Manila. This ain't no vanilla. Stinking hot sweat stepping over fish heads pig intestines. Big guy with a big backpack on getting looks getting stared at squeezing through the market crowd. Jeepneys belching smoke choke cover the face no use no way out but through. Swimming through air hop on a tricycle munching a 3 peso donut motors rip the air horns honking in your ear. No way out but through.



One day later on a bus stop. Stop. Slow delicious AC watching Ghost Patrick Swayze on the way out of Manila takes eternity. Hello Angeles City Sin City place where the air force dudes bought booze bought girls lived it up til Pinatubo popped. Philippines senate said no more bases 1991 adios soldiers packin it out under two feet of ash looters come in backlash. Casino man business man Philippino Air Force man keepin' the girls workin Sin City still alive. Walkin' down the main drag through girls hangin on my arm I'm saying "I got a wife" that doesn't seem to matter I need to scatter.




On the old base people camping out selling flutes. Duty free shop big aisles American crap just like the base commisary before jars of peanut butter fake nacho cheese as seen on TV. Near the Philippino barracks barber shop I go in ask for "Air Force Cut".




Clean cut hit the streets catch a flight to Guam by the skin of my teeth. I am ready for the military island paradise.

I spend a lot of time looking at ugly buildings. You could say I'm addicted to them. US military bases are not pretty things. One base planner put it to me this way: "We build 'em like jeeps, simple and functional." And there's a certain logic to jeep aesthetics: because it looks cheap and functional, then it probably is. The same goes for a lot of military architecture. It's basic, modular, cheap (in terms of finishes), and pretty damn ugly.



Well you can't quite build like that in Italy. I toured Aviano Air Base, northeast of Venice. It was a weird "architectural pilgrimage" being that one of the key books I read putting together this proposal was Mark Gillem's America Town. As a reserve Air-Force planner, he details the mocking of Palladian style: faux loggias and other such gestures at cultural assimilation. The book is more about land use and less about architecture. That's one thing that interests me in military bases (when my eyes get tired) is to think about the land use issues: who owns it, how does the treaty allow for its continued use, what happens when the land goes back to civilian use, etc.

In Italy I also met with some planners at Camp Ederle in Vicenza, where there's been a heap of protest over the new Dal Molin development. That's a whole 'nother story. But one of the planners gave me a .pdf of design guidelines for the army post derived from Palladian style. It's gold. You can just imagine the architecture being used as a beard for the military, saying "hey, this barracks has A-B-A-B proportions and square windows, see how it fits?" or "look at those doric columns at the headquarters; that means we belong here." .



Right, so this post is really not about the attempt to make the ugly beautiful, but it's simply about two really, really beautiful buildings that I had the pleasure to explore. One is famous, and the other is relatively newly restored. Check 'em out:



Castelvecchio was one of the first things I remember in architecture school. Someone at USC showed it in the intro to architecture lectures and it struck a deep chord. I feel like it came right when we were all neck-deep in Corb's five points, Itten's color theory, and the oppression of Mies's free plan. I thought, hey architecture isn't all about construction from a blank slate. You can do beautiful things with reworking an existing palette. So it's a bonus that I got to do this pilgrimage and chalk it up as a post-military site visit.

The "old castle" became a museum in the early 20th century but was in tatters after WWII. Enter Carlo Scarpa. The dude was obsessive, constantly working over drawings, washing them in white tempura and scribbling on them anew. His hand is in every corner of the building and, yet, it as though no hand has touched it but rather the natural, sublime forces of erosion have just shifted some planes, left some corners gaping, some stones stepping.

It's an amazing feeling when you get to walk through the building of an architect you've always admired in slides and in books. That's the real Grand Tour, and the only proper way to learn architecture, I think.

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The other building not to be excluded from a set of the post-military beautiful in Italy is the restoration of a tower in San Erasmo in the Venetian lagoon. The architects are Carlo Cappai and Maria Alessandra Segantini. If you can find the book Infrastrutture dello Sguardo (I bought it on the site) I recommend getting it; it's a beautiful book as well as a beautiful building.

There was an art installation as part of the Venice Biennale of Art and uncannily, one of the video works was about bunker towers in the lagoon built during WWII.



That's all I have time for, I'm jumping on a plane from SFO to Manila in six hours. The last leg of the trip starts tonight!

I interrupt this flow of dreamy travelogues to report on something I feel is incredibly important. I got back to Berkeley a few days ago for a pit-stop en route to my final destination of the Branner fellowship, the Philippines and Guam. My inbox has been inundated with messages bouncing around from students and administrators alike about a new fee that is slated to begin starting next fall. It's called a Professional Degree Fee or PDF. Already the graduate schools of Law, Business, Public Health and Public Policy have this fee, ranging from about $5000 a year for the two latter and over $25000 per year for the two former. The PDF has been under review for a few years now here at the College of Environmental Design.

Our new dean, Jennifer Wolch, probably feeling like Barack Obama, is stepping on to a sinking ship. We all know how screwed California is. (A flyer in Wurster Hall reads: California is Broken. Let's fix it.) On October 9th, students received the following memo from Dean Wolch:


As many of you know, over the past 3 years, the College has been considering the adoption of a Professional Differential Fee (PDF) for professional graduate students. This is something that is being implemented in many professional degree programs across campus, to sustain and enhance the quality of the professional schools' academic programs and services. Our deliberations have included extensive student surveys, discussions with staff, and faculty meetings both within individual departments and college-wide. Because of our collective desire to not only maintain the excellence of our programs and infrastructure, but to enhance the CED educational experience and placement opportunities for professional graduate students, the College has proposed a $6,000 per year PDF to the University of California Office of the President (UCOP). If approved by UCOP, this proposal will come before the UC Regents for their approval, sometime this fall.

It is important to understand several points related to the PDF. If approved:

1. The PDF would be assessed for all professional graduate students (MArch; MCP; MLA; MLA-EP; and MUD).
2. The fee would be imposed beginning in academic year 2010.
3. Continuing students, who entered prior to Fall 2010, would have their PDF returned to them in the form of student financial aid (but they would continue to pay the equivalent of the Miscellaneous Student Fees as appropriate for use of computer labs, CAD/CAM lab, shop, etc.).
4. For incoming (new) students, the PDF would replace Miscellaneous Student Fees.
5. At least 33% of the PDF would be returned to students in the form of financial aid.
6. Some share of PDF funds would likely be deployed to improve information technology infrastructure and services, provide other instructional support, enhance student career services, and increase participation of students from under-represented groups.
7. Students would be directly involved in developing plans for the allocation of PDF revenue.

I am currently meeting with graduate student association leaders to understand their range of concerns, and have scheduled a Town Hall meeting with all CED graduate students. You will receive a notice of this meeting soon. I encourage you all to attend and participate. In turn, I will be happy to share with you more details regarding the PDF, as well as answer your questions on a broad range of additional issues of concern.

Jennifer Wolch
Dean, College of Environmental Design


Various letters expressing the students' concern have been circulated from all departments within the College. The concerns in the Architecture letter can be summarized: 1. Please bring the proposal for the PDF back to our campus and reopen a comment period 2. In order to protect our own and future students’ interests, we want transparency and student governance in every step of instituting the PDF 3. We want to ensure that continuing students are not charged this new fee. And 4. We want the support of the administration in securing new sources of funding.

There was a Town Hall meeting two days ago which I sat in on. Dean Wolch addressed a few hundred bristled graduate students from architecture, planning, and landscape. She looked a little uneasy up there, and I think that came from having some sympathy ("no one wants to do this") but at the same time knowing that it doesn't matter what we say, the PDF is going to happen. The atmosphere became ludicrous at times, with students announcing things like a survey taken where 90% of students say they don't want to spend $6,000 more per year etc etc. (duh..) And at the end saying "The question is, Dean Wolch, does student opinion matter at all?" At one point Dean Wolch lost her patience as students demanded to see the CED's budget. She basically laughed it off, "It's too complicated." It was a dumb request by the student, but that didn't look so good on Dean Wolch's part. It reveals, though, just how much pressure she is under.

The biggest fear is lack of student input in future decisions about the PDF--since everyone sitting in that room is promised to be exempt from the PDF, we are actually standing up for students who haven't yet come to the CED. You guys out there who might be reading this, wondering whether or not you should apply to Berkeley--there's a fight under way on your behalf. We don't want fees that can be hiked up on a regular basis (every three years the PDF is under review: it can be taken away, though that has never happened, or increased up to 7%, which you can bet on).


Recent protests at Sproul Plaza

Folks, Berkeley is about to get more expensive. A LOT more expensive. One of the greatest selling points of the architecture program has been the "bargain" of an education, which it truly has been. When I began in 2007, tuition for in-state residents was just $4,789 per semester. The fees for next semester, however are rising to $5,616. The spur for the recent campus-wide protests and walk-outs is the fear that the fees will just continue to rise to the point where those who need access to public education might not get it. That's likely to affect students from middle class families the most. What's more important, to maintain access or to maintain the quality of the infrastructure and education? These are really tough decisions to make.

Add the $6000 PDF and I'm not so sure Berkeley is a bargain anymore. I've always thought "Okay, it's been one hell of a struggle to get the CNC router up and running, but man what a bargain this place is" or "Why can't we get more faculty, or more staff? How about an advisor?… but man, what a bargain my education is." Hell, I won this huge fellowship (that comes from a private endowment). I have absolutely no right to complain. But this isn't about feeling stingy or bitter that a cheap education is about to get more expensive. It's about students lacking control of the cost of our education and decisions happening at the top of the system.

Hello UCLA? You're facing the same deal. In fact, Dean Wolch said UCLA is looking at an $8,000 PDF. Public education in California is under some severe stress. So don't think you're escaping the blighted economy by coming to school. Shit rolls downhill, and as a student, well, you're pretty much at the bottom. Never mind though, we're still sticking up for you and fighting for some control over just how much shit, and how fast it will roll.

If there is a city ripe for post-military exploration, it's Berlin. And what a kick-ass city. Good food, great people, easy to get around, incredible museums, a scintillating soundscape, and fancy architecture to boot. Berlin has been my favorite city this year, and I'm kicking myself for only spending three days there. Yet another place that I have to return to. (Traveling is problematic - don't expect to go and check a bunch a things off your list: when you get somewhere, you only realize how little you have seen, and the damn lists just keep multiplying.)

We arrived thinking that the main purpose of visiting Berlin was actually not in the city but south in Zossen, where the Soviets basically evicted all the residents and turned the town into their communications headquarters. The height of Cold War would see "between 30,000 and 70,000 Russian soldiers and their dependents." The underground complex is multi-storied and extensive. It would have made a good trip, for sure, as a complement to the Maginot Line, but Berlin totally sucked us in. We couldn't escape. We were absolutely addicted to the city, which is full of post-military structures and landscapes.

We met up with an architect-friend of one of my wife's colleagues, who said to us " I am also interested in the subject of the reuse of former military installations--if you are an architect and live in Berlin, it is an unavoidable theme." He sent us in the direction of Teufelsberg, the tallest hill in Berlin, elevation eighty meters. Teufelsberg means Devil's Mountain. It didn't exist, however, prior to 1945. The Allies built it, shifting about 12 million cubic meters of rubble from an estimated 400,000 ruined buildings. Talk about a Ruin Machine. Beneath the hill lies the half-demolished military-technical college designed by Albert Speer. The walls were so massive that it was becoming cost-prohibitive to destroy it. The Allies were looking for a good place to bury the dead buildings, so add one and one together and you get Devil's Mountain. The ultimate death of a building is not to be reduced to rubble. It is to be buried by 12 million cubic meters of a dead city's rubble.



Not all of the dead buildings were shoveled to this spot in the west of the city center. The Trümmerfrauen or so-called Rubble Women spent years sorting out the re-useable chunks of buildings, recovering whatever they could. There is no romance to these ruins. These women lived a hard life, having lost their brothers, sons, and fathers in the war. So we can be fascinated by the artificial mountain, but when I saw this brick as I was walking up to the top, I spent a moment thinking about the people who survived the war and lived in its ruin. How funny that a single brick evokes human tragedy to me, where an entire mountain of rubble just sounds fascinating.



The Allies tacked on a third purpose to this rubble mountain, and that was their NSA listening post, now a tattered ruin with no formal plans for restoration or conversion. It is a specter of the Cold War. What's interesting to me about this listening ear are the ways that it overlapped with civilian space. We learn from Wikipedia:

It was noticed that during certain times the reception of the radio signals was better than during the rest of the year. The 'culprit' was found after a while: it was the Ferris wheel of the annual German-American Festival on the Hüttenweg in Zehlendorf. From then on, the Ferris wheel was left standing for some time after the festival was over.

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There are more rubble mountains in the city. We got inside of one, the partially destroyed Flak tower in Humboldthain park in Gesundbrunnen. You wouldn't suppose there is a massive concrete ruin beneath this lovely park, the hill rising steeply to the top which affords good views over the surrounding neighborhood. The concrete platform at the top might have been built by a benevolent park association, but no, it was built by Hitler.




Constructed in 1942, the anti-aircraft tower is unique to all the sites I've seen this year because it is the first example of a military base or structure where its post-military use was built-in. There are small windows, for example, which serve no military value and in fact, were a weak-point, requiring special steel shutters so that bombs and shrapnel could not sneak inside. Moreover, the monumental, castle-like form of the flak tower was excessive in bulk (the towers were over-budget and fewer were built than was needed).

As part of Berlin's air-raid defense, these towers were conceived to work harmoniously within Albert Speer's plans for Germania, the total reconstruction of Berlin. The tower would have been incredibly expensive to remove (this was proved by the Allies in post-war Berlin), and of course Hitler expected to win the war, so why not incorporate them into the future plans for the city?


source: Berlin Unterwelten

Since the flak tower ate up park land, it is probably most appropriate that it remains a park. I visited the inside of the tower and was required to wear a hard-hat by the tour guides (the Berlin Unterwelten or Underground Society - every city should have one). The inside is a habitat for several species of endangered bats. It is a hollow, artificial mountain in the middle of Berlin, and one of its exposed walls is rated as the toughest rock climb in the city. Is this the future of military space, to erode into "artificial" features in the landscape?

At the end of September, I spent nine days in Germany, a country that easily could have consumed the entire year of travel. You'd think the country is Europe's bunker heaven, full of war-landscapes and museums displaying big guns and stuff. Nope, that's France. Understandably, the residues of war were obliterated and covered up by the emerging German states in the decades following the war. Germans I have met on my travels are still ashamed of their history. One German that I hitched a ride with here on Crete the other day emphatically disowned Hitler (He was Austrian!).



While Germany is not bunker-museum and uniformed- mannequin-happy like the French, the traces of war are indeed visible. In fact, the way these traces have been perpetuated in the form of US military bases is anything but invisible. A base I visited in Stuttgart still displays the eagle of the Third Reich, etched in stone on the side of the headquarters building--it's a historical landmark--sans swastika of course. The US bases re-use many of the buildings built on Hitler's bases. They were, after all, built to last.



I met with planners and architects working on the US military bases in the Baden-Wurttemberg and Frankfurt regions. What makes Germany so interesting on this military Grand Tour? In the words of one planner for the Army Corps of Engineers: "I like working here because it's constantly changing… Germany has always been caught between East and West." The planner told me that he thought he was packing out of Germany in the 90's as base after base shut down, but the Balkan crisis, and then Iraq and Afghanistan have maintained Germany as a hub of activity. The newest command infrastructure of the US Military, AFRICOM, is now headquartered in Stuttgart. You could say it's caught between East, West, and South now. Any future wars in Africa will likely be channeled through Germany and Italy.

As bases are consolidated into "enduring military communities," many old bases are left to the German community to recycle. I visited one of the former bases, former Peden Barracks at Wertheim. It sits on a mountain top across the river from a picturesque, crumbling castle. Among the many reclaimed uses of this base are:

-A police academy: I walked into this former Nazi building and felt claustrophobic… I've never felt more out of place, and watched, in any military base I've visited. A mannequin with a police uniform in the hallway made me jump. I found out I was trespassing in the building and , as innocently as possible, escorted myself out.
-Housing for refugees from Russia and Kazakhstan seeking political asylum
-Officer's club converted into a hotel
-A contaminated air field occupied by junky old cars

These former bases are often a mess. They're confusing places to navigate. Often they are strewn with fields of weeds which sit adjacent to new housing sitting next to a rotting military hangar. It must be shameful for some military vets to come back and see the base in shambles where they spent so much time, waiting for the Soviet attack that would never come.

I asked the military planners whether they could possibly justify building into the bases a mechanism for recycling the base, once it is (eventually) put in civilian hands. Instead of planning based simply on current military needs, the city's masterplan could also weigh in on decisions about how to develop a base. Why not think of a military base in terms of its lifecycle? Sounds like a nice idea, but the planners just smile and shake their heads.

Continuing the game of catch-up with more sketches and sounds. As always, headphones are advised.

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My wife and I have spent a lot of time camping around Europe, to save money but also for the convenience of staying close to our sites. Outside of populated areas, camping next to bunkers proved to be a great way to spend more time with them. Listen to some sounds from the campsite:





We had a very, very rough crossing of the English Channel from Poole. With my body pressed to the floor of the boat, bottles flying off the shelves in the convenience store, I thought of Allied troops on their way to the beaches of Normandy. (Does that make the ferry ride another kind of war memorial?) We stopped off on Guernsey, one of the UK's Channel Islands, though it is much closer to France. This was the only British territory occupied by the Germans in WWII.

This fire-control post, type M-5, reminds me of Mendelsohn's Einstein Tower. I wonder if the engineers of Organisation Todt (O.T.) which built the Atlantik Wall didn't have some postcards in the drafting studio.

(Even more relevant notes on the Einstein Tower and war via a456).

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Another bunker, this one located at Batz-sur-Mer on the Loire-Atlantique coast, encourages me to believe that a 1937 Architectural Record was on the drafting board when the engineers of O.T. were planning the bunker types that were to proliferate across the new German empire. Yes, your innocent Falling Water inspired some beautiful bunkers.

I don't have the photo but this bunker was disguised as a French villa--the austere forms were in fact useful for propaganda photos by O.T. but not so desirable for surviving Allied bomb raids.

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On the Pas de Calais at the north of France, we inspected some of the finest bunkers of the Atlantik Wall. My all-time favorite bunker is this one, a type 600 anti-tank gun emplacement with two stairs running up to the top. It is tilting about five degrees into the sand. The beach has probably retreated from where it once stood, waiting for the landing crafts that never came. Like so many thousands of bunkers on the Atlantik Wall, it is a beautiful memorial to waste.

Listen to me walk inside:

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Near Wissant, the Batterie Todt was capable of striking England from the shores of France. These four massive batteries are sitting in farm fields and woods, peacefully rotting away. They make for enormous tree planters and pigeon roosts. Only one is being re-used and it's a giant museum stuffed with guns and costumed mannequins--I don't really like that sort of thing, but I do find the mannequins humorous. I get bored very quickly with the guns and the battle details. I prefer the bunkers empty or re-used as something other than a museum. As museums, the bunkers are like life-size doll-houses.

Listen to some pigeons in the giant bunker of Batterie Todt:





After we bid farewell to the Atlantik Wall, we left the coast for the first time in five weeks and headed for the Maginot Line in Lorraine, near the French border with Germany. Driving across farmland, no longer with our bunkers on the coastline to guide the way, we felt a bit lost. But then zooming down the highway, my wife spotted a Maginot Line bunker in a cow pasture. We pulled over and I asked the farmer if we could check it out. He laughed. Who would want to step around a bunch of cow pies to look at an old piece of concrete?

The Maginot Line is really the king of all bunkers, made famous by being "useless." In fact, the Maginot Line is an incredible piece of engineering, bringing together the most up-to-date technologies (from the 1920s and 30s) in electric lighting, telephone and radar, submarine equipment, diesel power generation, etc. I asked the President of the Maginot Line Alsace Region if he thought the Maginot Line was a model form of living, and he replied that it was more advanced in terms of communal life, state-of-the-art cooking equipment and ventilation, and electric appliances. The only thing missing was daylight, but never mind that, the Maginot Line had more mod cons than Villa Savoye.

On the myth of the Maginot Line being a military failure: it was only as useless as Hitler's Atlantik Wall-- built so impenetrable that it forced the enemy to attack elsewhere. After some brief challenges on the Line that were easily repelled, the Germans invaded Belgium and rolled right over the Ardennes, where there was no Maginot Line and the terrain was wrongly thought by the French to be difficult to penetrate. The Maginot Line had only seen limited action and most forces stayed inside until the Armistice of 1940. It had in fact done its job, forcing the Germans to find another solution to attack France.

The Maginot Line found later use by the Germans as underground factories, and then as a fallback as Patton's 3rd Army advanced. After the war, the French made some adaptations and employed the Maginot Line as a Cold War fortress. Even today some of the Maginot Line is controlled by the French military for radar stations and explosives storage. A good number of the bigger forts, however, can be visited. I visited two fortresses, one at Hackenberg and the other at Schoenenberg. I am sure that I will look back on these visits as one of the highlights of the year.

We got to ride on an underground train several kilometers from an ammo storage to a turret still powered for operation. Listen to some of the machine sounds:

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Not every part of this Grand Tour is overtly of a military nature. You have to do some pilgrimages. To fulfill a childhood fantasty, we made a day trip out to Mont St. Michel on a wickedly windy day. Listen:





But then you discover that St. Michael is the patron saint of war, and that the successful defense of Mont St. Michel from the English during the 100 years war led to its production as a national icon. It is a fortified church on an island, a symbol of war and power if there ever was one.

Next time, a traverse of the militarized landscapes of Deutschland.

One of the requirements of the Branner Fellowship is to give a lecture in Berkeley at the end of your travels. You and the other fellows are alotted 20 minutes each. Unless you give your lecture to the tune of the Johnny Cash song: I've been everywhere man, I've been everywhere. ...Oklahoma, Tampa, Panama, Mattawa ... rattling off like auctioneer, you're gonna leave a lot of great sites unmentioned.

So it is with the last six weeks of intense travel between France, England, and Germany: I've seen so much my eyes are bulging, my ears are topped up with sound, and my hands feel the indent of sketchbook and pen. And still, the show rolls on as I write this on the flight from Berlin to Venice. My wife and I have a month left in Europe before returning to Berkeley. Zo…the question remains how to catch up in one blog post, in anticipation of the task to distill the barrel of an entire year into a 20 minute shot of moonshine.

The idea is simple enough: it's a series of travel sketches on two types of media. 1.pen and paper 2.microphone and mp3.

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Camping out in a WWII battlefield in St. Malo, France

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plumbing the depths of the U-Boat Bunker in St. Nazaire, France

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hunting for bunker towers in Il de Re, France

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Boat trip out to the Maunsell Forts, England







...more to come shortly!

Often we think of WWII disfiguring cities through destruction: Hiroshima, Dresden, Rotterdam, Berlin, etc. But what about cities disfigured by addition in wartime? Such was the case for St. Nazaire when it was converted into one of five U-boat bases on the Atlantic coast of France.



A former Trans-Atlantic hub, this port town was forever transformed by the German occupation. In 1941, 300 meters of prime port frontage was obliterated when the Germans built a massive bunker to house up to 19 U-boats. When I arrived I couldn't believe the size of this thing. It's a bunker on some serious steroids, way bigger than any of the now puny bunkers I've been looking at over the past two weeks.



Let's get a hang of the scale here. It's 300 meters long by 180 meters wide by 18 meters tall, and in volume, 480,000 cubic meters of concrete. It was essentially a naval dockyard under an impenetrable shell of concrete. The roof is five meters thick, and in some places, with a gap for scattering the bomb blast, an effective roof thickness of 8 meters. That's nearly three stories of affordable housing to fit in the roof. And you thought the Berkeley Art Museum was a waste of concrete...



Well what can you do with 480,000 cubic meters of concrete? You're gonna call Bunker Recycling Services, that's what.



It seems St. Nazaire has already been visited by BRS.

In the former U-boat pens you can find the Base Bar, the tourist information center for St. Nazaire, a theatre, exhibition space, a museum of Trans-Atlantic ship travel, a night club/performance space, and just some kick-ass concrete caverns. It makes under-the-freeway spaces look pretty tame.



And then you get up to the roof. Access is achieved in three ways. The obvious way up is via a public ramp that is partially built on top of a supermarket. This ramp is like an extension of the surface of the city, vaulting up to the plateau on top of the bunker. There is an elevator to the top with a glass window that lets you scan the five-meter thick cut through the roof. There is also a metal stair punching through the roof, which resonates as your feet pound on the treads.



Curiosities abound on the roofscape. First, take note of the concrete lattice that was designed to scatter the bomb blasts. The space beneath is beautiful… the French term is chambres d'eclatement, which I think means "rooms of shattering".

There is an installation of 107 trees by Gilles Clement, entitled Le Bois de Trembles. It's ingenious: the trees poke through the lattice, while below, the planter boxes are kept in the shade. Unfortunately you can't explore this area (yet).

There is a radome that was lifted from a NATO air base outside Berlin and "offered" to St. Nazaire in 2004 by the German Ministry of Defense. It now functions as an "urban light-house" for the Ville-Port section of town. I gather that it hosts some performing arts events for an organization called LiFE.

It is funny to me that this big block of post-military space functions as a collector for other post-military structures. It's an urban military magnet. Across the harbor you can even find a French cold-war submarine sitting in the lock bunker (built to protect U boats while they waited to pass through the locks). What other things might get sucked into this building?



And this is what I think is most enlightening about this big chunk of concrete: that it is functioning as a catalyst to revitalize St. Nazaire. In the post-war years the city turned its back on the harbor, so the story goes with so many port towns now "rediscovering" their maritime past. (Walking around this place I had the funny feeling that this is the Baltimore of France... except instead of blue crab with a Natty Boh, everyone here eats moules frites, mussels with fries).

The city has taken the big bad U boat bunker head-on, and you can still see the process of bunker recycling under way.



There is even an informal element of reclamation in the big concrete caverns... people were just gathering there, letting their dogs run around, sitting in a circle and having some beers. All that's left to do is project Das Boot on the concrete wall!

Next stop: Paris

There's a missing chapter from all the books on fortification I've had a flick through. While they will go into sometimes nauseating detail on how developments in wartime led to certain innovations, material choices, etc., the authors of these books tend to freeze the structures in that stage of existence. What happens after the guns are taken out, the treaties are signed, and their usefulness goes up in smoke?

Take Bunker Archaeology by Paul Virilio for example, probably the work on bunkers known best by architects. While Virilio develops his point that the bunkers are evidence of total-war (no barrier between war and everyday life), he actually says little about how the structures are inhabited or interacted with in his day. His is a philosophical point about war--that the thickness of the structures and other formal properties demonstrate their adaptation to an evolving enemy threat. He writes:

These concrete shelters ceaselessly proliferated and got thicker, an almost botanical sign of a constantly increasing pressure, of a constantly more "rigorous" climate. In the end these bunkers obtained the role of the prestige monuments, witnessing not so much the power of the Third Reich as its obsession with disappearance.

The few plans and sections included with his text pay tribute to the bunkers' form and formidability, but there is scant detail on their context. The rich detail I love to study from an archaeologist's plan is absent.


A bunker on a farm in Vlissingen, the Netherlands.

His beautiful photographs portray bunkers tilting in the sand, uprooted and slowly floating away. (Exploring these "oblique" landscapes, he derives a formal strategy where dwelling takes place on sloping planes.) But not nearly all of the bunkers on the Atlantic Wall are isolated works of concrete. In many places that I've traveled to so far, cities and towns have grown up around them, swallowing them, usurping their cavities for storage space and horse stables and building foundations. Sometimes people just coexist with them, as civilian and post-military spaces overlap.



Still, many bunkers remain unused, collecting graffiti or simply taking up space, an incredibly valuable commodity in the Netherlands. They are not isolated structures, as heavy and austere as they seem. Bunkers are part of our everyday lives. They exist, like many military things, in the background, underneath us, or simply invisible to us.

Above: Dragon's Teeth near Vlissingen, the Netherlands.

The missing chapter is really Bunker Sociology-- What are the social dimensions of bunker space? How might new spatial practices derive from their re-use?

So while Virilio was concerned with bunkers as representations of a new era where war becomes a total atmospheric catastrophe, I am looking at the post-war physicality of bunkers, at the transformations that take place after demilitarization.

(above) This bunker forms the basement of a house. (below) a bunker usurped by a campground and converted into bathrooms.

I don't mean to pick on Virilio--the same criticism can be lodged against Rudi Rolf, whose excellent book, Atlantic Wall Typology I am lucky to have in my possession. It contains incredible detail on hundreds of bunker types, labels the room functions in plan and section, and goes way farther than Virilio in showing the evolution of form, adaptation to threat, and sheer veracity of concrete volume. This sort of book is for the hobbyist, who loves learning about the German ingenuity of the Atlantic Wall. How did they build so many thousands of bunkers in a short time frame?

Interesting as Virilio's philosophy and Rolf's typology may be, it leaves this bunker-explorer wanting for something a bit more relevant, a bit more productive… some action!

Then I saw this ad in a telephone book here in Dorset, England (one of the most militarized counties in England, from the Iron Age fortress of Maiden Castle to Bovington, birthplace of the tank).



Footnote to the unemployed architect: Could this mean it's time to consider phonebooks as viable means of advertising alternative architectural services?

Writing from a campsite in Zeeland, in the south of the Netherlands. I've been skipping down the coast with my wife hunting for bunkers from the second world war.

A week ago, I met up with fellow Branner fellows Nicolette Mastrangelo and Taylor Medlin in Rotterdam, where I worked one summer seven years ago at the offices of MVRDV. Always good to visit the streets you once roamed. Rotterdam, bombed out and rebuilt--it is the combination of Nicolette's thesis on "cities from scratch" and my own viewpoint on the architecture of war, or that which results from war.

But that left us wondering how to incorporate Taylor's work on remote construction.

How to get remote in Rotterdam? We thought about hitchhiking on a boat--if there was somewhere remote, maybe it would be an abandoned industrial island. I never thought I'd be on a boat…

I held a secret hope that we would see some US Coast Guard personnel wandering around the city--yes, the Coast Guard is here in Rotterdam, inspecting vessels bound for the United States. Isn't that amazing to think that the United States sovereign border is extended somehow into Rotterdam Port. The Army is also here in the form of the 838th Transportation Battallion. They receive and distribute supplies for all of the US military bases in Europe.

Well we didn't get remote on a Coast Guard boat, and Rotterdam is just not new enough of a city to satisfy Nicolette's taste for barren, failing projects (Almere?) So what next?

This is the kind of travel I love--no plans, no expectations, just moving and dealing with set-backs as they inevitably pop up.

On a rainy day we went to the beach. Exactly where no one else in Holland was going. So, then, did that make it remote?

Scheveningen, we get off the tram on the noorderstraand, where the hell are we? Dashing through the downpour to find some shelter on a street lined with brick housing but with no public spaces or alcoves, all the while Nicolette is shouting "we're in a new city, we're in a new city!" We take shelter in a parking garage. The downpour gets heavier. We abandon the option of grabbing umbrellas and as the rain eases up, we set out in search of the Atlantik Wall bunkers.



The rest is history.

[sound coming soon! wi-fi time at the campground running out--]