How does the figure of the barricade relate to the form of our buildings and cities today? Can we learn anything from its architecture, its history, and the way it makes reference to the anarchist perspective that has been largely absent from our familiar urban thinking, marked as it is by the great dogmas of urbanism and urban planning? Can anarchist thinking produce a particular kind of architecture, in the same way that political regimes – social-democratic, liberal, communist, or fascist – have produced their own? This is the question we raised during a teaching session conducted by the Muoto agency at the Technical University of Vienna in spring 2024.1 It echoed an exhibition staged concurrently at MAK, the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna, entitled Protest Architecture: Barricades, Camps, Superglue, featuring an architecture of revolt in the form of particularly realistic scale models reproducing camps and temporary installations erected during real contexts of revolt.² Here, we want to take these two parallel events as an opportunity to question the possibility of an architecture that is consistent with anarchist thinking, i.e. open to occupation and free from the pressure of all-powerful public opinion. Is it possible? And what would it look like?

At a time of proliferating and overlapping regulation, our cities and buildings are becoming an increasingly immediate expression of our democracy, its principle of choice, its mode of governance and its regulatory power. Every façade material is discussed, every programme has to be approved. The positive aspect of this process is that our cities and buildings look clean and safe, and manifest a certain harmony. Conflicts between residents are also reduced. Our urban environment is the product of what we agree is good, of what most of us think should or should not be allowed. However, this situation raises the question: in this pursuit of collective perfection, are we not sacrificing a large part of our freedom?³

One of the alternatives to this process is anarchy, which calls for a very different mode of decision-making from that of democracy, in the sense that it acknowledges no over‑ arching or totalising forms of government and calls for a society where rules are constructed from the bottom up. Whereas democracy is governed by a principle of majority decision, anarchy calls for consensus, or even dissensus, modes of decision-making, in other words, that do not require majority approval. However, talk of anarchy today has become taboo, as the notion is riddled with preconceptions.⁴ To call for a form of anarchy immediately raises the spectre of a lack of structure that would result in chaos and undermine the foundations and accomplishments of modernity. When we speak of anarchic societies, we generally think of remote, marginal places, or violent societies dominated by warlords who impose a climate of disorder and terror in order to maintain their power. Another picture that the idea of anarchy summons up is places of protest – rebel camps, tent cities and barricade walls. It corresponds to a picturesque iconography where anarchism takes the form of makeshift structures made from salvaged materials and assembled in a precarious, unplanned manner. In our view, it conjures up an aesthetic of occupancy that seems more decorative than effective. The question, then, is whether it is possible to imagine an anarchist architecture that is not simply a decorative DIY aesthetic, one that suggests another vocation for architecture, which would be, to put it simply, to set people free.

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