Guest Lecture by Ian Hodder
Architecture as an Entangled Flow: the 9000-year-old example of Catalhöyük
Rather than being stable fixed entities, the houses in the Neolithic settlement at Catalhöyük in what is now central Turkey were a struggle between humans and materials.
The houses were produced by the flows of different types of energy that were entangled in each other leading to fissures and contradictions. Houses were not things but ever-
changing flows, backward and forward looking and dependent on a wide range of entangled conditions, themselves continually changing. The bricks and walls played an active role alongside humans, animals and plants in producing ‘houseness’. Humans too were caught up in this ‘houseness’ entrapped into ways of life that led to social change and the domestication of plants and animals. In this view architecture played a central and active role in producing new forms of human existence.