In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

168 CHAPTER 7 The End of Architecture Who is in the small hut? A bhikkhu is in the small hut, with desire gone, with well concentrated mind. Thus know, Friend, your small hut was not made in vain.1 Announcing the end of architecture, as well as the body as we know it, the idea of the “last hut” serves as an arrival at the edge of civilization . This is the culmination of an evolutionary project in which home, from a socialized, ritualized space, has been reconceptualized as a last hut, the ascetic body made homologous to a structure, and finally, the body-hut positioned for a cataclysmic transformation. Comparable to attaining a nonconditioned mode of existence, or what is “unoriginated ” and “unmade,” the destruction of the body-hut becomes a singleminded pursuit of the ascetic, but for which the whole Buddhist edifice of codes, practices, and doctrines has been erected. The image of the final hut becomes a powerful metaphor and didactic tool in articulating the subtleties of the nonconditioned, and a lasting ideogram for approximating the ineffable destination of nirvāṇa. Despite being the emblem of asceticism, the last hut is not an affable project; it also exposes the contradictions and incongruities of the ascetic imagination. The end—the arrival at the nonconditioned state presenting itself as a theater of destruction—is not without some ambiguities . First, the final destruction announces a terminal point that resists or defies easy description, maintaining a semantically elusive term such as nirvāṇa and remaining an internal experience of the ascetic psyche. Furthermore, what appears to be the object of destruction is required as an ontological necessity in the whole process. Despite being nondescript and unremarkable, the hut was not made in vain; it was erected in order to achieve an overcoming. The first implies a representational challenge, and the second poses a conceptual perplexity. In this exegesis of asceticism, the hut—a cryptogram for the dwelling— was considered as the ontological fundament of asceticism. Even when THE END OF ARCHITECTURE169 the ascetic body is brought to the foreground of the final frontier, the narrative is related through the semantics of the hut. Extracting ourselves from the rigmarole of doctrinal texts, we discover a focused meditation on a perpetual human dilemma: the nature of dwelling. Tossing and turning between contraction and expansion, between rejection and elaboration, and between rootedness and sitelessness, the problem of the dwelling is not brought to a full resolution but left in a suspended truce in which the matter at hand is neither completely nurtured nor fully nullified. The project, it appears, must simply go on. From a dissent to the dwelling one arrives at a dissertation on it. Taking up the matter of the dwelling, the hermit’s hut recalibrates it along the axis of renunciation, pushing it to its limits, to the edge of civilization. The hut, appearing in an ascetic context, is an embodiment of the world, the condition of material, spatial, and social entanglements. Even when the body is conceived of as a hut, it is seen as a vestige of sociality, perhaps the last one. From the beginning to the end, the world is needed as a given; it is where renunciation begins, for asceticism and renunciation presuppose a world, a socialized and cultivated realm, which then is to be transcended. The representative repertoire of the hermit’s hut—from simple dwelling structures to dwellings in the form of harmikā to the structure with a “distended lintel”—illustrates a basic ascetic paradox of profiling a certain condition and, at the same time, attempting a transcendence. Hovering over the ascetic project, both literally and thematically, the shadow of the dwelling continues to invoke an intractable contingency. Two contrary ideas are condensed simultaneously in the metonymic character of the hut: being-in-the-world and being outside it. The schema is paradoxical because the significance is based on acknowledging the ontological necessity of something that then needs to be abandoned. In other words, the ascetic realizes that movement out of the world can be made through the world. This is evident in how ascetic praxis is always structured with its converse or conflicting self. In this matter, what is true for building practices is true for the ascetic body. The great ascetic experiment, when taken up on the body site, works through the simultaneity of occupation and destruction of the body-building. It is not truly a destruction, however the rhetoric may be, but...

Share