Unsettlements: An Interview with Ian Hodder on Çatalhöyuk and the Beginnings of Domesticity
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Architecture has long drawn insight from those outside its traditional boundaries—anthropologists, historians, philosophers—and Ian Hodder stands as one of the most transformative of those “outsiders.” His decades-long excavation at Çatalhöyük, a 9,000-year-old settlement in central Anatolia, has radically reframed how we understand the origins of domestic space, collective life, and built form. What makes Hodder’s work so compelling for architects is not just what it reveals about the past, but how it unsettles the very categories we use to think about architecture: house, plan, labor, domesticity. At Çatalhöyük, the house is not just a dwelling—it is simultaneously a tomb, a temple, a workshop, and a living being, constantly repaired and replastered. It resists separation between subject and object, language and drawing, activities and materials, production and reproduction. This entanglement forces us to rethink what architecture is and where domesticity truly began.
Source: Burning Farm
DOI: 10.63602/252358
Authors: Alfredo Thiermann, Xavier Nueno
Language: English
Subfield: Architecture
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W7083019714
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