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 ascamouflageto 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in the end as outdated as an infant’s rebuilt armor, an empty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