In Cities and Suburbs Rise Citadels From War

SURVIVAL CITY

Adventures Among

the Ruins of Atomic America

By Tom Vanderbilt

Princeton Architectural Press

224 pages, $25

*

When journalist Tom Vanderbilt (author of “The Sneaker Book: An Anatomy of an Industry and an Icon”) set out on his tour of disused fallout shelters, bunkers, missile sites and other architectural artifacts of the Cold War, he approached his quest somewhat in the spirit of an archeologist from a future age looking back in wonder on the ingenious, awe-inspiring, frightening and fantastic inventions of some distant, bygone civilization. That chapter of history seemed closed.

But not long thereafter, as he headed into Manhattan to go over plans for the design of his finished book, two airplanes struck the towers of the World Trade Center. Suddenly, as he tells us in his “Postscript: September 11, 2001,” he felt as if he’d entered the eerie, terrifying realm portrayed in the 1950s nuclear war pulp novels he’d been reading as part of his research. For, although the threat of planet-destroying warfare has receded, we are still living at a time when cities are targets for mass destruction. Once again, a condition of war, defensive alertness and pervasive anxiety coexists with a general state of peace and business as usual.

To so many of us who agonized about the dangers of the Cold War military buildup, it seemed almost inevitable that so much preparation for war could only lead to war. Yet that is not what happened. The parallels people drew between the Soviet-American arms race and the arms race among pre-World War I European powers did not hold true. Indeed, it is possible to come to the opposite conclusion: that being prepared for war is what saved us from war. But this, too, may be an oversimplification.

The conclusions that Vanderbilt offers are, as he puts it, “tentative.” “As the Cold War and its relics are buried,” he muses, “we should remember one of its enduring architectural lessons: There is no safety in walls.” In fact, however, the kind of ambitious Cold War efforts made to counter the threat of the unthinkable that are recounted in his book might actually make more sense now in the face of a more limited, if less theoretical, threat.

In earlier times, as Vanderbilt reminds us, cities in some sense were armed citadels, surrounded by walls to protect their citizens from attacks, bastions of safety in a dangerous, war-torn landscape. Even then, of course, they were vulnerable to siege and attack. Vanderbilt cites architectural historian Lewis Mumford’s belief that “war was one of the city’s ‘lethal genes,’ dominant in one epoch, repressed in the next. Conflict was inscribed in its very structure.” But the destruction of Dresden and Berlin, Hiroshima and Nagasaki made unmistakably, horrifyingly clear something much worse, something that had been evident ever since the advent of aerial warfare: Modern cities and their civilian populations had become military targets.

Indeed, as far back as the 19th century, Vanderbilt points out, aerial photography transformed landscape into panorama and, as early as 1849, the Austrian army tried (albeit unsuccessfully, thank goodness!) to subdue the city of Venice with bombs dropped from a hot air balloon.

America in the 1950s and 1960s, as Vanderbilt shows, rose to meet this challenge, if not, perhaps, to really solve it. Although the military spearheaded the drive to respond to the nuclear threat with missiles, silos, bunkers, satellites and early-warning radar defense, the streamlined, functional, defensive style became a prevalent mode among architects and builders.

Unlike many other countries (including both our putative foe, the Soviet Union, and steadfastly neutral Sweden), the U.S. made relatively little effort to defend the civilian populations of cities. Although the Office of Civil Defense encouraged homeowners to build fallout shelters, an astonishingly small number followed this advice. While reinforced bunkers and silos were built to house missiles, radar installations, military personnel and presidents, other effects of Cold War thinking were less direct.

Yet even as bunkers were being built below the ground, architects were endowing many ordinary, aboveground buildings with bunker-like qualities: heavy concrete exteriors, scant window surface and artificially lighted, climate-controlled interiors. Paradoxically, at the same time, architects were covering other buildings with vast sheets of glass (which, would, of course, be shattered by any kind of bombing), almost as if in defiance of such dangers.

Not surprisingly, Vanderbilt sees the post-World War II growth of the suburbs as part of the pattern of dispersal away from the bull’s-eye of the targeted city. Here, as elsewhere, he confines himself to the realm of intelligent inference rather than launching full-scale theories. Vanderbilt characterizes his enterprise as “an inquiry about space and how it exists during war. It is about how war defines space, and space defines war.... It is about spaces that are off the map and spaces hidden in plain sight. It is about the dueling sciences of protection and destruction in an age when war went from being a marked event to an underlying condition, when the city went from protective enclave to strategic target. It is about the quest to find safety in the modern world and to express it in physical terms.”

Although chock-full of pointed observations and written in the kind of sharp, vigorous style often associated with polemics, “Survival City” is not an intensely polemical book. It is, however, a genuinely engaging book, perhaps because the author is so skillful at conveying his own sense of engagement to the reader.