What Lies Beneath

What a sleek, streamlined, postwar-era modern home this seems to be, outfitted with a spiral staircase, a cozy kitchen with a drip coffeemaker and neatly arranged storage space. But a closer look at an architect’s rendering from 1955 reveals that this is no suburban tract home--it’s a fallout shelter.

“Nuclear Families: The Home Fallout Shelter Movement in California, 1950-1969,” at the University Art Museum at UC Santa Barbara, examines Cold War bomb shelters in societal, art and architecture contexts, incorporating plans and renderings along with fallout-related civil defense material and pop culture items. This is more than campy retro design.

“I wanted this to be a social art history,” says exhibition curator Elizabeth Kathleen Mitchell, a UCSB doctoral candidate in art and architectural history. Mitchell incorporated pieces from the university’s Architecture and Design Collection archives, as well as from the Conelrad Collection, owned by a Los Angeles-based Web site dedicated to all things Atomic Age. “The material could have been used in a lot of directions, but I was really interested in the fallout shelter because of all the connections about gender and structuring identities, and the idea that it was up to the individual to build these. It wasn’t a general program like retrofitting for earthquakes; people had to take the initiative.”

In a small gallery inside this recently renovated on-campus museum, Mitchell has assembled plans and renderings of bomb shelter designs by respected Southern California architects Paul Laszlo, Robert B. Stacy-Judd and Jim Charlton, as well as pulp novels, civil defense brochures and a movie poster. However comic some of them seem today in their “Armageddon is just around the corner” sensibility, such shelters--some of which still exist--serve as a stark reminder of how pervasive the fear of a nuclear attack on American soil was a half-century ago and how much it influenced myriad aspects of Americans’ lives. Although the exhibition was conceived a year ago, it’s impossible not to draw parallels between then and now, as phrases like “axis of evil” and “weapons of mass destruction” again become part of the vernacular.

“The verdict isn’t in,” says Kurt Helfrich, curator of the university’s Architecture and Design Collection, which contributed several pieces to the show. “We’re still living with the possibility of nuclear destruction, and I believe that living with that threat does change the kind of optimism and progressive thinking that had gone before. How we’ve incorporated that into our culture is really important to understand.”

The Laszlo shelter sketches are part of the architect’s greater vision, called “Atomville USA,” which he envisioned as a planned community incorporating underground structures connected by cable cars. While trying to sell the idea to the military to use for housing, he was commissioned to build a shelter for a private residence in Woodland Hills. A black-and-white photograph from the era shows a group of schoolchildren happily descending into the backyard structure.

Mitchell points out the care taken by the Hungarian-born Laszlo, known for his glamorous, luxurious style, to make the structures not only efficient, but aesthetically pleasing as well--the same care he put into homes for celebrities such as Cary Grant and Barbara Stanwyck. She explains how rooting through the university’s architectural archives for Atomic Age design turned up a surprise--a wealth of information on bomb shelters.

“I’d been going through all these plans for commercial buildings, and some homes, and it was so jarring to see a lot of the same considerations taken for those as for streamlined living underground,” Mitchell says, noting that Laszlo’s renderings include such survivalist musts as a drip coffeemaker and a telephone. “Building codes for bomb shelters were not in place yet in L.A. county, but in his materials Laszlo was assuring people that the shelters would just be used for emergencies. But in other materials you’d see things like, ‘If the bomb never drops, you can use the shelter as an extra room for guests, or storage, or another entertaining area!’”

Laszlo (1900-1993) also had a career designing textiles and furniture, along with commercial and residential buildings. He tried to market his bomb-proof quarters to the government without luck, Mitchell says. A letter from the Federal Civil Defense Administration declines his petition to attend a nuclear test program in Las Vegas to gather information before building his shelters.

Stacy-Judd (1884-1975) was a London-born architect who lived in Southern California; he designed commissioned shelters that showed influences of the Mayan and pre-Columbian architecture he loved (he designed the famed Aztec Hotel in Monrovia).

“These drawings reflect his mind-set,” she says of his rigidly structured underground dwellings. “You can still see his interest in patterning. Laszlo was very glossy and glamorous, but Stacy-Judd was very nuts and bolts. It made sense to him to draw in every steel beam where it was needed.”

Shelters represented more than squeezing a family of four into a small space underground. They divided the haves and the have-nots, says Mitchell: “There are themes about quality of living in all of these renderings, which obviously was a big consideration if you had enough money to commission a professional architect.” While a shelter could be improvised from anything--a basement to a car buried in the backyard--she was only interested in the designed shelters “as a reflection of class and consumption.”

These dwellings also gave rise to “shelter mentality,” pitting neighbor against neighbor when homeowners considered who they’d take underground, and who they’d leave behind. The phenomenon also, according to Mitchell, cemented stereotypical gender roles.

An illustrated poster with “Protect Them!” in large type depicts a quintessential 1950s-era mother comforting her cowering children. “It was obviously directed at the father, who was in charge of protecting his family. It kind of created this very rigid social and sexual identity,” Mitchell says, with mother as nurturer and father as builder and protector. “The government was telling you how to behave. It was naturalizing these rigid roles as people were living under the gun all the time. Everybody had to know their role, or they’d die.”

A display of pulp novels reveals titles like “The Day They H-Bombed Los Angeles” and “Tomorrow!,” with a cover showing a shapely woman barely holding onto her tattered clothes, blown off by a nuclear blast. An original poster for the 1955 film “Creature With the Atomic Brain” reads: “Terror true to science, based on laboratory experiments described in national magazines!” and depicts a scary zombie-being whose brain has been replaced with atomic matter. A listening station enables visitors to hear civil defense instructions on how to stock and live in a fallout shelter.

These items are courtesy of Conelrad, whose Web site (www.conelrad.com) offers a plethora of Cold War culture bites, including films, civil defense material and some original research done by site founders Ken Sitz, Curtis Samson and Bill Geerhart. Sitz, 50, says he remembers “duck and cover” drills in school and finds the era, which he calls “the golden age of homeland defense,” fascinating because “it’s a key to so many other things. I’m particularly interested in music of that era, and obviously the society really changed after World War II.... We’re trying to do a lot of first-hand research. It’s not hard to talk to people who lived it--Bill tracked down a couple who spent their honeymoon in a fallout shelter. A lot of companies that built swimming pools got into shelter building because they had the equipment. The problem was financing.”

Mitchell and Sitz warn against drawing too many parallels between nuclear destruction fears then and now: “Because we don’t have that much experience in the 20th and 21st centuries in feeling threatened at home, the two are easy to equate,” Mitchell points out. “But the conditions are different. Now we’re more inclusive in defining Americans--it doesn’t matter where you came from. Then, America was America if you were white and Protestant.”

Mitchell hopes students born after the age of fallout shelters and atomic zombie sci-fi films will see the exhibition and “think about the fact the way we respond to threats and differences is not natural, it’s naturalized for you by materials like the civil defense brochures. People didn’t get up in the morning and think, ‘Well, I’d better build a bomb shelter to protect my family.’ It was imposed on them very clearly and reasonably by the government. It’s propaganda. And people don’t think critically about propaganda. They’re not thinking critically about it today.”

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“Nuclear Families: The Home Fallout Shelter Movement in California, 1950-1969,” at the University Art Museum at UC Santa Barbara. Through April 14. Call (805) 893-7564, or visit www.uam.ucsb.edu.