The shelter eats us back (inside the body, outside the blue-print-)

We thought shelter was where you lived. But it’s where you hide, where you mark, and where you’re devoured just slow enough to still remember your name.

There will be no unveiling. No ribbon, no ceremony, no one to clap. The first shelter after the fall wasn’t built, it was found. A hole, a shape, a wall that didn’t fall like the others.

I’m writing this by the last candle I have. The wax is pooling weirdly. I can hear someone breathing two floors below,´-or-maybe it’s wind. Hard to tell now.

Anyway. This isn’t going to be a clean story. There’s no beginning. But there was a moment, I remember, when I crawled beneath an overpass, and for the first time in months I felt something like safety. The concrete had vines growing inside its cracks. Something wild, something green. The city above was on fire. But under there, it was quiet. Like a womb.´-or-a grave.

I think that’s when I started to understand what shelter really is. It’s not what we thought. It’s not design. Not beauty. It’s not warm light and nice chairs and Pinterest boards. Shelter is something your body recognizes before your mind does. Like a jazz note in a dark room. One note. Not the melody, just the breath before it.

Shelter, in the end, isn’t visual. It’s tactile. A breath, a texture, a shift in temperature. I remember reading Juhani Pallasmaa talking about the body as the real architectural instrument. That we live first through skin, not sight. I didn’t understand it then. Now, I do. You don’t see safety, you feel it in your shoulders, your pulse, your ankles.

After the fall, nothing was designed. We didn’t have time. You used what you found. Sometimes you bent metal. Sometimes you buried yourself. The ones who survived weren’t the ones with the best homes. They were the ones who could disappear.

I remember something I read once, maybe from an architect, maybe just someone trying to be one, something about how modern buildings were made for the eye. Glass, angles, skyline wars. But none of that helped. None of it kept us warm. None of it kept them out.

You learn quick: walls aren’t for beauty. They’re for teeth. I used to think the house was the final refuge, until I saw what they meant in films like Lost Highway. There’s that moment, early on, where the man receives a videotape. Nothing but static shots of his own house. Just the outside. Still. Watching. And somehow, that’s worse than a gun.

The house in that film wasn’t a set, it was a real home, designed by Lloyd Wright, son of Frank Lloyd Wright. A pristine, modernist Los Angeles dwelling, all clean planes and geometric order. But under Lynch’s lens, it becomes something else entirely, a haunted mask. He doesn’t use architecture as backdrop. He dreams it into being.

That Lynchian space, haunted, recursive, dream-stained, it’s not just cinema. It’s how space really works when the world breaks. The paranoias we used to joke about became physical. Even Rem Koolhaas, in his more lucid essays, called modern architecture "a machine for paranoia." Now every home is just that. A trap with a door.

For Lynch, space is never neutral. Rooms breathe. Hallways withhold. A doorway can loop time. That house in Lost Highway becomes the first crime: too smooth, too perfect, too quiet. The crime isn’t what happens in the house, it’s the fact that the house exists at all.

Now, here, after the collapse, I understand that. Our houses always lied to us. About safety. About time. About ourselves. And here, now, it’s the same. These walls remember what you did to stay alive. They trap sound. And breath. And blood.

Supermarkets didn’t go empty. That’s not how it happened. They just… stopped. One morning, the trucks didn’t come. No warning. Just silence and shelves with the same three cans over and over again. And the lights still worked for a while, which made it worse. You could see every barcode. Every bright label trying to lie to you. And then someone smashed the freezer door with a fire extinguisher and it all rotted anyway.

Later, someone told me, maybe around a fire, maybe I imagined it, that every tomato ever ate in Europe needed phosphate from Jordan. I laughed. I told them to shut up. But I checked an old article once, back when I still had signal. It was true. It came from the desert. Shipped, traded, timed like a ballet.

It’s insane, isn’t it? Someone bites into a tomato in Paris and it needed a mine near Karak to exist. And a boat. And a port. And a currency. And fuel. And peace. Break one link, and that tomato disappears. That whole dinner disappears. That world disappears.

Ted Kaczynski, and yeah, I know what he did, said something about that. That the more complex a system becomes, the easier it is to break it. We called it globalization. He called it a trap. I think now it was both.

It wasn’t just food. Lithium, cobalt, corn, rice, everything was stitched together in a way we thought was efficient. It wasn’t. It was fragile. Beautiful, sure. Like a spider web. But the wind came.

And when it came, the cities turned first. They were never really cities. Just big mouths. They swallowed and swallowed and when nothing came in, they started chewing on themselves.

We used to say cities were designed. But they weren’t. They were fed. The architecture of growth, the high-rise, the mirrored atrium, the masterplan, wasn’t built to last. It was built to lure. And when the systems failed, those same geometries became mazes. Dead ends. Dead mouths.

Somewhere in the rubble, you could still find the old slogans like "form follows -function-"´-or-"the house is a machine for living". But the machines stopped working. The -function-s inverted.

People ate rats. Then pets. Then each other. I heard about a man who boiled his son’s foot. He said it was the cleanest part.

I don’t know if it was real. But I believed it. That’s what matters now, what you believe before the fire comes.

It was asphalt that betrayed us first!

Not the bombs. Not the viruses. Not even the hunger. It was the ground. We’d covered everything with black skin, thinking it made us fast. Thinking it meant we’d won. But when the trucks stopped and the rain came, the asphalt turned against us. It burned in the day. It flooded at night. Nothing grew. You could lie down on a parking lot in July and feel your kidneys boil.

All that modernist clarity, the utopia of the grid, the gospel of concrete, it turned out to be hostile. The Bauhaus, once a dream of rational beauty, became something else entirely. The grid didn’t liberate us. It boxed us in. It became a trench. A heat-sink. A map of dehydration and helplessness. You could draw our downfall with a straightedge.

We used to think of cities as alive. But they weren’t. They were organisms that could only digest. Nothing could grow in their stomachs. No food. No memory. Just concrete, piss, and code.

The rich tried to wait it out in their gated communities. Glass and steel, with perimeter sensors and -backup- power. I remember watching the fences get higher. At first, it was to keep out the poor. Then it was to keep out the others. Then it was just to keep the screaming out.

But they didn’t last. You can’t algorithm your way through starvation. The guards stopped showing up. The sprinkler systems failed. The lawns died first, thank God, and then the pets.

Eventually the gates stayed closed, not out of security, but out of shame.
That was when something old came back. Not just hunger. Not just fear. Something older. Something with bones. People started grouping by blood again. Not ideology. Not preference. Just closeness. Shared history. Shared debt. Someone you trusted to hold the knife when you slept.

Governments tried to send drones, protocols, PDFs! Nothing landed. The ministries turned into shelters, then into tombs. Power shifted to the people with tools, with fire, with cousins.

We weren’t citizens anymore. We were tribes again. It was faster. It worked. You knew who would die for you, and who wouldn’t. And shelter changed with that. Doors got thicker. Rooms got rounder.

Fire moved to the center again. And the buildings that survived, the real ones, weren’t the tall ones. They were the hidden ones. Semi-dug, earth-wrapped, smoke-vented. You could tell a good shelter by how invisible it was. By how bad it smelled. That meant it was working.

And yes. There was cannibalism. You don’t need me to lie to you. It wasn’t everywhere. But it came. And not in the way the stories told it, not with madness. With calculation. With ritual. With apology. And the architecture reflected that too. The homes that still had mirrors took them down.

There was this neighborhood up on a hill, all white villas with driveways wide enough for dancing. I passed it once, weeks after things had broken. The cars were gone. The hedges were on fire. Someone had spray-painted the word hunger across five walls in a row, like they were trying to warn whoever still had eyes.

One house had metal bars welded to the inside of the windows. You could tell they’d done it in a hurry, crooked, sloppy welds. Protection, not prestige. That’s what those gates were now. Not a status symbol. Just a thin apology to the people outside.

I stayed there one night. Broke into a smart home with solar panels and a voice assistant that kept saying “I didn’t catch that.” I sat in the kitchen where someone once hosted wine tastings and tried to boil moss in a copper pot. There was a painting on the wall of a man eating grapes. I stared at it for a long time.

That’s when I started thinking about asphalt. All those giant paved surfaces. Supermarket lots. Parking garages. Dead malls. We poured it over soil like it was useless. But soil remembers. It needed breath. And we suffocated it. So when the rains came back, they came harder, the water just ran off, hot and wild, dragging trash and oil and bone with it. No food grew. Nothing could. The earth was sealed shut.

And when the food didn’t come, the hunger got organized. First in lines. Then in threats. Then in recipes. The stories of cannibalism weren’t urban legends. They were urban consequences. Kitchens turned into abattoirs. Dining rooms into butcheries. I saw it once. I won’t write about it. But I can tell you this: design doesn’t survive that kind of hunger. It curdles.

The idea of a “home” changed. It wasn’t yours unless you could defend it. And even then, it was only yours until someone hungrier showed up. The tribal thing wasn’t an idea. It was gravity. People clumped together by blood, by accident, by hate, by memory. Whatever held. Constitutions stopped mattering. Cousins mattered. Revenge mattered. Trust became something you could lose in one meal.

I saw people build fences out of broken furniture. Saw families ---sleep--- in circles, feet to the fire, knives pointing out. No walls. Just awareness. That was the architecture

Not designed. Assembled. Not drawn. Improvised. Not explained. Felt. Maybe there’s a name for it. Maybe this is where the theory ends and the folklore begins. But if there were architecture schools still breathing, I imagine they’d teach it now: not the golden ratio, but how to build a windbreak in twelve minutes. Not Vitruvian ideals. Just a geometry of blood.

We didn’t need architects. We needed people who could smell danger in the wind. Someone who knew how to boil bark without poisoning the baby. Someone who could dig a trench fast. Someone who knew which -dir-ection to piss so the scent didn’t travel.

The ones who had studied form and space and parametric shells? They were gone. Not because they were useless. But because they were slow!

The cities didn’t fall like towers. They froze. They calcified. Grids turned into bones. You could walk down a street that once pulsed with traffic and not hear anything but your own footsteps, echoing off the glass of banks no one could open anymore. Even the wind seemed embarrassed to pass through.

Brutalism held. Not because it was better. But because it was heavy. That was the new rule: things that lasted were things that could not be moved. There was a library in a near town that survived only because someone barricaded it with vending machines. Inside, the books were untouched. Useless, mostly. Except the ones with diagrams.

There were fragments of Palladio in there. Some translated bits of Vitruvius, probably fake. But even fakes can guide you when your fingers are raw. We didn’t care if they were real. We cared if they made sense. A roof pitch, a stone arch, a soil wall detail. The sacred became whatever worked.

I found one once, a textbook on vernacular architecture. Adobe walls, pit houses, smoke holes, that sort of thing. I stared at a cross-section of a Mongolian yurt for two hours. It felt like a secret,´-or-a prayer.

Elsewhere, people built shrines out of trash. Icons of meat and wire. Rituals formed. Before entering a shelter, you had to spit on your left boot. I don’t know why. Maybe no one knew. That’s what culture is now repetition that no one questions because it might be the thing that keeps you breathing.

A friend of mine,´-or-maybe just someone who didn’t kill me, carved symbols into the ceiling of his shelter. Said it helped the roof stay up. Said his grandmother used to do the same with her bread dough. He mixed crushed bones into the mud for better insulation. Said it was warmer that way.

I started marking my own walls. I used whatever I had, charcoal, old lipstick, a fragment of rusted iron. Not for art. Just to see change. Just to measure time. Architecture became memory scratched into surfaces. A way to stay inside the body. A way not to vanish. I remembered a scene from The Holy Mountain, the one with the architect, a holy fool maybe,´-or-maybe the only sane one, who proudly presents a new kind of home: graves. Beautiful ones. Air-conditioned. Lined with velvet. A place to rest eternally. He wasn’t being ironic. He was being honest. In the world that film imagined, and maybe it wasn’t imagining, the grave was the final house. Not a metaphor. A literal offer.

I think about that sometimes. When I dig shallow pits,´-or-curl under broken beams. I think: maybe he was right. Maybe we’ve been building toward the grave this whole time.

And maybe memory was the last architecture. Like in that film: La Jetée. A ruined future, where survival meant returning to a single image burned into the past. We all had our own still frame: A face, a fire, a wall.

And then there was the girl!

I saw her once in a collapsed mosque. She was kneeling by the edge of what used to be a mihrab, holding a bowl full of ash. Not like a priest. Just… like someone with a task. She dipped her fingers in and smeared the wall in silence. No symbols. Just her hand, open. A -print-. Then another. Then another.

When she noticed me watching, she didn’t run. She looked at me like I should already know why she was doing it.

It was a ritual without explanation.
Memory without archive.
Gesture without audience.

She seemed like the embodiment of what architecture becomes when everything else collapses: a human being using her own hand, her own ash, to mark a wall and say: I existed. I touched this. I was here.

She left before I did. I stayed and touched the -print-s after she was gone. They were still warm.
Not concrete. Not steel. Not renderings.

A wall. A mark. A moment. A body inside a body.

Something that eats you back. But leaves you just enough space to survive the night.



Footnote:
For further reading, see:
K.T. Morrow, “Feral Zoning and Cannibal-Resilient Urbanism: Towards a Theory of Shelter Necrosis in Post-Anthropocene Settlements,” Journal of Collapse-Oriented Design, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 9–37. (Now out of -print-. The editor reportedly ate the last reviewer.)





Mohammad Abdel Qader Alfar

Rate the article
Bad	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	Very good
Result : 100%							Participated in the vote : 1