In his 1868 street-fighting manual, Instructions for an Armed Uprising, the French revolutionary Auguste Blanqui sets out meticulous instructions for how to build a good barricade. Such defences, he wrote, must no longer be thrown together in “a confused and disorderly fashion”, but should be robustly composed of two sturdy rampart walls made of paving stones and plaster. All the aspiring revolutionary needed was a good supply of cobblestones and “a cart filled with sacks of plaster, plus wheelbarrows, handcarts, levers, picks, shovels, mattocks, hammers, cold chisels, trowels, buckets and troughs”. Blanqui advised that all of these things could be “requisitioned from the respective merchants”, whose addresses were handily listed in an accompanying directory.
The students at UCLA, who were peacefully occupying their campus in protest against Israel’s war on Gaza, might have wished for such supplies when they were attacked by a violent mob of vigilantes last week. Terrifying footage showed masked thugs beating their makeshift encampment with sticks and metal poles, dragging away steel fencing and plywood panels, and tearing apart their tents and gazebos, amid fireworks and clouds of bear spray. The hastily assembled camp stood no chance against the brute force of an organised gang intent on inflicting violence, terror and destruction.
As protesters across the world regroup to plot their next moves in the face of rising vigilante and police brutality, they might do well to pick up a copy of Protest Architecture, a new compendium of barricades, camps and “spatial tactics”, from 1830 to the present day. Published to coincide with an exhibition on the same topic at the MAK museum of applied arts in Vienna, co-produced with the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt, the book cuts a compelling cross-section through the last 200 years of resistance. It is a radical encyclopedia of tunnels and treehouses, lock-ons and laser pointers, ranging from 19th-century barricades to Hong Kong students’ street structures and Extinction Rebellion’s clever tensegrity towers, via tactics deployed in Burundi, Caracas and Tahrir Square.
Coming from a part of the world that is largely covered in forest, the book includes plenty of examples of protesters taking to the trees. One of the most startling silvan occupations began construction in 2012, in western Germany’s Hambach forest, in protest against the destruction of ancient woodland for the expansion of an opencast coalmine. The Hambach mine was already the biggest hole in Europe, and one of the continent’s largest sources of carbon. Its expansion would have cleared the last 10% of remaining forest, which had stood since the last ice age, and was home to a rare species of bat.
Over the years, protesters from around the world created an aerial tree village worthy of the Ewoks, featuring a network of wooden structures connected by bridges, nets, rope ladders and zip wires. The shelters ranged from ad-hoc cabins to substantial four-storey treehouses, some equipped with solar electricity, ovens and internet, arranged in self-sufficient neighbourhoods with names like Oaktown, Robin Wood and Endor. It took the police four attempts to evict residents of Beechtown, the highest encampment, which featured an octagonal treehouse 20 metres up in the air, and a crow’s nest lookout at 36 metres, poking up above the treetops. The 2018 eviction – justified on grounds of fire safety – was later ruled illegal, and the forest given protected status in 2020.
That same year, activists 40km away in Lützerath took a similar approach, in their efforts to halt the expansion of another opencast mine. With fewer trees available, a new form of “delaying architecture” had to be invented. The group realised that, for any evictions that take place above a height of 2.5 metres, the police had to call in specialist units of “climbing cops”, of which there were a limited number. So they set about erecting a network of “treehouses without trees”, constructing tall wooden tripods, bipods and monopods, connected by traversing wires, so that protesters could move around above the heads of the police. The planned exhibition also proved to be a useful delaying tactic.
The Deutsches Architekturmuseum had arranged a loan agreement to acquire one of the wooden structures for the show, causing an additional hold-up when the police attempted to demolish the camp. Surreal phone calls went back and forth between bamboozled police chiefs, mischievous museum curators and furious energy company bosses, discussing what to do with this newly minted “cultural asset”. It was eventually destroyed last year, along with the rest of the camp.
In more urban settings, where trees and diggable ground are less readily available, the book shows some ingenious responses. In the early 1990s, in an attempt to halt the construction of the M11 link road in east London, a group of squatters managed to occupy some of the homes on Claremont Road slated for demolition. They set about suspending an astonishing aerial web of netting between the rooftops, spanning the entire width of road, where they could dangle safely out of reach. The protesters also created an extensive tunnel system by boring holes through the walls of the terraced houses, and used the rubble to build bunkers, while the street was overlooked by a scaffolding lookout tower. It took 700 police, 200 bailiffs and 400 security guards five days to evict the encampment – the longest such eviction in postwar Europe at the time. In the end, the road went ahead, but the protest movement led to similar projects being shelved.
More recently, Hong Kong’s multileveled topography of roads, ramps and raised walkways proved to be fertile terrain for spatial interventions in 2014 and 2019, when two waves of protests against mainland China’s creeping control filled the streets. During the umbrella movement, student protesters barricaded highways with impromptu assortments of street railings, rubbish bins and shop-window mannequins, while construction workers used their scaffolding skills to erect sturdy bamboo frames within minutes, which were then extended over time, often shielded by canopies of umbrellas. Walls of messages and projection screens turned these spaces into outdoor cultural venues: places where free tutorials, yoga classes and open-air movie screenings all took place.
In the 2019 protests, increasingly agile tactics were developed to block roads at speed and hamper police progress, including the creation of what became known as “mini Stonehenges”. Activists covered the highways with grids of little arches made of three bricks: when struck by a wheel, the block on top would fall away from the wheel and land behind the two remaining bricks, acting as a buttress. “It’s much harder to clear than ordinary roadblocks made with traffic barriers,” one protester told the Guardian. “Good for slowing down the riot police when they come charging too,” said another. Elsewhere, these rows of brick henges were overlaid with networks of scaffolding poles, lashed together to form a fiendishly entangled obstacle course.
Easy to deploy but difficult to move is the ultimate aim of most protest architecture, and little meets the brief as elegantly as the tensegrity towers developed by Extinction Rebellion in recent years. A portmanteau of tension and integrity, the term was coined by the utopian engineer and futurist Buckminster Fuller, godfather of the geodesic dome, to refer to a structural system where elements acting in compression (such as bamboo or scaffolding poles) are held together by elements in tension (like rope or steel cables). The Skylon, that icon of the 1951 Festival of Britain, was one such structure, while artists have since developed the technique to create implausible, gravity-defying towers, erecting extendable latticeworks of poles that seemingly float in mid-air.
When Extinction Rebellion blockaded Rupert Murdoch’s Broxbourne print works in 2020, the use of tensegrity towers made it almost impossible for police to dismantle the blockade safely. After 13 hours trying to remove them, the campaigners were still there, dangling from the top of their precarious-looking wiry structures. The next day’s papers had to be pulped. The structures’ beauty is that they can be premade, packed and transported in relatively compact form, and then speedily unfurled in all their cop-confusing glory.
“The police don’t know what to do with them,” activist Julian Maynard Smith told Dezeen at the time. “They look very flimsy. If you cut a cable, the whole thing falls apart, but they are strong enough to climb. That was the idea – we could construct them off-site, run with them, and plonk them up in a minute. The police are now quick to stop protest structures going up so it’s a question of surprise!”
It might not be wise to risk such precarious rigging against the thuggish mobs of recent days, who would no doubt be willing to wield wire cutters with impunity. But the engineering ingenuity and quick-witted tactics documented in this compendium provide much inspiration for alternative forms of resistance, which could become increasingly necessary.