The book chapter explores the intersection between architecture and anthropology. Drawing on anthropological texts, it challenges the foundational role of ‘shelter’ in architectural discourse by drawing on the concept of the ‘trap’ as articulated by the anthropologist Alfred Gell.

In doing so it attempts to raise the problem of human subjectivity within discourse on architecture in a new way, to foreground the role that architecture plays in shaping human habits and character – rather than see architecture as a provision that is able to nullify a lack – as in the provision of shelter.