Cold War bunkers as a post traumatic landscape

Luke BennettDepartment of the Natural and Built EnvironmentSheffield Hallam Universityl.e.bennett@shu.ac.ukhttp://lukebennett13.wordpress.com

Our day in the bunkerEncountering the bunker- affect, image, film, performance & aestheticsThe bunker as exceptional space- shelter, retreat, geo-politics, crisis, infrastructureThe bunker as post traumatic landscape- people, roles, visits, practices, artefacts, enactmentRuination and afteruse- seeing, representing, curating, converting & eliminating?

My bunkerology projectBennett L, 2011a, The Bunker: metaphor, materiality and management,Culture and Organization17,155173

Bennett L, 2011b, Bunkerology: a case study in the theory and practice of urban explorationEnvironment and Planning D: Society and Space29,421434

Bennett L, 2013a, Who goes there? Accounting for gender in the urge to explore abandoned military bunkers,Gender, Place and Culture,20(3),630-646

Bennett L, 2013b, ConcreteMultivalence:practisingrepresentation inbunkerology,Environment and Planning: Society and Space31(3), 502-521

What makes bunkers matter?

Mattering is simultaneously a matter of substance and significance.

Karen Barad (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway, Duke University Press: London p.3.

Repurposing the bunker as aroom in naturewww.stivkuling.no

Aftermath

Where it all started for me

Paul Virilios Bunker ArcheologyThis was an archaeological study, and a personal one, motivated by the desire to uncover the geostrategic and geopolitical foundations of the total war I had lived through as a young boy in Nantes, not far from the submarine base of Saint-Nazaire" (Paul Virilio & Claude Parent (1996) Architecture Principe, p. 11)

Growing up in the 1970s

Harry Pearson (2007) Achtung Schweinhund: a boys own tale of imaginary combat, Little Brown: LondonYpres, the Somme, Tobruk, El Alamein, Monte Casino were names so familiar to us they might have been nearby villagesIf you mention Japan to that radgie old gadgie at the allotments, he started swearing and didnt care who heard

Bunker as NostalgiaMuch of the interest [in pillboxes] must come from the national consciousness of 1940 as a defining moment in British history, the time when we stood alone against German military power, defiant, and resolutethere is a great nostalgia, I believe, for the oneness and purpose of those days, in particular when contrasted with the state of the nation today, when the concept of our sovereign independence is under threat.

William Foot (2007) The Battlefields that Nearly Were defended England 1940, Tempus: Stroud. p.21

The bunker in popular culture

The bunker as post traumatic landscape

Bunkers as Post Traumatic Landscape

Post Traumatic Landscape the legacy, resonance, trace and recuperation embodied in the socio-geological (Amanda Crawley Jackson)

Making old bunkers matter: The trauma of an end that never was, scars of approximate acquaintance projected onto remnant structures once secret now in abandonment laid bare, open to all, to reveal their strange banality

Any serious study of the Cold War military landscape (including those immense underground bunkers that prefigured the spectacle of mass premature burial) would be one not of war but ofeschatology.

Matthew Flintham (2012) The Military-Pastoral Complex: Contemporary Representations of Militarism in the Landscape Tate Papers 17 (emphasis added}

Growing up in the end of days (1980s)

I grew up in Montana, and I was simply obsessed with nuclear war. When I was sixteen, I could have drawn you a map of [the local Minutemen silos]

I was more afraid of living than dying. I was petrified of nuclear winter specifically

By the time I was old enough to start planning a future, I was pretty sure I wouldnt have one.

Im still amazed I got to grow up. Amazed!

Sarah Vowell, in conversation with Richard Ross in Ross, R. (2004) Waiting for the End of the World, Princeton Architectural Press: Princeton. (emphasis added)

Did we ever really forget?

Douglas Couplands wrong sunWhen you are young, you always expect that the world is going to end.

And then you get older and the world chugs along and you are forced to re-evaluate your stance on the apocalypse as well as you own relationship to time and death.

You realize that the world will indeed continue, with or without you, and the pictures you see in your head.

So you try to understand the pictures instead.

Douglas Coupland (1994) Life After God, Scribner: London, p. 84. (emphasis added)

The bunkers two faces

in the 1960s the subterranean world became an elegant metaphor for power and the hubristic belief of the powerful that they might survive the horrors that their madness whether criminal or political would bring about.

Philip French (1999) The designer as collaborator and auteur. In Moonraker, Strangelove and other celluloid dreams: The visionary art of Ken Adam, ed. D. Sylvester, 1841. London: Serpentine Gallery. page 32

We are now going underground! All the most important rooms in my factory are deep below the surface there wouldnt be nearly enough space for them up on top! But down here, underneath the ground, Ive got all the space I want. Theres no limit so long as I hollow it out.

Roald Dahl (2004) [1964] Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Penguin: London p.59, emphasis in original

While actual shelters were usually dark, cramped, mildewed affairs, in the realm of the subconscious desire they were always spacious, ridiculously well-stocked playrooms with artificial sunlight and state-of-the-art entertainment systems, inhabitable for years and years.

Tom Vanderbilt (2002) Survival City Adventures among the ruins of atomic America. New York: Princeton Architectural Press p.110

AbjectionThe modern world, the world of world war, the Third World, the underground world of death that acts upon us, do not have the civilized splendour of the Greek city state.

Julia Kristeva (1992) Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, Columbia University Press: New York, p.235

The whole atmosphere down there was debilitating. It was like being stranded in a cement submarine, or buried alive in some abandoned charnel house.

People who work in diving bells probably feel less cramped. It was both dank and dusty

(Captain Beerman, quoted in James P. ODonnell (1979) The Berlin Bunker Arrow: London, p. 26)Abject entombment: the last redoubt; the last days

the ventilation could now be warm and sultry, now cold and clammy. The constant loud hum of the Diesel generator

the fetid odours of boots, sweaty woollen uniforms, and acrid coaltar disinfectant.

Towards the end, when the drainage packed in, it was as pleasant as working in a public urinal.

(Captain Beerman, quoted in James P. ODonnell (1979) The Berlin Bunker Arrow: London, p. 26)Abject entombment: the last redoubt; the last days

Above our heads Berlin was burning, yet we knew nothing of what was actually going on behind the heavy thumps of explosions that came ever closer, the shuddering of the concrete walls and the dust falling from the ceilings.

Quote: Bernd Freytag Von Loringhoven (2007) In the Bunker With Hitler, Phoenix: London p.157

and powers material tracesin the concrete of bunkers, in the radio towers, the food stores, the dispersed centres of government, [one] can read the paranoia of power. This evidence is written on the face of England

Peter Laurie (1979) Beneath the City Streets, Panther: London, page 9http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaton_Park_BT_Tower#mediaviewer/File:Heaton_Park_BT_Tower,_distance_view.jpg

Our day in the bunkerEncountering the bunker- affect, image, film, performance & aestheticsThe bunker as exceptional space- shelter, retreat, geo-politics, crisis, infrastructureThe bunker as post traumatic landscape- people, roles, visits, practices, artefacts, enactmentRuination and afteruse- seeing, representing, curating, converting & eliminating?

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