At first, I thought it was snow, a moonlit landscape. The photograph was low-resolution and dimly lit — it took me a split second to notice the towel hanging from a peg in the foreground. Suddenly, my vision adjusted, and scale rearranged itself: I was looking at a bathroom filled two-thirds to the ceiling with concrete, broken glass giving its surface a fragmentary gleam. The next image was clearer, but equally surreal: a yellow bottle cap flush with another concrete surface like a hockey puck on ice, a red electric kettle visible from midpoint up, a dark hole where the mouth of a kitchen sink had escaped a cement gag. These were rare images of rooms from the seven known cases of “concrete sealing” carried out by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) between January 2015 and March 2017. A form of collective punishment for the families of alleged Hamas collaborators, concrete sealing entails pumping rooms or whole buildings full of cement to render them uninhabitable. The IDF far more routinely bulldozes houses as a punitive measure (over 3,000 houses were destroyed in this way during the Second Intifada between 2000 and 2005 alone, let alone since October 7), but it was these images that stuck with me as a powerful metonym for systemic oppression.

Overwhelmed by the news of death and suffering emerging from Palestine since the 2023 Israeli invasion of Gaza, my mind keeps returning to these photographs. Perhaps it’s that they depict the interment of domestic life more poignantly than any aerial images of destruction ever could. They convey the meaning of the death of a home, and that of all the private meaning contained within it.

Since the early 2000s, this kind of architectural violence has been termed domicide, meaning the destruction of a home with the intention of making it uninhabitable. Contemporary writing on domicide is often highly specific, focusing on one particular instance and arguing for the classification of these kinds of attacks as crimes against humanity. Such pieces usually cite J. Douglas Porteous and Sandra E. Smith’s seminal 2001 book, Domicide: The Global Destruction of Home, as the original source of the term. While this is true in the sense of a clear, contemporary definition of the word, its use can be dated back to the late 1800s, when authors employed it alongside similar terms like “homicide,” “patricide,” and “matricide.” As a tactic in warfare, displacement, and the willful erasure of peoples, however, it extends back into the furthest reaches of human history. As long as there has been a sense of “home,” there has been a form of domicide.

Indeed, the past is rife with what Porteus and Smith categorize as “everyday” and “extreme” examples of domicide — we can point easily to the statistics that litter the historical record and follow closely in the wake of mass atrocities. There are the 40,600 Rohingya structures demolished in Myanmar between 2017 and 2019; the close to 30 percent of Syrian homes that have been destroyed since 2011; the 138,000 Iraqi houses left in ruins after the 2014 war against ISIS; the more than 150,000 buildings damaged in Ukraine since the latest Russian invasion; and the staggering 60 percent of buildings turned to rubble in Gaza (with Northern regions seeing up to 83 percent) since October 2023 — but domicide can only partially be understood by enumerating levels of destruction. Buried within this specificity, there is a deeply human, universal fear: that home — whether a building, a community, a neighborhood, or a geography — might be a place to which we cannot always return.

The urgency of calls to classify domicide as a crime against humanity has, however, kept the surrounding debate highly specific — responding primarily to contemporary concerns around ongoing conflicts without much exploration of past examples. This runs the risk of enshrining domicide, both in international law and the general consciousness, as a narrowly defined act that fails to incorporate the many meanings of home. But history offers a wider perspective and demands more careful consideration if domicide is to be curtailed in the future.

Sometime around 2200 BCE, the Ness of Brogdar in the Scottish Orkney Islands was deliberately decommissioned. This grand complex, with walls more than 15-feet thick, had been in use by a Neolithic tribe for more than a thousand years. With the intention of sealing it off for generations to come, an unknown group feasted on 400 cattle and placed their skulls around the perimeter of the building. They then broke down the walls, filled the complex in with rubble and midden, and placed precious items — what archeologists call terminal deposits — such as a carved whale bone, the wing of a white-tailed sea eagle, and the skeleton of a human infant at significant structural points like doorways and hearths. The whole thing was covered in a mound of earth and left untouched until the modern day. Speculation as to why the Ness was interred in this way abounds — perhaps the community was moving away, had changed their religion, or had been subjugated by a neighboring tribe who sought to symbolically end their opponent’s cultural heritage. What we do know is that such rituals, called building closures, were common in cultures stretching from Syria to Scotland as early as 7000 BCE.

The reasons and methods for such closures most likely differed from group to group, but the symbolic meaning of burning or burying a perfectly habitable structure seems to have remained the same: making physically manifest what the archeologist Julia Schönicke terms “people-place disentanglement.” The recurrence of terminal deposits signals another shared human tendency: to link the death of a building with the death of a living being, imbuing the structure with something like life and therefore mortality. These acts of domicide were clearly ritualistic procedures that carried symbolic weight for entire communities. So much so that most mounds resulting from building closures are in pristine condition — some sense of the funereal must have kept subsequent generations from building on top of them. Ironically, this particular form of domicide thus  preserved the sites for posterity, but in a particular moment in the building’s life: that of its ritual destruction.

The symbolism of these ancient rites similarly remains embedded in, and understandable to, the modern psyche, with domicide lying at the foundation of our relationship to domestic architecture. The destruction of home, whether during wear or peace, thus means so much more than just physical destruction; it is the murder of the emotions, memories, and histories that a structures contains, and persists as a violent means of “people-place disentanglement.”

Over the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries, European settler colonialists moved westward across America toward the Pacific Coast, killing and forcibly removing the Indigenous peoples they encountered along the way. Many of these tribes were nomadic, with no permanent structures to demolish. Instead, their home was the vastness of the land itself. And so, the settlers went to work: In the space of just 20 years, from 1870 to 1890, the population of the American bison — a key part of Native American culture and diet on the Great Plains — dropped from 8 million to a mere 500; a single generation of homesteaders cleared huge swathes of indigenous plants to make way for wheat fields; and the sacred Native American site of the Black Hills was seized and systematically pocked by the largest gold mine in the country.

The crime was both genocidal and environmental: the land was remade without traces of the cultures that had named it and for which the relationship between people and place was what constituted home. It is this capacity to make the familiar foreign that links domicide inextricably to solastalgia, the psychoanalytical term coined by Glenn Albrecht in 2005 to mean the nostalgia for a place that still exists, but no longer resembles itself. If domicide is an act of murder, solastalgia is the grief that ensues in its wake.

After the ethnic cleansing of Muslims by their Christian neighbors in the former nation of Yugoslavia from 1992 to 1995, the Dayton Accords were signed and survivors were granted the “right to return” to their homes. Yet both sides of the conflict continued to bomb houses where the reintegration of communities was being attempted. In effect, the very architecture of belonging had been irrevocably destroyed. Previously shared spaces were now starkly segregated — supposedly to hold a fragile peace, but really to further entrench ethnic divides. The genocidal desire to create a pure ethnoreligious “homeland” was scaled down to the level of individual buildings, allowing nationalists to claim that there had never been communal space to begin with. To make matters more complex, the international forces involved in reconstruction efforts focused on rebuilding sites of “national heritage,” rather than encouraging the reintegration of communities. According to Dr. Martin Coward, this was a major oversight, as “what makes a city is plurality — the record of people sharing a space over time.” The destruction of homes means the fracturing of that record, a violence reified in the country’s very architecture.

Even when reconstruction moves forward with the best of intentions, it often forgets  that cultural heritage is not simply enshrined in monumental architecture but lives also in the interwoven narratives and traditions shared by a community, and that the destruction of this social fabric is the destruction of that heritage. The rearranging of spatial relations during reconstruction efforts means the rearranging of social relations — and thus reconstruction can be a continuation of domicidal violence, echoing across times of peace.

The question of whose homeland is allowed to exist is at the heart of the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. Domicide, in this case, is a function of both the Russian-nationalist project and of military convenience — given the youth and inexperience of Russia’s army, bombing cities indiscriminately from the air is more strategic than a ground invasion on urban terrain. The result will be a landscape from which the traces of Ukrainian life and culture have been razed. And in that respect, Putin has already accomplished a major part of his goal, a checkmate on the continuity of Ukrainian identity. In the case of a Russian victory, Putin — who has claimed that the ninth-century kingdom of Rus, which had Kiev as its capital, justifies his invasions of Ukraine as a means to reinstate this ancient unity — will claim Ukraine as empty land on which to build an extension of the Russian national homeland, “reunifying” with an aesthetic homogeneity. And even if Ukraine maintains its sovereignty, any attempt at postwar reconstruction will have to reckon with the same cultural and social loss, the de-ukrainization of Ukraine. What rises in the place of rubbled cities like Irpin, Mariupol, and Kharkiv will necessarily replace any historic understanding of Ukraine with a new imaginary.

The issue of how to rebuild and whose vision to follow is already playing out in Kharkiv, where Foster + Partners has been working with city officials on a reconstruction plan. New apartment blocks will be constructed in residential areas, alongside what the mayor Igor Terekhov calls “a science park,” which has “everything — a platform for the development of startups, universities, housing, a green zone, a market — all the necessary infrastructure for a comfortable life and economic development.” This raises an entirely new set of complex considerations. Such neoliberal construction efforts mean the city will be adequately funded as it rebuilds essential infrastructure (Foster + Partners has pledged to work pro bono). But at what cost will these supposed postwar improvements be made? Which current residents will see their memories of home reflected back at them from a gleaming, Foster-designed edifice? It is hard to imagine communal grief and mourning will be given space in this vision of a “comfortable life and economic development.”

In the midst of an ongoing war, the victims have already been stripped of a key element for which they are fighting: their homeland. Indeed, listening to the throbbing of bombs from the shelters beneath their apartment complexes, Ukrainians are experiencing domicide collectively and in real time.

In Palestine, domicide has transformed the landscape over a prolonged period. Long before Israel’s most recent campaign of mass death and destruction, the Palestinian conception of home was not only under threat (as but one example, in 2021 Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich openly claimed “there is no such thing as a Palestinian people”) but was already in the process of being physically eroded through incremental acts. Legislation carried over from the 1948 British Defense (Emergency) Regulations and enacted as Israeli law allowed local Israeli authorities to seize Palestinian land, structures, and houses as punishment for illegal acts (in many cases before the accused Palestinian was tried or convicted). Property could be destroyed without warning, leaving families homeless and impoverished. Concrete blocks and massive mounds of dirt and refuse would appear overnight, redirecting, or completely restricting, the movement of the local population. Infrastructure could suddenly be crippled, cutting off resources to targeted areas. To say nothing of the illegal Israeli settlements erected strategically across occupied territory. In effect, as Weizman argues, the IDF’s architectural tactics transformed “Palestinian towns, villages and roads into an artifice where all natural and built features served military ends.” Domicide was extrapolated from the individual to the community, tearing the social, cultural, and familial fabric through the use of an “architecture of violence.”

This architecture of violence is precisely what will proliferate across Gaza and the West Bank when the time eventually comes to rebuild. Israeli entrepreneur Alex Daniel’s widely shared AI-generated “Israel Nova” cityscape perhaps encapsulates this full-spectrum domicide most clearly. Depicting a fantasy metropolis built on Gazan land, the image shows a developer’s dream of gleaming high-rises and rollercoasters looping across an artificial lake. A comment below Daniel’s post reads: “Right now they are clearing the ground.” Clearing the ground, not just of civilians, families, buildings, but of the broader meaning of home — the daily life that weaves its culture between architectural edifices. Whether the postwar reality is as blatantly fascist-cute as Daniel’s image or a more insidious, subtle form of violence, the idea of a Palestinian homeland is being murdered before the world’s eyes. In an intensification of the cases in ex-Yugoslavia and Ukraine, any “peace” that follows in Palestine will likely still contain acts of war: rebuilding spaces that have been intentionally emptied of their history and culture.

Even after the horrors of war, the violence of domicide hovers like a specter above the lands it has touched. While the loss of architecture both during and post-conflict is irrefutably less important than the loss of human life, domicide is the way that this violence is inscribed into space — an essential physical record of the narrative of war. History is written by the victors, but it is also, often, rebuilt by them — the bricks and concrete that form national façades erase just as much as they celebrate. A house can be rebuilt. A home cannot. Like the building closures of our ancient counterparts, modern domicide seeks to disentangle people and place, stripping geographies of meaning and recasting their populations as rootless exiles. This is the mobilization of architecture as a tool of war — construction perverted into destruction.

That the houses and rooms sealed by concrete in Palestine are the structures most likely to survive this wave of mass destruction, solidified as they are with the most permanent of building materials, is a horrific irony. They will, perhaps, remain as twisted memorials, destruction frozen in a single, permanent moment. Memorials to the demolition of architecture and to architecture as demolition. Memorials to a form of domicide in which the materials of construction are transmuted into existential threats, weapons for destroying the domestic space. Dotting the ruins of a Palestinian homeland, they will crystallize solastalgic grief by providing small reminders of what was there before: a shared vision of home.