Architecture and Trauma

Working through the ambiguities of the concepts and definitions of “trauma” and “architecture”, the paper defines and explores the “trauma of architecture”. The effects of traumatic events on architecture are considered beyond the physical damages and destruction of its body, to understand the temporally dilated workings of trauma through architecture as a practice and a discipline, and the processes through which architecture responds to trauma using its own languages, histories and forms of representation, in an attempt to incorporate it. What are the changes that trauma produces on architecture as a discipline then, and how does trauma affect architectural discourse and forms of expression? Transposed to architecture, the idea of trauma’s “deferred action” is applied to the time of the architectural project. A series of examples – the aftermath of the events of 9/11, architectural responses to the effects of the war in Sarajevo, and Bernard Tschumi’s theoretical work on architecture and violence – illustrate different ways in which architecture elaborates the trauma to produce not only spatially and temporally situated physical responses, but also transformations of the discipline at large, with a further deferred effect in both time and space