the-instinct-of-architecture-the-origin-and-evolution-of-human-architecture-92

Location:

Sarrià-Sant Gervasi · Sant Gervasi - la Bonanova · Carrer de Bellesguard, 14, Sarrià-Sant Gervasi, 08022 Barcelona

After documenting an origin of architecture far more remote than previously believed, The Instinct of Architecture offers a vibrant narrative that turns the aesthetic foundations of architecture upside down, leading us to the idea that the cross-cutting traits linking architecture across all eras and cultures may be related to the evolution of the human species itself.

In 1964, Bernard Rudofsky presented the legendary exhibition Architecture without Architects at the MoMA in New York, in which architecture expanded beyond the professional sphere and revealed itself as a trait shared by all humankind.

In 2023, a team of archaeologists unearthed in Zambia two beams fitted perpendicularly together, dating back approximately half a million years. This evidence, published in Nature, has forced a reconsideration of preconceived ideas and pushed back the origin of architecture to a time before Homo sapiens.

The Instinct of Architecture. Origin and Evolution of Human Architecture presents this evidence in Barcelona for the first time and offers an engaging and well-documented visual account of the evolution of architecture: from the building of nests similar to those of chimpanzees by H. habilis, to the forces that still shape our shelters, buildings, cities and monuments today. The exhibition path follows Rudofsky’s intuitions in order to construct an original hypothesis based on new evidence pointing to a human architectural ethology, understood as a set of cross-cutting behaviours and impulses that give a characteristic form to our way of inhabiting the world.

The exhibition, curated and designed by Arturo Frediani and Lara Alcaina together with an international multidisciplinary committee of experts, is structured in three chapters:

Human architecture in the context of animal architecture. The origin and evolution of human architecture. Adapted behaviours: the instinct of architecture.

The first presents architecture as an adaptation widespread throughout the animal world, challenging its supposed human exceptionalism, and pays tribute to the Catalan primatologist Jordi Sabater Pi, author in 1985 of Ethology of Human Dwelling, identifying the arboreal nests of hominid primates as a common antecedent of our architecture.

The second presents the findings from Zambia and demonstrates the deep evolutionary roots of human architecture, contrasting the available evidence from primatology, archaeology, paleoanthropology and paleoecology.

The third and final chapter introduces seven possible defining traits of human architectural ethology: architectural behaviours that, because of their adaptive advantages, may have been retained through natural selection. Spaces are devoted to Genius Loci, or the bond between architecture and landscape; to the ambivalence of Territoriality; to the Cozy, with a tribute to Nina Masó; to the variety of Ornament; to the influence of the Picturesque on the destinies of global tourism; to the contemporary proliferation of the Monumental; and finally to Grace, conceived by Josep Llinàs.

The theme of the exhibition will also be the subject of debate in one of the seven main theoretical contributions to the UIA World Congress of Architecture Barcelona, to be held between 28 June and 2 July 2026.

This exhibition also includes a public programme.