Cold War bunkers

as a post traumatic landscape

Luke Bennett
Department of the Natural and Built Environment
Sheffield Hallam University
l.e.bennett@shu.ac.uk
http://lukebennett13.wordpress.com


Our day in the bunker
1. Encountering the bunker
- affect, image, film, performance & aesthetics
2. The bunker as exceptional space
- shelter, retreat, geo-politics, crisis, infrastructure
3. The bunker as post traumatic landscape
- people, roles, visits, practices, artefacts, enactment
4. Ruination and afteruse
- seeing, representing, curating, converting & eliminating?
Dreams
Matter
Bodies
My bunkerology project
Bennett L, 2011a, The Bunker: metaphor, materiality and
management, Culture and Organization 17, 155173

Bennett L, 2011b, Bunkerology: a case study in the theory and
practice of urban exploration Environment and Planning D: Society and
Space 29, 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,
Concrete Multivalence: practising representation
in bunkerology, Environment and Planning: Society and Space 31(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 a
room in nature
www.stivkuling.no

Aftermath
Where it all started for me
Paul Virilios Bunker Archeology
This 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: London
Ypres, the Somme, Tobruk,
El Alamein, Monte Casino
were names so familiar to us
they might have been nearby villages
If you mention Japan to that radgie old
gadgie at the allotments, he started
swearing and didnt care
who heard
Bunker as Nostalgia
Much 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 of eschatology.

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)
How and when did we
forget?
Did we ever really forget?
Douglas Couplands wrong sun
When 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


Abjection
The 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
Dreams
Matter
Bodies
and powers material traces
in 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 9
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaton_Park_BT_Tower#mediaviewer/File:Heaton_Park_BT_Tower,_distance_view.jpg
Our day in the bunker
1. Encountering the bunker
- affect, image, film, performance & aesthetics
2. The bunker as exceptional space
- shelter, retreat, geo-politics, crisis, infrastructure
3. The bunker as post traumatic landscape
- people, roles, visits, practices, artefacts, enactment
4. Ruination and afteruse
- seeing, representing, curating, converting & eliminating?