Unsettlements: An Interview with Ian Hodder on Çatalhöyuk and the Beginnings of Domesticity

Architecture has long drawn insight from those outside its traditional boundaries—anthropologists, historians, philosophers—and Ian Hodder stands as one of the most transformative of those “outsiders.” His decades-long excavation at Çatalhöyük, a 9,000-year-old settlement in central Anatolia, has radically reframed how we understand the origins of domestic space, collective life, and built form. What makes Hodder’s work so compelling for architects is not just what it reveals about the past, but how it unsettles the very categories we use to think about architecture: house, plan, labor, domesticity. At Çatalhöyük, the house is not just a dwelling—it is simultaneously a tomb, a temple, a workshop, and a living being, constantly repaired and replastered. It resists separation between subject and object, language and drawing, activities and materials, production and reproduction. This entanglement forces us to rethink what architecture is and where domesticity truly began.