Tunnels, treehouses and tensegrity towers: landmarks in protest architecture, from UCLA to Hong Kong

How did UK activists outfox 700 police? Why was Hong Kong traffic stopped by ‘mini Stonehenges’? And could an octagonal treehouse and a crow’s nest really have saved a German forest? Our writer enjoys a 200-year history of resistance architecture

In his 1868 street-fighting manual, Instructions for an Armed Uprising, the French revolutionary Auguste Blanqui sets out meticulous instructions for how to build a good barricade. Such defences, he wrote, must no longer be thrown together in “a confused and disorderly fashion”, but should be robustly composed of two sturdy rampart walls made of paving stones and plaster. All the aspiring revolutionary needed was a good supply of cobblestones and “a cart filled with sacks of plaster, plus wheelbarrows, handcarts, levers, picks, shovels, mattocks, hammers, cold chisels, trowels, buckets and troughs”. Blanqui advised that all of these things could be “requisitioned from the respective merchants”, whose addresses were handily listed in an accompanying directory.

The students at UCLA, who were peacefully occupying their campus in protest against Israel’s war on Gaza, might have wished for such supplies when they were attacked by a violent mob of vigilantes last week. Terrifying footage showed masked thugs beating their makeshift encampment with sticks and metal poles, dragging away steel fencing and plywood panels, and tearing apart their tents and gazebos, amid fireworks and clouds of bear spray. The hastily assembled camp stood no chance against the brute force of an organised gang intent on inflicting violence, terror and destruction.