Architecture as a Weapon: The Dark Side of Design

When Buildings Become Battlefields

Architecture isn’t just about aesthetics or functionality it’s about power. Some buildings are designed to uplift, inspire, and serve communities. Others? They control, oppress, and intimidate. From fortified government buildings to segregated city planning, architecture has been weaponized for centuries. The question is: Are we even aware of how space is used against us?

Urban design isn’t always innocent. Walls aren’t just for protection sometimes, they’re meant to divide. Streets aren’t always about access, sometimes they’re designed for surveillance. And some structures are built not for the people but to keep them out. Welcome to the dark side of architecture.

Fortresses of Power: When Buildings Intimidate

Some buildings exist to make you feel small. Cold, imposing, inaccessible these are the hallmarks of architecture used as a tool of dominance.

1. Government Palaces & Financial Headquarters

Ever noticed how government buildings, banks, and corporate towers often look like fortresses? That’s not an accident.

• Brutalist government buildings (think Boston City Hall or the J. Edgar Hoover Building) were designed to look impenetrable because they are. These structures communicate power, control, and inaccessibility (Till, 2009).

• Financial districts are often built with hostile urbanism glass towers with no seating, no public gathering spots, and no warmth. It’s architecture designed for exclusion, not inclusion.

2. Dictatorship Design: Buildings That Oppress

Authoritarian regimes love using architecture as a tool of propaganda and control.

• Nazi Germany’s architecture under Albert Speer aimed to project a sense of eternal dominance massive columns, exaggerated scale, and stone structures meant to last for a thousand years (Schneider, 1998).

• North Korea’s Ryugyong Hotel a 105-story, never-completed skyscraper looms over Pyongyang like a monument to unfulfilled power and fear.

Figure1

When a building is too big, too cold, too disconnected from human scale, it isn’t just bad design it’s a message.

Urban Warfare: When Cities Are Designed to Control

It’s not just buildings entire cities are built to manipulate and suppress.

1. The Haussmann Effect: Designing Cities to Prevent Revolt

In the 19th century, Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann redesigned Paris not for beauty, but for control. They demolished medieval alleyways and built wide boulevards, making it nearly impossible to build barricades. Protests? Easily crushed. Architecture as crowd control (Harvey, 2006).

2. Segregation by Design

Some urban layouts don’t just separate neighbourhoods they enforce social and racial divisions.

• Apartheid-era South Africa used urban planning to physically separate Black communities from white ones wide highways and buffer zones acted as barriers (Massey & Denton, 1993).

Figure2

• Robert Moses’ highway projects in New York were designed to cut off poor communities, making access to wealthier areas difficult (Caro, 1974).

Figure3

Architecture doesn’t just shape cities it shapes who gets to move, live, and thrive within them.

Hostile Architecture: When Cities Turn Against Their Own People

Hostile architecture is everywhere. It’s subtle, it’s deliberate, and it’s designed to make certain people feel unwelcome.

1. Anti-Homeless Design

• Metal spikes outside buildings to prevent rough sleeping.

• Benches with armrests in the middle so no one can lie down.

• Bus stops with slanted seats so you can’t sit for long.

These aren’t accidents. They’re choices made to push unwanted people out of public spaces (Petty, 2016).

Figure4

2. Privately Owned Public Spaces (POPS)

Ever walked into a public plaza that somehow felt… off? That’s because it’s probably not actually public.

• London’s Paternoster Square looks open, but it’s private property, meaning security can evict protesters at will.

• Many corporate plazas exist only for aesthetics, not for the public.

If you can be removed from a space for existing in it, was it ever really public to begin with?

The Future: Reclaiming Architecture

Not all architecture is designed to control. Some spaces fight back.

Figure5

1. Protest Architecture

• The Berlin Wall (before it fell) became a massive canvas for rebellion street art, slogans, and defiance turned a symbol of oppression into one of resistance.

• Tahrir Square in Egypt was transformed during the Arab Spring a place of gathering, debate, and revolution.

2. Cities Designed for People, Not Power

Architects and urban planners are rethinking city spaces to make them inclusive, human-centred, and democratic:

• Participatory design movements involve communities in shaping their own neighbourhoods.

• Walkable, mixed-use cities encourage connection, not isolation.

• Reclaiming streets for pedestrians (like Barcelona’s Superblocks) prioritizes people over cars.

The question isn’t just how architecture is used against us it’s how we take it back.

Is Your City Working for You or Against You?

Architecture is never neutral. Every structure, every street, every plaza is designed with intention. Some uplift, others control. Some welcome, others exclude.

The next time you walk through your city, ask yourself: Is this space for me? Or was it designed to keep me in my place?

References:

·        Caro, R. (1974). The power broker: Robert Moses and the fall of New York. Knopf.

• Harvey, D. (2006). Paris, capital of modernity. Routledge.

• Massey, D. S., & Denton, N. A. (1993). American apartheid: Segregation and the making of the underclass. Harvard University Press.

• Petty, J. (2016). The London spikes controversy: Homelessness, urban securitization, and the question of ethics. Urban Studies, 53(5), 1016–1032.

• Schneider, P. (1998). Totalitarian architecture of the Third Reich. MIT Press.

• Till, J. (2009). Architecture depends. MIT Press.

• Articles from Dezeen, ArchDaily, and The Guardian on hostile architecture and urban control.

  
  

Image References:

o  Figure1: Ryugyong Hotel. [Photograph]. Pinterest. https://i.pinimg.com/736x/49/91/8b/49918b8d42b4e9bede42b047bb710881.jpg.

o  Figure2: What Was Apartheid in South Africa?. [Photograph]. Pinterest. https://i.pinimg.com/736x/b6/36/f5/b636f5d118ae92bcf58881dae262b8c4.jpg.

o Figure3: Robert Moses’ highway projects in New York. [Photograph]. Pinterest. https://i.pinimg.com/736x/24/11/99/24119986c53d8e234c7a1551a39a8e03.jpg

o Figure4:  London’s Paternoster Square. [Photograph]. Pinterest. https://i.pinimg.com/736x/8c/7b/ba/8c7bba25da1ee7bd1e79b6a418879b1a.jpg.

o Figure5:  The Berlin Wall. [Photograph]. Pinterest. https://i.pinimg.com/736x/16/c3/76/16c3766f58920d6367aff23092b0eed3.jpg.