A tour of the built legacy of the Cold War, from missile silos to fallout shelters

BY SUDIP BOSE

Buy this book

Survival City: Adventures Among the Ruins of Atomic America
By Tom Vanderbilt
Princeton Architectural Press, 224 pages, $25

In the 1985 Cold War comedy Spies Like Us (starring Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd as bumbling intelligence officers), two state department officials arrive at what appears to be an abandoned drive-in in the middle of the Nevada desert. Inside a decrepit snack bar, the two men approach a dusty soda fountain, when one of them triggers a mechanism that causes the floor to open up, sending the men hurtling down a narrow shaft at super speed. When they finally reach bottom, thousands of feet below the surface of the earth, they find themselves in a well-fortified command center, with computers and electronic consoles alive with blinking lights and high-ranking military men sitting around in cozy-looking chairs sipping booze. Some rogue Army officers, it turns out, are planning to start a nuclear war—and ride things out in the comfort of their high-tech, underground bunker.

This is the kind of place that comes to mind when I hear the phrase "cold war architecture"—all concrete and tunnels and heavy doors (think of the opening sequence from television's Get Smart), but with the trappings of luxury inside. Of course, the world we built for the sole purpose of carrying out our $5.5 trillion stare down with the Soviet Union—the world of command centers, test sites, bunkers, laboratories, fallout shelters, and missile silos—is, as Tom Vanderbilt shows in this meticulously researched and engaging book, far different from what the public has always imagined it to be, no thanks to science fiction and spy novels.

Take Project Greek Island, for example, one of the many Cold War sites Vanderbilt visits. Nowhere in this bunker, constructed beneath West Virginia's posh Greenbriar Resort as a home for Congress in the event of a nuclear attack, does he find any "well-appointed sitting rooms" or "fifteen-year-old scotch. There are indeed few soft edges whatsoever, nary a concession to the subterranean homesick blues; the feeling is of concrete and steel, of industry. The bunker looks like a factory; survival is its product." The same could be said of the headquarters of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, located inside Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado; we expect "the technocratic flamboyance displayed in the James Bond films, but the reality is a place where normal people are simply going about their work, albeit without natural light, some 9,000 feet below the peak of the mountain."

American Cold War architecture suffers a curious fate. No one can deny its importance, its service to national defense. And yet, for the most part, we do not venerate abandoned Cold War landmarks in the way we do Civil War battlefields, lavishing them with markers and plaques. In Mercury, Nev., a town that flourished because of the atomic testing industry, Vanderbilt comes upon "street after street of low-slung cinder-block buildings, painted desert pastel with air conditioning machinery lurking atop their flat roofs … erected in the great rush of the missile gap and then left to sit in the sun." Of course, places like Mercury have all the aesthetic charm of a dumpster. They're function, not beautiful, which explains why they, and their Cold War cousins, aren't exactly the darlings of architecture critics.

Vanderbilt argues, however, that many Cold War sites have been unjustly neglected. "It took a Le Corbusier to champion the American grain silo as an eminent form," he writes, "but there has been no Le Corbusier of the missile silo—the deadly connotations may be too grim. Nevertheless, the missile silo represents one of the country's largest public works programs in history, one that had a great impact on the landscape. Yet any single building by Mies van der Rohe has occasioned more architectural consideration than all these structures combined, though silos and installations are in a sense the highest expression of the modernist dictum ‘form follows function.'"

But what, if any, of this built legacy should be preserved? We might chuckle or scratch our heads when we read how an Atlas F ICBM silo in upstate New York has been given new life—as a 4,000-square-foot home carrying a $2.4 million price tag. But there's an irony inherent in any effort to save, say, an atomic test site, a place like Frenchman's Flat, in Nevada. The Flat was built to be bombed, after all, with scientists trying to determine what kinds of architecture could withstand an atomic blast; it was never intended to endure. The same is true of two houses in nearby Yucca Flat: "spartan, lacking front porches, gables, or adornment of any kind, sitting impossibly in the middle of this scarcely inhabitable desert." But local groups are indeed trying to save these so-called Monopoly hotels. The question is: Would America's built environment be any worse off if the Yucca Flat houses—abandoned and forgotten in the middle of nowhere—were to crumble, the dust rising up from the ruins to meet whatever nuclear residue still hangs in the air around them? If they were preserved, who would even go to see them?

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to preserving most Cold War architecture has to do with the dehumanizing nature of the buildings themselves. I'm talking not about test sites and labs, but underground schools and the fallout shelters and back-yard bunkers of 1950s suburbia. To build a shelter that could resist a blast, one necessarily had to eschew all those things that make a structure habitable: light, adequate ventilation, decoration. (I cannot imagine what it must have been like to memorize multiplication tables in the gloomy underground Abo school in Artesia, N.M.) Unless you found living in a concrete box particularly heartwarming, you would probably have been driven mad after a week or so of such a coffin-like existence. And to think that some bunkers were designed to house people for many months; I'd have probably taken my chances with radiation if it meant getting some fresh air and sunlight.

The agents of destruction these days, we are told, are more likely to be chemical or biological. Just this morning, however, the FBI warned U.S. allies to watch out for al Qaeda's attempts to acquire nuclear weapons. I'm pretty sure nobody will be hurrying home to build a bomb shelter in his back yard. But a new nuclear threat, legitimate or not, does suggest that the installations Vanderbilt visits in his thoughtful, exhaustive book may not be as obsolete as they must have seemed just a year ago. The Cold War may be over. Let's hope its instruments do not come in handy one day.

Sudip Bose is associate editor of Preservation magazine.

Read more excerpts from our current issue online, look for the May/June 2002 issue on newsstands, or e-mail us to purchase a copy, or subscribe to the magazine.