Below, Stefan Al shares five key insights from his new book, Dwelling on Earth: The Past and Future of the Places We Call Home.
Stefan is an architect and Associate Professor of Urban Planning at Hunter College.
What’s the big idea?
Humans have always built homes to shape the world around them, but those homes end up shaping us right back. As we face a future of massive urban growth and climate pressure, the challenge isn’t just building more but rather building in ways that reconnect innovation with the wisdom of nature and the past.
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1. Your home is making you who you are.
When I was a student in Delft, in the Netherlands, I moved into housing that was part of a bold experiment in 1970s architecture. The architects had done something simple but unusual: they centered each floor around a communal kitchen. As a result, most roommates (including myself) naturally fell into the habit of taking turns cooking for one another. There were no formal rules that required this arrangement. The layout simply encouraged it. It nurtured collaboration and community. To our surprise, one roommate became the town’s youngest mayor.
Our homes are not just where we live—they are also how we live. The design of our homes shapes how we move, how we interact with one another, and even how healthy we are. People who live in homes with stairs live longer because they get “built-in” exercise just from moving through their house. Meanwhile, in car-dependent suburbs, daily step counts have collapsed. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors walked up to 19,000 steps a day. The average American today walks about 4,000. The home is the most personal thing we build, and it shapes us in ways we rarely reckon with.
2. We were builders before we were human.
In 2023, archaeologists made a remarkable discovery at Kalambo Falls in Zambia. They found two interlocking wooden timbers—carefully joined together—dated to roughly 476,000 years ago. That predates our own species, Homo sapiens, by tens of thousands of years. Whatever hominin built this was not just making a tool. They were constructing a place.
It was this capacity to build places that gave us a unique evolutionary advantage. We belong to a type of species that engages in what researchers call niche construction. Like beavers building dams, we create environments that often afford us an advantage.
“It was this capacity to build places that gave us a unique evolutionary advantage.”
From those first timber joints, we went on to build mud brick cities in Mesopotamia, multistory concrete buildings in Ancient Rome, and eventually steel-framed skyscrapers that pierce the clouds. I was fortunate enough to work on several of them myself, including the Canton Tower in Guangzhou, which was briefly the world’s tallest tower.
And now that same impulse to build is going beyond our planet. A company called ICON has partnered with NASA to 3D print structures on the Moon using lunar regolith, or moon dust, fused by lasers into a hard, radiation-resistant material. We dare to imagine homes on distant planets, carrying the ancient idea of “dwelling” beyond our world.
3. An extraordinary history of innovation.
From our first basic huts to today’s towering structures lies an extraordinary and hard-won journey of innovation: from Roman concrete to modern steel frames, from wood-burning fireplaces to smart thermostats, from candlelight to LEDs. Many advancements arrived through trial and error, and sometimes at great human cost.
Consider the Roman insula, the ancient world’s apartment building, rising up to eight stories in the heart of Rome. It was here that Roman engineers invented concrete by mixing lime with volcanic ash from Mount Vesuvius to create a material so strong that it could set underwater. Concrete enabled the Colosseum, the Pantheon, and the first true multistory buildings in history. Yet the upper floors remained precarious. As the Roman poet Juvenal put it, the last to die in a fire would be “the attic tenant, way up among the nesting pigeons.”
Millennia later, steel-frame construction and the elevator safety brake made the skyscraper possible, inverting that hierarchy overnight, as the upper floors suddenly became the most coveted. Each generation has inherited a problem that seemed insurmountable and built its way through it. There is every reason to think the next will do the same.
4. Socrates advocated sustainable design.
When I lived in Hong Kong, I noticed how my air conditioner moved heat from inside my apartment to the outside, but with buildings being so close together, that expelled hot air found its way straight back in. This paradox captures our modern predicament perfectly. Thanks to air conditioning, we gained the ability to create our own climate, but at the cost of altering the Earth’s climate. Our buildings account for nearly 40 percent of global carbon emissions, mostly from heating and cooling.
“This paradox captures our modern predicament perfectly.”
And yet for thousands of years, humans crafted dwellings that worked with their local climate without any of that. Persian architects built towering windcatchers that funneled cool breezes through entire buildings without a watt of electricity. On Santorini, whitewashed facades reflected the sun while narrow lanes channeled shade. Such designs emerged from necessity because, before fossil fuels, energy was scarce and wood was often too precious to burn. Architecture became a form of environmental adaptation. Like wine shaped by its terroir, buildings reflected their climate.
Even Socrates understood this. Xenophon recorded him describing the ideal home: in winter, the sun shines into south-facing porticoes; in summer, it passes over the roof and casts shade. The Ancient Greeks applied this at an urban scale, orienting entire city grids toward the sun, because firewood was scarce and the sun was free. We tend to think of sustainable design as a modern invention—solar panels, smart thermostats, green roofs—but it’s a return to ancient wisdom.
5. Nature as blueprint.
We are expected to build more in the coming decades than in all of prior human history combined. By 2050, urban populations will increase by 2.5 billion. To house them, we will need to build the equivalent of a new New York City every month until mid-century.
But construction is consuming the planet in the process. The industry uses roughly half of all raw materials humanity extracts each year—the equivalent of dismantling two-thirds of Mount Everest—and generates about a third of the world’s total waste. The problem is baked into how modern materials are made: for a single-use assembly, not for reuse. For instance, reinforced concrete, with its tangled mix of rebar, aggregate, and cement, is difficult to separate and mostly ends up in landfills.
“We are expected to build more in the coming decades than in all of prior human history combined.”
For most of human history, we built differently. Civilizations built their cities from biobased materials such as wood and clay, which could be returned to the earth without consequence. We abandoned them largely because we believed we had outgrown them. Engineers assumed that wood had a structural ceiling topping out at six stories. Then, in the 1990s, the invention of cross-laminated timber shattered that ceiling. These large, engineered panels achieve compressive strengths approaching those of concrete and today support buildings reaching eighteen stories and beyond. A new generation of architects is building in timber again. Today, as our profession rediscovers pre-industrial material choices, we are beginning to realize that the future may have been growing around us all along.
From interlocking timbers in Zambia to moon-dust printed lunar shelters, the story of human dwelling is the story of who we are.
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