Hors nature

An anthropological reading of the history of architecture, and an architectural reading of the history of mankind. We live in a time when mankind dominates the Earth. It is consuming its resources in excess even as it faces an increasingly uncertain future. This exploitation of nature by humans has grown exponentially with industrialization two centuries ago. But the initial rupture which sees the human being extracted from nature is much older. Architecture accompanies the sedentarization of man, in particular by the construction of enclosure to delimit the space of the territory gained on nature. Since the first structures made by Neanderthals, the author proposes in twelve stages an anthropology of the history of architecture, based on this constant of what humans built.