The idea of the “spirit of the place” or the “genius loci” is a familiar one – that a particular spot, a landscape, a house retains a unique character or atmosphere. But for the Romans this was far from an abstract concept: each place was possessed of an earth spirit and, if the ground was to be disturbed and built on, that spirit needed to be placated so that the building and its inhabitants would enjoy good fortune.

That is the inspiration for the building sacrifice. The killing of a living thing or the building of an object representing life into the foundations and walls of a house are virtually universal in superstitious societies. From extraordinary myths about workmen being immured within the walls of Strasbourg Cathedral to sinister eastern European legends of wives being built into bridges, their breasts left exposed so they could nurse their babies, sacrifice was deeply embedded in building culture. It survived the centuries in less grotesque forms through the symbolic slaughter of animals to appease the earth spirits and, often, the incorporation of their bones or even their blood into the mortar.

These practices later transmuted to the incorporation into the structure of worn shoes or personal tokens. Another common gesture was the burying of a coin beneath the threshold or footings. Building works to many Georgian or Victorian houses will reveal some similar token, a memory of building sacrifice. The significance forgotten, these gestures have largely disappeared, yet something of them remains in the rituals of laying foundation stones for public buildings and in the burial of time capsules containing personal effects.

Walls are rich in evocation

The notion of beings built into the walls evokes an idea of the house itself as a thing made alive. The wall is the element that encloses, protects and supports. It is, along with the roof, the most fundamental part of the structure and, in its verticality, it defies gravity. Standing tall, just as we do, it mimics our own lives.

Built from brick or stone, the wall is a manifestation of the earth, an extrusion of the materials of the ground to create a man-made cave. Yet there are other influences. Gottfried Semper, the Austrian architect, theorist and designer of the Dresden Opera House, posited that the wall embodies a memory of the woven fabrics of the nomadic tents that enclosed the earliest dwellings. Thus the complex brick bonds are an evocation of the weave of a fabric while the wallpaper of an interior recalls the decorated carpets and hangings which once enclosed us.

That the wall is our basic measure of normality, of comfort and containment is testified by phrases such as “off the wall”. It is also extraordinarily rich in evocation – it can represent the boundaries of a great city or the fabric of a tent, the wickerwork of medieval wattle and daub or the proportion of the classical temple. It is as much a canvas depicting the memory of dwelling as it is an envelope with which we happily confine ourselves.

It was perhaps that richness of meaning and history that led modernist architects to attempt to dispense with it as far as they could. Aiming to create architecture free of memory (or, as they saw it, constraint), they replaced solid walls with glass, internal divisions with fluid space, rooms with flowing plans. Houses such as Philip Johnson’s Glass House (New Canaan, Connecticut, 1949) and Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House (Plano, Illinois, 1951) attempted to dispense with walls altogether. Both conceived as summer houses, they demonstrate the ethereality of wall-less living but also its oddness. They feel insecure, insubstantial, they provide no embrace or enclosure, they remain sophisticated, beautiful gazebos. The wall, it appears, remains far too deeply embedded in our consciousness to just disappear.