“One of the essential characteristics of the bunker is that it is one of the rare modern monolithic architectures.”
So writes philosopher-artist-dromologist Paul Virilio in his exegesis of World War II defensive fortifications, Bunker Archeology. These poured-in-place pillboxes aren’t just modern, they’re modern concentrate—efficiently constructed for a single purpose and devoid of any style or ornament because, as Virilio writes, “the omnipotence of arms volatilized what was left of aesthetic will.”
If Le Corbusier’s houses are machines for living, the concrete bunker is a machine for surviving, designed to stand against bombs, bullets, gases, and flames. But in parts of the world where war is now a fading memory, bunkers linger on this earth without purpose, decaying, tied inextricably to the past, a haunting reminder of violence, a ghostmodern architecture.
Observation post (with container): These drawings, taken from Bunker Archeology, show just how massive these structures are. The heavy black lines represent solid concrete but remind me of the poché on a Beaux-Arts-style drawing.
Some of these underground bunkers were incredibly expansive, intended for long-term occupation, but many others were martial follies. Today, they’re half-buried along coastlines or looming silently and mysteriously in the middle of cities, too massive to be destroyed but often too difficult to be repurposed. Apparently, a side effect of being built to withstand mortar attacks is the ability to confound planners and developers—perhaps there’s a lesson there. Yet despite the difficulty of renovating a structure with a wall thickness measured in feet, some enterprising organizations and architects are doing just that, appropriating bunkers to imbue them with a new life and new meaning.
Among architects, there seems to be renewed interest in Brutalism these days, and on purely aesthetic terms, it would be easy to think of these projects as examples of a New New Brutalism. After all, the Brutalist buildings of the 1950s and ‘60s were often derided as “bunkers,” although their raw concrete surfaces are more likely to harm their occupants than any invading military force.
But like any good -ism, these projects represent both an aesthetic and an ethic. There’s a lightness to all these structures, an effort to mitigate the weight of the original bunker—and not just its literal weight. These bunkers carry a historic heaviness. They can be a psychological burden for people who don’t want to be reminded of the horror of war, but who are confronted by it every day, who literally live with it. While these renovations can’t erase the past, they can imbue its relics with new meaning.
Photo courtesy of BIG
Blåvand Bunkermuseum by BIG, Varde, Denmark
BIG’s Blåvand Bunkermuseum reconstructs the bunker’s original cannon out of glass “as a ghost or a reflection of the war machine it was meant to be.” For Virilio, the removal of a cannon “deconsecrates” a bunker. By that logic, BIG’s project re-consecrates the structure for a new denomination. The canon, once an instrument of ruination, is now an instrument of illumination, a skylight above an exhibition space. BIG describes its design as the “antithesis” to the existing structure: “vacuum rather than volume—transparency rather than gravity.” These are themes that recur in many of these projects.
Photo courtesy of Block
Ghostbunker by Block, Nantes, France
Speaking of gh-gh-gh-ghosts, this unbuilt design from French firm Block proposes to transform a former World War II air-raid bunker into an experimental art facility with a “ghost” copy of the bunker floating above the concrete structure. The exterior circulation of the ghostbunker is exactly as wide as the original bunker’s outer walls, creating a passage through a blockage.
Energy Bunker by Hegger Hegger Schleiff Architekten, Hamburg, Germany
After World War II, the absolutely massive flak bunker, with its three-meter thick walls, proved too difficult to demolish and sat empty for 60 years, collecting graffiti. But now IBA Hamburg and Hegger Hegger Schleiff Architekten have given it new life as a renewable energy facility. Part power plant, part museum, and part café, this recently completed structure has become a symbol of restoration and renewal instead of a symbol of destruction. The architects gutted the structure but restored the facade and preserved the graffiti it had collected in the years since the war. Besides the obvious array of solar panels on the roof and south facade, the structure also produces energy from bio-methane, wood chips, and waste heat from a nearby industrial facility, to generate 22,500 megawatt hours of heat (enough to heat 3,000 households) and nearly 3,000 megawatt hours of electricity (enough to power 1,000 homes).
RAAAF and Atelier de Lyon painstakingly bisected an old bunker to reveal its interior while framing the landscape and providing a footpath to a nearby floodplain and natural reserve. The installation, which was made a Dutch national monument, is part of a larger effort to attract more visitors to the New Dutch Waterline (NDW), an important military defensive line with a 200-year history.
Bunker F56 by Rainer Mielke and Claus Freudenberg, Bremen, Germany
Architects Rainer Mielke and Claus Freudenberg have made a name for themselves restoring and repurposing old bunkers in Germany. They work to reintegrate these buildings into neighborhoods and transform them into modern, inviting residential developments where people actually want to live.
Bunker Aufstockung byIndex Architekten, Frankfurt, Germany
After the war, this Frankfurt bunker was disguised as a house because it was too big to destroy and too ugly to live with. As part of an effort to begin revitalizing the “no man’s land” near the city’s east harbor where it stood, the decaying, disguised defensive fortification was transformed into a home for artists—its thick walls made it ideal for music studios—and topped with a new structure for the Institute of New Media.