Bunker Archaeology, Paul Virilio

> the bunkers of the Atlantikwall are anti-vernacular, and also non-domestic militaristic.

> relocation, dislocation, reformulation, agglomeration? build an artificial lagoon-like at Sète near military bunkers; recreated or pushed out to sea to create a fisherman's lagoon as an effort to reclaim the old militarized zone and its structures.

> relationship of new war tactics and wilding as a representation of non-order, unpredictability. 

· "All houses are dwellings, but all dwellings are not houses." Oliver, p. 15.

//


· "The combat designated here is an originating one, for this combat brings forth combatants as such, not simply the assault given to a subsistent thing. Combat is that which first of all draws up and develops the unheard of, up to then unsaid and unthought. The combat is then underpinned by those who strive: poets, thinkers, statesmen. When the combat ceases, that which is does not disappear, but the world turns away." M. Heidegger

· "... recovering peace and access to the beach were one and the same event. With the barriers removed, you were henceforth free to explore the liquid continent; the occupants had returned to their native hinterland, leaving behind, along with the work site, their tools and arms." p. 9.

· "The sky had volatilized, everything had become a field of action, little was missing before war became total." Virilio, p. 57.

· "... construct countless bunkers, symbols of the fragility of the Nazi state... These concrete structures ceaselessly proliferated and got thicker, an almost botanical sign of a constantly increasing pressure, of a constantly more 'rigorous' climate." Virilio, p. 57.

· "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." Virilio, p. 57.

· Goebbels: "So, people, may the storm break out!" Virilio, p. 58.

> in a sense the Nazi Atlantikwall was both a representation of their continental expansion and conquest in extension of their power and rule — but also a limitation, stopping short at the ocean, showing vulnerability in the defense of their acquisitions.

· "This had been a frontier that an army had just abandoned, and the meaning of this oceanic immensity was intertwined with this aspect of the deserted battlefield." p. 9.


· "... the object no longer made the same sense, though there was still protection here."


· "... why would these extraordinary constructions, compared to the seaside villas, not be perceived or even recognized? Why this analogy between the funeral archetype and military architecture? Why this insane situation looking out over the ocean? This waiting before the infinite oceanic expanse? Until this era, fortifications had always been oriented toward a specific, staked-out objective..." p. 11.


· "the immensity of this project is what defies common sense; total war was revealed here in its mythic dimension. The course I had begun to run, over the banks of Festung Europa (Fortress Europe), was going to introduce me into the reality of Occidental geometry and the function of equipment on sites, continents, and the world.


Everything was suddenly vast. The continental threshold had become a boulevard — the linearity of my exploration; sun and sand were now personal territory that I was beginning to like more and more. This continuous band of dunes and pebbles and the sharp crest of the cliffs along the coast fit into a nameless country where the three interchanges were glimpsed: the oceanic and aerial space along with the end of emerged land. The only bearings I had for this trip from the south to the north of Europe were these stelae whose meaning was still unsure. A long history was curled up here. These concrete blocks were in fact the final throw-offs of the history of frontiers, from the Roman limes to the Great Wall of China; the bunkers, as ultimate military surface architecture, had shipwrecked at lands' limits, at the precise moment of the sky's arrival in war; they marked off the horizontal littoral, the continental limit. History had changed course one final time before jumping into the immensity of aerial space." p. 12.

· "These heavy grey masses with sad angles and no openings — excepting the air inlets and several staggered entrances — brought to light much better than many manifestos the urban and architectural redundancies of this postwar period that had just reconstructed to a tee the destroyed cities. The antiaircraft blockhouses pointed out another lifestyle, a rupture in the apprehension of the real. The blue sky had once been heavy with the menace of rumbling bombers, spangled too with the deafening explosions of artillery fire. This immediate comparison between the urban habitat and the shelter, between the ordinary apartment building and the abandoned bunkers in the hearts of the ports through which i was traveling, was as strong as a confrontation, a collage of two dissimilar realities. The antiaircraft shelters spoke to me of men's anguish and the dwellings of the normative systems that constantly reproduce the city, the cities, and the urbanistic." p. 13.


· "We violently rejected the bunkers as symbols rather than logically, with patience: as so many people said, "It is a question of time!" That is also what you say of the avant-garde.... What was the nature of the modernness in these historical ruins? Could war be prospective?" p. 14.


· "... the conflict I perceived between the summer of seaside bathing and the summer of combat would never again cease. For me the organization of space would now go hand in hand with the manifestations of time." p. 14.


· "This game created an implicit empathy between the inanimate object and visitor, but it was the empathy of mortal danger to the point that for many it was unbelievably fearsome. The meaning was less now that of a rendezvous, and more of combat: 'if the war were still here, this would kill me, so this architectural object is repulsive.'" p. 14.

References - Dwellings, Paul Oliver;