bunkerworld
Built predominantly in densely populated urban centers, it is estimated that more than 1000 wartime above-ground air raid shelters remain within the modern borders of the German Republic. Known as "Hochbunker" (high-rise bunkers), they are unique to German civil defense design and construction of the 1940's. Cold War era analysis of materials and construction of the shelters by the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey determined many as satisfactory civilian protection against atomic blasts and fallout. Due to the immense cost and threat to surrounding buildings and habitat, the removal of these bombproof shelters has proven prohibitive in modern times.
Originally cloaked in the visual forms of churches, water towers and residences as camouflage to the bombardier’s probing eye, the bunkers’ contemporary façades and utility have been reinterpreted in a wholly new manner: festooned with rock-climbing hand-holds, wrapped with immense murals, deluxe residences built atop, resurfaced in siding and mirrored glass – there is a yearning to reappoint the function of these structures which are so indisputably linked with the culture and events that made their primary purpose necessary.
“The blockhouse is still familiar, it coexists, it comes from the era that put an end to the strategic notion of “forward” and “rear” (vanguard and rearguard) and began the new one of above and below, in which burial would be accomplished definitively, and the earth nothing more than an immense glacis exposed to nuclear fire. The poetry of the bunker is in its still being a shield for its users, in the end as outdated as an infant’s rebuilt armor, an empty shell, an emotionally moving phantom of an old-fashioned duel in which the adversaries could still look each other in the eye through the narrow slits of their helmets. The bunker is the protohistory of an age in which the power of a single weapon is so great that no distance can protect you from it any longer.” – Paul Virilio Bunker Archeology