Vault houses can be defined as long and narrow communal dwellings covered by a single arch which serves as both roof and wall. As a building type, the vault house has been practised across radically different contexts and periods — from the marshlands of southern Iraq to the suburbs of Silicon Valley, from wartime military camps to the radical architecture collectives of 1960s Brazil. In each case it has carried a consistent formal logic: structural economy, non-hierarchical interior space, and resistance to the division between enclosure and structure. This article argues that this formal logic is also a political one — that the vault house is not merely a recurring type but an archetype, a deep structure through which architecture has repeatedly expressed resistance, economy, and sociopolitical critique.
This article examines four instances of this typology: the sarifa of the Ahwari people of Iraq, the Quonset hut developed by the United States military during the Second World War, Casa Abóbada produced by the Brazilian collective Arquitetura Nova, and a design proposal that returns the vault house to Silicon Valley — carving its form out of the suburban landscape to make visible the boundaries and collective spaces that the current typological design suppresses. Through these four cases, it investigates what it means to call an archetype political.
Vault houses can be defined as long and narrow communal dwellings covered by a single arch which serves as both roof and wall. As a building type, the vault house has been practised across radically different contexts and periods — from the marshlands of southern Iraq to the suburbs of Silicon Valley, from wartime military camps to the radical architecture collectives of 1960s Brazil. In each case it has carried a consistent formal logic: structural economy, non-hierarchical interior space, and resistance to the division between enclosure and structure. This article argues that this formal logic is also a political one — that the vault house is not merely a recurring type but an archetype, a deep structure through which architecture has repeatedly expressed resistance, economy, and sociopolitical critique.
This article examines four instances of this typology: the sarifa of the Ahwari people of Iraq, the Quonset hut developed by the United States military during the Second World War, Casa Abóbada produced by the Brazilian collective Arquitetura Nova, and a design proposal that returns the vault house to Silicon Valley — carving its form out of the suburban landscape to make visible the boundaries and collective spaces that the current typological design suppresses. Through these four cases, it investigates what it means to call an archetype political.