Examples are plentiful. Al-Qaeda built rudimentary versions of American cities to attack in the Afghan desert. Senator Orrin Hatch built a full-scale model of a New York subway underneath the Utah desert to bomb with poison gas. The city of Santa Monica blew up several of its own disused public buses one nice spring day to help plan for the inevitable. This is an architecture of attack in advance of the attack on architecture. It is both a wishful fantasy and a strategy of defense against the realization of potential wish attacks. As much as architecture is an object of attack, it is not just the raw material of incident--a nevertheless magnificent debris of programmatic repetition- it is also the agent of an unfolding drama of symbols, such that to attack its form is also to attack an Order that is not only represented by the architecture but embodied by it.
We understand that subjectivity results from the repetition and performance of particular roles, postures, and figures. Likewise, the figural contours of the built environment build that environment though performative repetition, and habitats in turn produce and enunciate themselves through bodies, manifested as habits. As ever, spaces contain and constrain only as much as they stage and generate; they are expressions of bodily form but also express themselves as and through bodily form (prisoner, worker, individual, mass), through habitats (cage, desk, car, desert, bed, corridor), and through the articulation of those habits they are rendered as institutions and as material design culture. The neurological fiction that is the manifest image of our own individual subjectivities emerges from the repetition of particular positions, which themselves emerge in relation to particular architectural surfaces, positions, and dispositions.
The registered object of that possibility, the first spatial medium -one's physical body - is weaponised and counter-weaponized, getting ever closer to the metal, while architecture proper continues its tuition as a first line of offence in the production or what Donald Rumsfeld used to compulsively refer to as "the security environment." As the brothel becomes a camp, and as the brothel becomes an enclave, the physical mediation of secondary material is formed by the incorporations and disassemblies of the architectural. The productive mimesis of one into the other may not be law, or need a law-even a law suspended or projected--but the law of force bears each an equivalent sovereignty from the other. For either an inside out (camp) or an outside in (enclave), the architectural partition provides the necessary function of the limit. That limit provides an architectural program by regulating the full possibility of flux and flow into regular formation, and in the codification of that regulation, the limit is that which gives anatomy to space by enveloping it, and that which produces eventful transgressions in its own image (stadium, skyscraper, school, shrine, slaughterhouse). At least in this way, architecture is, as others have said, intrinsically violent to the bodies and events that it witnesses because it is given intrinsic form by the social violences that scar territory into space by repeating themselves along the way.