David Monteyne - Fallout Shelter: Designing for Civil Defense in the Cold War

Medicine by Design: The Architect and the Modern Hospital, 1893-1943 Annmarie Adams

Manhood Factories: YMCA Architecture and the Making of Modern Urban Culture Paula Lupkin

Fallout Shelter: Designing for Civil Defense in the Cold War David Monteyne

Women and the Everyday City: Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915 Jessica Ellen Sewell

194X: Architecture, Planning, and Consumer Culture on the American Home Front Andrew M. Shanken

A Manufactured Wilderness: Summer Camps and the Shaping of American Youth, 1890-1960 Abigail A. Van Slyck

The Architecture of Madness: Insane Asylums in the United States Carla Yanni

ARCHITECTURE, LANDSCAPE, AND AMERICAN CULTURE SERIES

xi

City, Suburb, and Shelter in 1950s Civil Defense

City and Social Planning for Civil Defense

Professional Architects and Civil Defense

Fallout Shelter in New Buildings

Boston City Hall

The security guard rolled his chair aside while keeping one eye on the surveillance camera images emanating from his bank of screens. The building manager pushed away a large table, revealing a steel trapdoor set flush with the concrete floor. "Here it is," he said, bending over to grab an inset ring and pull up the heavy door. A flight of steel stairs with open risers disappeared in the darkness of the dirty subbasement. "After you," he said. I gingerly descended, then waited at the edge of light cast down from the hatch opening. I thought about my newly polished dress shoes and the likelihood of rats. "There's a light switch down here somewhere," muttered the building manager, who had joined me at the bottom. When he flicked it on a long corridor appeared, lit by a straight row of evenly spaced bare bulbs receding into the distance. Immediately apparent, lining both sides of the corridor, were seemingly endless stacks of cardboard boxes. Each one was marked with a telltale yellow symbolthe letters CD inscribed within a triangle, within a solid circle-and the words "CIVIL DEFENSE SHELTER SUPPLIES FOOD." This was what I was here to see.

These high-energy crackers, stored in this nondescript space, were material evidence of architecture for civil defense. During the Cold War, architects had surveyed this building and determined that many of its everyday office and public spaces offered excellent shelter from fallout radiation. In turn, the federal civil defense agency had marked the building with signage and supplied these survival rations, first aid kits, emergency commodes, and Geiger counters. Volunteers had delivered the supplies, and building personnel at the time had located available storage areas in the building's subbasements.

I also was there to see the building itself: Boston City Hall. As an architectural historian, I was aware that it was an icon of 1960s modernism in the United States. Several years earlier I had embarked on a study attempting to explain why North American architects and their clients adopted a particular architectural style for public buildings in the 1960s. Boston City Hall was a prime example of this architectural approach, what I had come to think of superficially as the "bunker style." I had not been the only observer to note the seemingly defensive and militaristic aesthetic of these buildings, characterized as they are by bold, rectilinear masses in exposed, rough concrete. But what lay behind this choice of aesthetic? What concerned American architects and their collaborators at the time?

During the 1950s and 1960s, the period of this study, the hot button building security issue in the United States was the aftermath of nuclear war. I found that civil defense experts allied with architects on numerous fronts in the Cold War: planning for urban dispersal, shelter surveys and technical reports, design competitions and charrettes, the construction of buildings with fallout shelter. At the time, civil defense officials also had been aware of Boston City Hall's significance within architectural discourse. They had distributed a slick publication celebrating the civil defense aspects of the building. This publication had led me back here, to an example of the bunker style. Stepping over debris in the dingy depths of Boston City Hall confirmed for me that this bunker architecture went more than skin deep.

This study traces a developing alliance between architecture and government during the early Cold War, when U.S. civil defense agencies formed mutually beneficial partnerships with professional architects. The purpose of civil defense was planning to ensure social, economic, and political continuity after large-scale catastrophes, especially nuclear war. Civil defense relied on architects to demonstrate how plans for protecting citizens in the imagined aftermath of nuclear attack were based on the material realities of building construction and everyday spaces. By developing a discourse and a rationalized set of practices concerning civil defense and "shelter," the state worked with architects to redefine what constituted "good design." Providing a foundation for civil defense, and participating in planning for national security, architects aimed to bolster the profession's leadership role in relation to competing experts on the built environmentthey hoped to be recognized as defense intellectuals. If preparation for enemy attack was deemed vital to the preservation of the nation, and the duty of all good citizens, then civil defense was an excellent opportunity to display architectural good citizenship.