Architecture of the Barricade: An Iconographic Research by the Arsenale Institute for Politics of Representation

Introduction

By its very nature, architecture is an affirmative profession. As much as the practitioners of this business may consider themselves artistically autonomous, socially engaged and politically committed, their work is in principle—and with increasing inevitability—constrained by the prevailing standards and economic calculations that shape the commercially driven choices of their clients, namely real estate developers. Anything that fails to meet their criteria of profitability is unlikely to be realized as a building.

The fact that the exemplary figure in the city’s spatial policy, the prefect Baron Haussmann (1809–1891), was not an architect but a lawyer is therefore as unsurprising as the fact that he instrumentalized architecture for an urbanistic maxim of the forced pacification of the city under the authority of Napoleon III and the business world it favored. It was architecture that created order in the metropolises of the early industrial age through the physical transformation of the street against the traditional methods of insurrection and, in particular, the building of barricades by the dangerous classes.

Walter Benjamin dealt with the way in which Haussmannization relates to the barricade tradition in a separate chapter of his Arcades Project: “The true purpose of Haussmann’s work was to secure the city against civil war. He wanted to make the erection of barricades in Paris impossible for all time.”

In his aesthetics of perspective visual axes—‘L’embellissement stratégique’—Benjamin only recognized the strategic purpose of depriving the revolt of the physical conditions provided by urban space. In contrast to the rationality of the prosperous real estate speculation of the Napoleonic era, the barricade formed a threatening negative volume that, paradoxically, itself also bears the determinations of architecture.

The Concept of the Barricade

The artists who gathered around Gordon Matta-Clark in the 1970s under the banner Anarchitecture adopted Richard Nonas’s term ‘hard-shell’ to denote the ossification of the prevailing societal conditions engineered by property developers and the architectural profession in particular. The latter seemed to them insurmountably linked to the principle of property in its most radical form of exclusion from space. With their name Anarchitecture however, they implied the possibility of a subversive definition of architecture. This applies to the creation of negative spaces, which paradigmatically include the barricade.

Long before this, the decisive author in architectural history who believed he could learn from the conceptual form of the barricade and conversely use his expertise as a master builder to help it achieve greater practicality in the street fighting of the rebellious population was Gottfried Semper (1803–1879).

The Role of Gottfried Semper

When, with the explicit self-assurance of an architect, he became active in the field of a system-transcending architecture of subversion in order to take sides in the revolt in Saxony in May 1849 in favor of the rebellion and against feudalism, he took great personal risks. After all, the rebellion in which the court architect and professor of architecture at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts took part was directed against his immediate employer and patron, the King of Saxony.

As an architecture student, Semper had witnessed the July Revolution in 1830, whose proverbial three glorious days on the barricades he enthusiastically experienced in Paris. When his reign in turn was brought to an end by the bourgeois February Revolution of 1848, the impetus of republican aspirations for freedom spread across Europe until July 1849.

The climate of resistance to the Restoration, known as the ‘Vormärz’, reached Saxony in the states of the German Confederation and manifested itself in the Dresden May Uprising of 1849.

There, Semper teamed up with his friend, the court conductor Richard Wagner and the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin to participate with great determination in the front line of an uprising against the absolutist rule of King Frederick Augustus II.

The Barricade as a Form of Resistance

While Wagner acted as an observation post for the attempted coup, Semper was tasked with preparing the barricade battle as commander and engineer. Bakunin established himself as the de facto military leader of the provisional government. The heterogeneous juxtaposition of the order of battle, in which a professional proletarian revolutionary joined forces with the representatives of the republican-minded bourgeoisie, was the special point of this historical constellation.

Bakunin began publishing inflammatory articles in the Dresdner Zeitung. In one of them, he coined the term ‘barricade weather’ to describe the historical moment of a turning point: when a revolutionary subject appears in collective action, realized in the sudden and spontaneous creation of an obstruction built from found objects.

This blockage stands in the way of the state forces of the existing order. As a former artillery officer, Bakunin understood the metaphorical power of barricade construction at the moment of its obsolescence as the dramatic sign of a mass uprising that continues to fill rulers with terror.

Conclusion

The present project takes this moment of civil courage and dissidence in the life of the celebrated mastermind among the master builders of his time as the starting point for examining the iconography of the barricade from the perspective of its architectural substance as a spatial and symbolic form. The selected documents span 400 years, from the earliest barricades of the late Renaissance in the 16th century to those of the student revolt in Paris in May 1968.

In our present moment—when property development advances a vision of the city as an exclusive enclave of luxury—architecture can benefit from self-relativization and humility. The barricade serves as a potent reminder that every built form begins as a pile of stone and timber and is destined to return to that state.

Wolfgang Scheppe
Venice, May 1, 2025