Conference: Displacement & Domesticity since 1945 // Brussels, Belgium [2019]

Publication: ‘Living Within the Absurd: Albert Camus and Social Estrangement,’ in Alessandra Gola, Ashika Singh and Anamica Singh (eds.), Displacement & Domesticity since 1945: Refugees, Migrants and Expats Making Homes, Working Paper Series, Leuven: KU Leuven, (Brussels: 2020) pp. 267-274

Project Description

Philosopher and Nobel Prize winner Albert Camus presents writings that are biographical descriptions of domestic and urban space that provide a stage on which characters become exiled from society which surrounds them. Emblematic of an absurd incongruence between life and the world, his writings portray an abstraction of architecture in vast African cityscapes. An analysis of displacement present in Camus’s writings, this research and subsequent conference presentation, interrogates episodic architectural instances as described through Camus himself. Inspired by Albert Memmi’s work on post-colonial theory, and Esra Akcan's melancholy estrangement, this investigation will deepen relationships between humans and their domestic space. Living in a displaced world, Camus abstracts himself, and subsequently the characters in his novels, from the reality of these environments. 

Rachel Ghindea and Matthew Teismann of MKC Architects developed this research into Albert Camus and domesticity between 2018-2019, and presented the work at an EAHN conference in Belgium in late March 2019, titled Displacement and Domesticity. As national leaders in student housing, this conference was an opportunity for MKC to showcase two key themes of students living away from home: Displacement & Domesticity. Displacement connotes a sense of being uprooted. When people are displaced, it involves instability and invokes strong feelings of unfamiliarity, even homelessness. Domesticity, in contrast, implies certain stability and familiarity; a rootedness or sense of being grounded. Applied to the building and adaption of architecture, domesticity refers to the material and spatial practices that are considered indicative of the makings of a home.

Returning home from the holidays on January 4th, 1960, Albert Camus was killed when his car crashed into a tree. Found in the mud at the accident site was an incomplete manuscript of his latest book, Le Premier homme [The First Man], which, like his earlier novels, is an semi-autobiographical account of his life. An Algerian born Frenchman, Camus was conflicted between his ethnicity and perceived home, often describing a complex relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. Emblematic of an absurd incongruence between life and the world, his writings portray an abstraction of architecture. Camus’s works provide an illustrative insight into the post-WWII colonial rubric. As Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism (1994) indicates, “Camus’s narratives of resistance and existential confrontation, which had once seemed to be about withstanding or opposing both mortality and Nazism, can now be read as part of the debate about culture and imperialism”

An analysis of societal displacement present in Camus’s writings - in particular La Peste [The Plague], L'Étranger [The Stranger], and Le Premier Homme [The First Man], this paper analyzes episodic architectural instances through the lens of Camus’s notion of home. What can the analysis of a particular author tell us about the relationship between literature, colonialism, and architectural spaces of domesticity? How does Camus’s philosophy of the Absurd impact an idiosyncratic narrative and its memory? Most importantly, how does one’s sense of home affect the way they cognize and abstract the reality around them?

Although a self-denied existentialist, Camus’s philosophy posits an indubitable need for a life’s meaning, albeit inconsistent with the world as we know it. According to biographer Robert Zeretsky (2013), an Absurd life “tears us from our everyday subjective experiences and forces us to assume an external viewpoint - a perspective that rattles the conceits and assumptions we hold about our lives” (p. 11). Evident in the writing of Camus, the result is a need for abstraction. Abstraction is one’s way of coping with Absurd inconsistencies between life and the world in which one lives. As such, in his novels Camus creates an abstracted, nondescript architectural framework detached from this world.

Camus’s reluctance to accept his surroundings motivates him to fill his novels with nondescript architecture. As Memmi postulates, “[t]o live without anguish, one must live in detachment from oneself and the world - one must reconstruct the odors and sounds of one’s childhood” (Memmi, 1965, p. 26) A colonizer who tries to reject association with one side or another “either no longer recognizes the colonized, or he no longer recognizes himself.” Forced to remain in a state of absurdity, this person loses contact with reality and “begins to construct myths” (Memmi, 1965, p. 32]. Perhaps this is why we see descriptions of architecture that are devoid of materiality or form. Instead Camus chooses to describe the sounds, smells, and sights that make up an experience in a space. A result of his detachment from his Algerian surroundings, architectural experiences are abstracted, reduced primarily to an emotional response a space elicits. Said (1994) suggests that Camus and characters in his novels “blocked off” ambitions of France to “possess the territory” of Algeria ( pp. 176, 178) Camus  abstracted his surroundings - stripping them of signification - resulting in ethereal experiences as opposed to tangible reality - such as style, ornamentation, and detailing.

Growing up Camus believed that an Algerian-born Frenchman could live peacefully in Algeria. Later in life, following the Algerian Revolution, Camus refused to admit that not only was he not welcome, his ideology that the pied noirs could call Algeria ‘home’ was not shared by others - neither French nor Algerians. What Camus had once thought of his home was no longer. It is likely that the overwhelming disagreement with Camus’s stance may have shocked him - coming to the self-realization that he may have never been home in Algeria all along. Unwilling or unable to accept his position as a colonizer, Camus, and the characters of his novels, are forced to construct myths to combat the Absurd.

Detached from his world and unwilling to accept his reality, Camus’s status as a colonizer and colonized, stripped him of all notions of domesticity and home. Unsure of his true nationality, Camus is forced to navigate between a society for which he was promised a sentiment of home, and a society whose structure he rejects. As such, he is left in the abstract, caught somewhere between.

Likewise, his architecture is also unidentifiable. Light and sound affect his characters through raw, visceral circumstances, however, the architecture itself remains ubiquitous. Its location is anywhere, its style unidentifiable. His characters, a biographical parallel of Camus, are likewise exiled where abstraction is a necessity. Instances of nondescript architecture in his novels, therefore, result from a need to create myths in an Absurd reality.

A NON-DESCRIPT ARCHITECTURE

Showing an early interest in art and architecture, Camus would often go for walks through the city to study its forms and structure in light and shadow. His walks through Oran and Algiers left lasting impressions on a young Camus. On his first trip to Marseilles he visited the architecture of Le Corbusier. Camus’s initial impressions were that Corbusier’s modern architecture was befitting of the working-class. Surprisingly, he suggested architecture a more pragmatic art than literature or philosophy, insofar as it was made substantial and had consequences. Camus identifies with modernist principles, such as an abandonment of superfluous ornamentation, as opposed to the ostentatious architecture of the bourgeoisie. Camus’s novels contain detailed events that occur in particular architectural spaces. Despite this, Camus’s architecture is nondescript. Not without detail, it is plain and abstracted - devoid of ornate detailing or stylistic idiosyncrasies.