assumptions about war, violence, and
architecture.
Consider, for example, the fundamentally
different ways in which construction (whether
imagined or realized) and destruction are usually
understood. From most interpretive positions,
architecture-as-construction is irreducible to its

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6. Destruction of Gazi Husrev-beg Mosque, Sarajevo (c. 1994 by Asocijacija arhitekta DAS-SABIH, Warchitecture: Urbicide Sarajevo).
contexts; constructions do not simply re-present
contextual dynamics in other forms but also pro-
duce new meanings and new effects that depart
from and even transform these contexts. Con-
struction, then, must be interpreted; its form must
be analyzed, its history ascertained, and its theo-
retical parameters established.5 When architecture
is destroyed, however, its ontological status also
tends to be destroyed. Destruction usually displa-
ces architecture from architectural discourse, if not
the domain of culture more generally, and positions
it in the domain of violence. As an artifact of vio-
lence, destruction is approached in contradistinc-
tion to construction. Allen Feldman describes how
typical accounts of violence assume their subject
to be ‘‘a surface expression of ‘deeper’ socio-
economic and/or ideological contexts’’; as such,
Feldman continues, ‘‘violence is denuded of any
intrinsic semantic or causal character.’’6 Thus, pre-
cisely what architecture-as-construction is usually
endowed with—this intrinsic character, usually
termed ‘‘autonomy’’ in architectural discourse—is
denied architecture-as-destruction. Construction
is regarded as a complex phenomenon that must
be rendered legible through interpretation, while
only rarely is destruction analyzed or even thickly
described. Who inflicted destruction? What was
destroyed? Why was it destroyed? These are
the kind of questions that most often organize
accounts of wartime destruction. The material
dimensions of destruction, then, are usually total-
ized in the numbers and types of destroyed build-
ings and the aims and identities of destructions’
explicit perpetrators—explanatory parameters that
would be completely inadequate in the case of
construction.
The potential of the concept of warchitecture
is to bring the interpretive protocols of architecture
to bear upon architecture’s destruction. In so doing,
the study of warchitecture can throw into question
received distinctions between war and architecture,
open up new ways of examining and understanding
wartime violence against architecture, and connect
violence against architecture to emergent discus-
sions of war, violence, and modernity in and across
other disciplines.7 The concept of warchitecture can
thereby raise still larger questions for architecture—
as discourse, practice, and as a form of knowledge
production. Where does architecture end and vio-
lence, whether structural, symbolic, or physical,
begin? How to locate architecture ‘‘here’’ with
respect to war ‘‘there’’? What sorts of architectural
autonomy stand against war and what sorts are
complicit with war? How can a politics against
violence or against war inform a politics of archi-
tecture? And what is the relation between the
politics of architecture and the architecture of
politics—the recruitment of architecture in the
service of political institutions, projects, and
ideologies? These sorts of questions, dealing with
architecture both in and out of war, invoke
a warchitectural theory: a theory of war as archi-
tecture by other means.
Warchitectural Theory 38

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7. Destruction of Oslobod-enje Building, Sarajevo (c. 1994 by Asocijacija arhitekta DAS-SABIH, Warchitecture: Urbicide Sarajevo).
Violence and Culture, War and
Architecture
The foundational opposition organizing most dis-
course on war and architecture is that between
violence and culture. Before it is targeted by
violence, architecture is located within the domain of
culture, whether that domain is understood in the
traditional Enlightenment form of ‘‘civilization,’’
the historical materialist form of an economic
39 HERSCHER
superstructure, the anthropological form of mean-
ing-making, or the postmodern form of a con-
structed discursive artifact.8 Violence, by contrast,
tends to be located outside of the domain of cul-
ture and defined as a phenomenon that lacks, is
inimical to, or destroys that culture.9 Discourse on
wartime destruction can be divided according to
conceptualizations of destruction’s targets as ‘‘the
city,’’ ‘‘cultural heritage,’’ or ‘‘architecture.’’10
However, the opposition between violence and
culture has fully played itself out in discussions of
each of these targets. City, heritage, and architec-
ture each stand as concretizations of culture that
violence targets for destruction; the underlying
assumption is that violence is absent from, or
always aberrant in, each of these cultural
formations—that cities, heritage, and architecture
‘‘normally’’ exist without violence.
This assumption, however, rests upon an
a priori and problematic understanding of violence
as exterior to and disruptive of culture, an
understanding that ignores the historical
enmeshment of culture in all modes of social
repression and domination. Culture and violence
thus cannot stand as simply unmediated opposi-
tions of one another, and cities, heritage, and
architecture should be understood to advance and
legitimate violence as much as to resist or
disregard it. As Francis Barker points out, ‘‘con-
trary to post-Enlightenment humanist, liberal and
conservative theory, ‘culture’ does not necessarily
stand in humane opposition to political power and
social inequality, but may be profoundly in collusion
with it, not the antidote to generalized violence,
but one of its more seductive strategies.’’11
Another, more fundamental distinction in dis-
course on wartime destruction is that between
irrational destruction and rational destruction. In
the former trajectory, wartime destruction is posed
as ‘‘senseless’’ or ‘‘barbaric,’’ a posing that often
maps onto more general accounts of a conflict’s
source in affective or primordial dynamics such as
national, ethnic, tribal, or religious antagonisms. In
the midst of the siege of Sarajevo, for example, the
Serbian architect, Bogdan Bogdanović wrote in
a widely translated essay that
(T)he civilized world . . . will never forget the
way we destroyed our cities. We Serbs shall
be remembered as despoilers of cities, latter-
day Huns. The horror felt by the West is
understandable: for centuries it has linked the
 concepts ‘city’ and ‘civilization’, associating
them even on an etymological level. It therefore
has no choice but to view the destruction of
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cities as flagrant, wanton opposition to the
highest values of civilization. 12
Here, violence against the city is also violence
foreign to the city, with the city posed in its classic
Weberian form as the site of civility, civics, and
civilization itself and violence posed as the barbaric
destruction of these and other manifestations of
urban culture.13
Bogdanović’s essay reintroduced the term
‘‘urbicide’’ into architectural discourse, and much
of the subsequent discourse on urbicide has
reproduced Bogdanović’s opposition of urban cul-
ture and pre-, non-, or extra-urban violence, albeit
in somewhat more muted terms. Thus, accounts
of urbicide often characterize the city by such
descriptors as ‘‘heterogenous,’’ ‘‘multicultural,’’
‘‘cosmopolitan,’’ or ‘‘European’’ and violence
against the city as ‘‘ethnic,’’ ‘‘ethnonationalist,’’
‘‘tribal,’’ or ‘‘barbaric.’’ In accounts such as these,
culture either is reserved for the city or is regarded
as more modern and developed as it is more
urbanized; reciprocally, cultural forms and pro-
cesses are circumscribed or deleted from violence
against the city, which becomes an impenetrable
black box of irrationality in the process.
To capture the complexity of destruction,
a second trajectory of discourse has taken a dialec-
tical position—imputing rationality to destruction.
In The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War,
Robert Bevan describes ‘‘war against architecture’’
as ‘‘the destruction of the cultural artifacts of an
enemy people or nation as a means of dominating,
terrorizing, dividing or eradicating it.’’14 Bevan
describes these means as a series of strategic
intentions: ethnic cleansing, terror, conquest, rev-
olution, and partition. Other accounts of rational
destruction have explicitly posed themselves as
corrective responses to the inadequacy of accounts
based on irrational destruction, arguing, for exam-
ple, that the ‘‘purposeful destruction of cultural
heritage is a product of rational, politically moti-
vated iconoclasm rather than purely ignorant and
venal impulses.’’15
In these claims, as in all rationalizing accounts
of destruction, intents are collapsed into effects,
with these intents understood as transparent to
both their authors and their victims: these accounts
comprise, that is, an auteur theory of destruction,
with the investigation of destruction focusing on
the identity of that auteur and the intentions
underlying its employment of violence. An exami-
nation of destruction through the identities and
intentions of its authors can certainly provide useful
information. However, the rationalization of
destruction reproduces the key problem of the
position it seeks to correct: whether rationalized or
irrationalized, destruction is nevertheless denied
the autonomy that critical interpretation would
grant any cultural phenomenon. Reduced to an
irrational irruption, destruction is presumed to be
unreadable; reduced to a rational instrument,
destruction is presumed to be already read. Thus,
while it hardly would be controversial to assert that
architecture, as a constructed artifact, cannot be
reduced to either an irrational expression or
a rational instrument, architecture damaged or
destroyed in war is almost always reduced to one or
the other of these interpretive categories in dis-
cussions within and across a range of disciplines.
Both interpretive positions thereby short-
circuit a close examination of destruction. In his
discussion of the architectural topography of the
Palestine conflict, Daniel Monk argues that
accounts of architecture’s role in that conflict
‘‘participate in the intuition of something ‘imme-
diate’: namely, the presumption that in architecture
a political reality presents itself to view directly and
without mediation.’’16 It is precisely this intuition of
immediacy that underlies most accounts of wartime
destruction. By suggesting the blurred or even
nonexistent boundary between construction and
destruction, however, the concept of warchitecture
opens up an interpretive position beyond the
reductive binary of irrational destruction versus
rational destruction. Posed as warchitecture,
destruction remains within the discursive field of
architecture and so cannot be reduced to its con-
texts, nor to the intentions of its authors, nor to its
effects on its targets. As warchitecture, destruction
comprises both a targeting of culture and a cultural
form in itself.17
The understanding of violence against archi-
tecture prompted by the concept of warchitecture
also resonates with recent work on other modalities
of violence, work that, in a number of disciplinary
and interdisciplinary contexts, ‘‘demonstrates the
centrality of cultural issues to the study of conflict
and violence.’’18 For example, Allen Feldman poses
bodily and spatial violence in Northern Ireland as ‘‘a
semantically modal and transformative practice that
constructs novel poles of enactment and recep-
tion.’’19 Framed in this way, violence is neither
a voiding nor a mediation of reason, identity, or
intentionality but rather a process that acts upon
and transforms the identity and agency of its
authors.
The preceding conceptualization of violence
suggests the special salience of violence amid the
novel and intense transformations of recent and
contemporary globalization. These transformations
induce often extreme situations of social uncer-
tainty, instability, and mutability in the identity of
people, places, social norms, and cultural forms.
Accounts of ‘‘new war’’ often pose these instabil-
ities and mutabilities as key contextual dynamics.
Thus, accounts of the destruction of architecture in
these wars should not present this destruction as an
exception to these dynamics; destruction should
not be based on certainties rather than on uncer-
tainties and regarded as an act of knowing subjects
committing violence on known objects. Instead,
destruction needs to be understood as a response
to uncertainty. Arjun Appadurai poses some sorts of
violence as cognitive, as a means of discovering
identities and transcribing them onto bodies and
Warchitectural Theory 40
 spaces: ‘‘violence can create a macabre form of
certainty and can become a brutal technique (or
folk discovery-procedure) about ‘them’ and,
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therefore, about ‘us’ . . . (which) might make special
sense in the era of globalization.’’20 I pose warchi-
tecture as just such a discovery procedure, one
which reflects and responds to the manifest
uncertainties that have emerged in such situations
as postsocialist Yugoslavia. The term also has,
though, a broader relevance for accounting for
destruction in corresponding situations of
uncertainty and transformation and, in the follow-
ing, I will lay out two dimensions of this relevance,
each that responds to an aspect of the social
uncertainty underlying recent and contemporary
political violence.
Delegation and the Subject of Violence
Both irrationalizing and rationalizing theories of
destruction presume a violent subject (whether
individual or collective), preexisting and unaf-
fected by the violence it inflicts. This presumption
allows the truth of destruction to be solicited from
its authors, with statements of intention serving as
totalizing frames for understanding the meaning
and effect of destruction. But it is problematic to
assume that violence is somehow less salient as
a process of subjectivization than the social,
political, or ideological formations that violence
supposedly mediates. Allen Feldman describes this
assumption as based on the false premise that
‘‘the authorizing narrative and/or institution that
legitimates violence, be it the state, various
imagined communities of nationalist and ethnic
identification, territorial referents, civil laws, or
origin myths . . . inhabit a less ephemeral temporal
plane than the violent acts of instantiation that
supposedly represent, advance, mediate and
materialize these meta-historical sites of
legitimacy.’’21
Understanding violence as a production of
subjectivity like other cultural practices poses the
authors of warchitecture as at least altered, if not
41 HERSCHER
reconstructed, by their investment in and practice
of destruction. In the domain of architecture-
as-construction, the claim that both objects and
subjects emerge from architectural thought and
practice has already been decisively made.22 The
concept of warchitecture suggests that architec-
ture-as-destruction works analogously, producing
new sorts of subjects in the course of producing,
through violence, new sorts of objects.
Pierre Bourdieu has used the term ‘‘delega-
tion’’ for the process by means of which subjects
assume identities in relation to larger communi-
ties.23 For Bourdieu, there is no natural relationship
between what he calls ‘‘the delegate,’’ the subject
who is allied with or speaks on behalf of a commu-
nity, and the community itself; that relationship,
rather, has to be produced, and as it is produced,
both the delegate and the community assume
political and symbolic existence. Violence can be
regarded as a key process of delegation, especially
in situations of political instability and social trans-
formation. Many accounts of wartime destruc-
tion note that this destruction tends to target
buildings of heightened collective significance.
These buildings are said to possess symbolic value
for a targeted national, ethnic, or religious group,
and so their destruction is taken as evidence of the
ethnic, cultural, or historical identities of a conflict’s
protagonists. But these protagonists often have
unclear or even nonexistent relations to the com-
munities they supposedly represent. In the case of
‘‘ethnic violence,’’ Rogers Brubaker has pointed out
that ‘‘organizations, not ethnic groups as such, are
the chief protagonists of ethnic conflict and ethnic
violence and . . . the relationship between organi-
zations and the groups they claim to represent is
often deeply ambiguous.’’24 One way for these
organizations to cast themselves as delegates of
a group is to target the delegates of that group’s
adversary, whether human or architectural. This
targeting, then, is a way for its perpetrators to
arrogate a collective identity, as opposed to simply
mediate an identity that preexists its violent
performance. As David Campbell describes this
dynamic, ‘‘violence is the performative enactment
of the identities subsequently regarded as pre-
existing and the source of the conflict.’’25
Forensics and the Objects of Violence
Both theories of irrational violence and rational
violence pose destruction as targeting objects
whose identity, value, and meaning are known,
stable, and, from some interpretive positions,
shared between perpetrator and victim. In a char-
acteristic example, describing the destruction of
churches in Kosovo after 1999, it is thus claimed
that ‘‘for the (Serbian Orthodox) Church, the con-
struction of facilities was a way of claiming Kosovo
for its earthly kingdom; the Albanians understood
the construction project in these terms and would
act on this formula after June 1999.’’26
While the concept of delegation suggests that
this destruction allowed particular organizations of
Albanians to stage themselves as representative of
‘‘the Albanians’’ as such, recent accounts of vio-
lence also insist that violence is as much an
exploratory examination of its objects as a targeted
destruction of them. Several recent anthropological
accounts have narrated this exploration with
respect to violence against the body. Liisa Malkki
has described how ‘‘through violence, bodies of
individual persons become metamorphosed into
specimens of the ethnic category for which they are
supposed to stand.’’27 Arjun Appadurai emphasizes
the exploratory nature of this violent metamor-
phosis, writing that ‘‘the most horrible forms of
ethnocidal violence are mechanisms for producing
persons out of what are otherwise diffuse, large-
scale labels that have effects but no locations.’’28
He thus calls this violence ‘‘forensic’’ because it
involves a search for the parameters of otherness in
the very course of harming or eliminating others.
Violence against architecture, like violence
against the body, often involves the same forensic
investigation, the same attempt to define an other
in the midst of destroying it. Thus, the nature of
 the architectural sites of violence should not be
regarded as pre-given, as destruction inflicts sym-
bols on an other just as much, if not more than
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targeting symbols already claimed and acknowl-
edged across interpretive communities in conflict.
Most accounts of destruction assume some
certainty on the part of the perpetrators of
destruction about what they are destroying; what
these accounts miss is how the object typically
regarded as the ‘‘target’’ of violence is often defined
by that violence. That is, the status of a building as
‘‘symbol,’’ ‘‘heritage,’’ or, in Robert Bevan’s terms,
constellation of ‘‘memory, history, and identity’’
does not remain stable after that building is
attacked, damaged, or destroyed. Violence against
architecture transforms, often fundamentally, the
values, meanings, and identities of architecture.
Moreover, this transformation is connected to but
not determined by the explicit architectural inter-
pretations made by destruction’s perpetrators; this
transformation is conditioned not only by these
interpretations but also by the experience of
destruction by its victims, witnesses, and audiences.
Though it may very well be important ‘‘to recognize
the ways traditional cultural suppositions are lever-
aged and manipulated by the perpetrators (of
destruction) for the purposes of social engineering
and revision of the visible historical record,’’ these
purposes are not totalizing.29 As Kay Warren has
written, ‘‘violence, whether surgical or diffuse, is not
a social fact or cultural experience until it is given
significance by analyzing subjects.’’30
Warchitecture and ‘‘War’’
States not only engage in war but also attempt to
define what counts as ‘‘war’’ and what counts as
‘‘peace,’’ what counts as legitimate ‘‘preventative
war,’’ ‘‘peace keeping,’’ or ‘‘self-defense,’’ and
what counts as illegitimate, indiscriminate, or
extreme violence.The most fundamental distinction
in discourse on wartime destruction, then, may be
whether accounts of destruction reconfirm or con-
test hegemonic accounts of war and violence, and
the contestation of such accounts may be one of
the most profound possibilities offered by the
concept of warchitecture.
One form of contestation is to defamiliarize
the architectural targets of destruction in war. A
violent alchemy must take place in order to trans-
form a building into a target into a ruin. Part of this
alchemy is discursive; certain stories about archi-
tecture guide and legitimate these transformations.
The tenements of Dresden and paper and wood
homes of Tokyo must become housing for workers
in war industries for them to be fire bombed; ref-
ugee camps in Palestine must become nodes of
a terrorist infrastructure for them to be bulldozed;
neighborhoods in Baghdad must become breeding
grounds of insurgency for them to be managed as
war zones. Warchitecture is a reminder that what
are posed in legitimizing accounts of violence as
disembodied and abstract ‘‘targets’’ are, simulta-
neously, architecture: objects and spaces for living,
for the living. Framed as warchitecture, the violence
that these accounts neutralize can be reconstituted,
an essential preliminary to responding to and
opposing this violence. Susan Sontag points out
that, although it is often neglected, ‘‘war tears, war
rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War dismembers.
War ruins.’’31 Sontag argues that it is not an ethi-
cally sufficient response to merely register war’s
manifold violence, but it is at least necessary to do
so if war is to be comprehended and critiqued.
Another form of contestation is to defamilia-
rize what counts as ‘‘war’’ itself. Reflecting on one
of the original projects of urban modernization—
Baron Haussmann’s mid–nineteenth century
reconstruction of Paris—Walter Benjamin realized
that the capacity for urban destruction was tech-
nically enmeshed with modernist urban renewal:
‘‘along with the growth of the big cities,’’ Benjamin
pointed out, ‘‘there developed the means of razing
them to the ground.’’32 The urban renewal of Paris,
in other words, shared many of the qualities of war
and was, at least in architectural terms, hardly dis-
tinguishable. In the case of Paris, Benjamin argued,
this renewal was aimed at the city’s working class,
who were marked as a threat to imperial power and
therefore removed from their neighborhoods in the
city center and dispersed in peripheral banlieues.
The destruction inflicted in the course of Paris’
renewal, that is, was a form of violence that yielded
the segregation and marginalization of disempow-
ered groups and communities in the city. In
‘‘peacetime,’’ these sorts of reterritorializations,
on both urban and transnational scales, are often
framed and normalized by terms such as moderni-
zation, development, or globalization. Warchitecture
poses the architectural and urban forms of these
processes as potential instruments for the violent
reordering of spaces, communities, and polities, and
thus, as weak or sublimated modes of war carried out
both within and against cities.33 But warchitecture
also suggests that architecture, in its most neutral
and discrete versions, can be enmeshed with war.
Both war and architecture are components in
a highly mediated globalization of insecurity and
safety, risk and protection, and profiteering and
exploitation. The status of war as a protection of
‘‘our way of life’’ is corroborated by architecture’s
support of and improvement to that life. In a time of
war or other form of political violence, architecture,
as ‘‘business as usual,’’ can be warchitectural,
advancing war precisely by ignoring it.
Holding open what counts as war and what
counts as violence, warchitecture suggests an
expanded conception of architecture more gener-
ally, an expansion beyond the anodyne and limited
conception of architecture as constructive and as
construction. In so doing, warchitecture also
refracts trajectories in and around the histories of
art and architecture in which new objects of study
and new forms of social engagement have been
investigated. Indeed, through the formulation and
exploration of concepts such as space (especially
in Lefebvrian formulations), iconoclasm, and the
social life of architecture, the historical disciplines
have anticipated, adumbrated, and in some cases
initiated the study of architecture’s manifold
Warchitectural Theory 42
 intersections with war. Michael Hays has posed
architecture as ‘‘a precious index of the social fact
itself, the shape of whose complex flows could not
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otherwise be detected.’’34 Should examination of
that index be confined only to the work of those
actors called architects and the product of those
activities called constructive, or should they include
the range of actors and processes involved with
architecture? Warchitectural theory suggests that
only the latter can do justice to the social facts that
(could or should) concern us.
Notes
1. On language and violence, see Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The
Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press,
1985); Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the
Ordinary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
2. Association of Architects DAS-SABIH, Warchitecture: Urbicide
Sarajevo (Sarajevo: Association of Architects DAS-SABIH, 1994).
3. On the genealogy of the term ‘‘urbicide,’’ see David Campbell, Stephen
Graham, and Daniel Monk, ‘‘Introduction to Urbicide: The
Killing of Cities?,’’ Theory & Event 10, no. 2 (2007). Available at
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v010/10.2campbell.html
(accessed November 20, 2007).
4. Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).
5. In the words of K. Michael Hays, the labor of architectural theory is to
‘‘show the work of architecture as having some autonomous force with
which it could also be seen as negating, distorting, repressing, compen-
sating for, and even producing, as well as reproducing, (its) context’’; see
K. Michael Hays, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in K. Michael Hays, ed., Architectural
Theory since 1968 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), p. v.
6. Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and
Political Terror in Northern Ireland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1992), p. 19.
7. Some recent scholarship on the architecture of war and political vio-
lence in line with these ambitions includes, for example, Daniel Bertrand
Monk, An Aesthetic Occupation: The Immediacy of Architecture and the
Palestine Conflict (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); many of
the essays in Stephen Graham, ed., Cities, War and Terrorism: Towards an
43 HERSCHER
Urban Geopolitics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004); and Eyal Weizman, Hollow
Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (New York: Verso, 2007).
8. On formulations of the concept of ‘‘culture,’’ see Raymond Williams,
Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1983), pp. 87–93.
9. On the theorization of violence and culture, see Kay B. Warren,
‘‘Introduction: Revealing Conflicts across Cultures and Disciplines,’’ in
Kay B. Warren, ed., The Violence Within: Cultural and Political Oppo-
sition in Divided Nations (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993),
pp. 1–23.
10. On the wartime destruction of the city, see Gregory Ashworth, War
and the City (London: Routledge, 1991); Stephen Graham, ed., Cities, War
and Terrorism; Jane Schneider and Ida Susser, eds., Wounded Cities:
Destruction and Reconstruction in a Globalized World (Boston: Berg,
2004); and Lawrence J. Vale and Thomas J. Campanella, eds., The Resil-
ient City: How Modern Cities Recover from Disaster (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004). On the wartime destruction of cultural heritage,
see Nicola Lambourne, War Damage in Western Europe: The Destruction
of Historic Monuments during the Second World War (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2001); Robert Layton, Peter G. Stone,
and Julian Thomas, eds., Destruction and Conservation of Cultural
Property (London: Routledge, 2001). On the wartime destruction of
architecture, see Robert Bevan, The Destruction of Memory: Archi-
tecture at War (London: Reaktion, 2006). The critique laid out here
does not, of course, apply equally to each or each part of
these works.
11. Francis Barker, The Culture of Violence: Tragedy and History
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. viii.
12. Bogdan Bogdanović, ‘‘The City and Death,’’ in Jeri Labon, ed.,
Michael Henry Heim, trans., Balkan Blues: Writing Out of Yugoslavia
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995), p. 53.
13. See Max Weber, The City, trans. Don Martindale and Gertrud
Neuwirth (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1958).
14. Bevan, The Destruction of Memory, p. 8.
15. Jon Calame and Esther Charlesworth, ‘‘The Divided City as Broken
Artifact,’’ Mediterraneum 2 (2002): http://www.minervapartners.org/
html/ICONessay.pdf (accessed June 18, 2007).
16. Monk, An Aesthetic Occupation, p. 2.
17. I here pose ‘‘culture’’ as a constructed domain with material and
semantic autonomies and semiautonomies that is situated within a larger
structure of economic, political, and social domains; on the recuperation
of an antiessentialist model of culture, see Susan Hegeman, Patterns for
America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1999).
18. Warren, ‘‘Introduction,’’ p. 1.
19. Feldman, Formations of Violence, p. 20.
20. Arjun Appadurai, ‘‘Dead Certainty: Ethnic Violence in the Era of
Globalization,’’ Public Culture 10, no. 2 (Winter 1998): 230.
21. Feldman, Formations of Violence, p. 2.
22. K. Michael Hays notes that modernism ‘‘defeats the view that
meanings and subjectivities are already formed and existent somewhere
outside the work of art and that the critic’s and historian’s business is to
locate them and forces the recognition that modern aesthetic practice
aims to bring into being new meanings and new subjectivities’’; see
K. Michael Hays, Modernism and the Post-Humanist Subject (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1992), p. 4.
23. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, trans. Gino
Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1994), pp. 203–19.
24. Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2005), p. 16.
25. David Campbell, National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity and
Justice in Bosnia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998),
p. 110.
26. Sabrina P. Ramet, ‘‘The Politics of the Serbian Orthodox Church,’’ in
Sabrina P. Ramet and Vjeran Pavlakovic, eds., Serbia since 1989: Politics
and Society under Milosevic and After (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 2005), pp. 327–55.
27. Liisa Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National
Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 88.
28. Appadurai, ‘‘Dead Certainty,’’ p. 296.
29. Calame and Charlesworth, ‘‘The Divided City as Broken Artifact.’’
30. Warren, ‘‘Introduction,’’ p. 8.
31. Susan Sontag, ‘‘The Telling Shot,’’ Guardian Review (February 1,
2003): 5.
32. Walter Benjamin, ‘‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,’’ in
Harry Zohn, trans., Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High
Capitalism (London: Verso, 1969), p. 174.
33. See, for example, Stephan Lanz, ‘‘Where Bosnia Begins in the Middle
of Brazil: Urban Orders of Violence Beyond ‘Good Governance’,’’ in
Jochen Becker and Stephan Lanz, eds., Space//Troubles. Jenseits des
Guten Regierens: Schattenglobalisierung, Gewaltkonflikte und städtisches
Leben (Berlin: b_books, 2003). Available at http://www.metrozones.info/
space/bos01.html (accessed November 20, 2007).
34. K. Michael Hays, ‘‘Foreword,’’ in Manfredo Tafuri, ed., Daniel Scherer,
trans. Interpreting the Renaissance: Princes, Cities, Architects (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), p. xi.