In the Ruins of the Cold War Bunker

by Luke Bennett

  But Arno also reminds us that the urban realm is always in flux. Uses come and go, and while bunkers and the voids that they encase are difficult to erase, the uses enacted in these places can change over time. Specifically, Arno flags the iterative life of his Atoombunker, for his proposals for this space are but the most recent instance of the purposing of this void space. This modest subterranean structure has by turns been a 1950s pedestrian underpass, a 1960s ‘anti-social space’, a 1970s improvised nuclear shelter and since the 1990s a sealed void beneath a roundabout. Throughout its life it has flipped in and out of active use and attention.

  THE INTERVIEW

  What motivates your exploration?

  Growing up in the Arnhem region I was confronted at an early age with the memory and the numerous physical remains of area’s turbulent history, most notably the Second World War Battle of Arnhem, better known as ‘A bridge too far’. During my childhood in Oosterbeek – a small town adjacent to Arnhem – which was the actual epicentre of the Battle of Arnhem, physical traces of conflict were omnipresent, whether they were damaged buildings, commemorative stones, the annual ceremonies at the massive military graveyard or the unexploded ammunition or drop containers we as kids would dig up from the woods. The abundance of sites with historic significance instilled in me a deep fascination for history and conflict studies. A side effect of my encounters with the multitude of historically significant sites and their stories was the feeling that every void space or derelict place is a potential site of exploration, full of mysterious attraction and imagination. This instinctive attraction to undefined and abandoned places must have settled in my subconscious as it has certainly informed my professional interests and projects. For instance, it influenced my graduation project design for the planned National History Museum of the Netherlands. Since setting up my own architecture practice, I’ve always been on the lookout for fascinating historic sites that I can work on to combine and express my interests in architecture and history.

  Through my urban exploration I’ve tried to delve deeper into the built environment, searching for places which are normally closed off to the public, meanwhile learning more and more about underexposed remnants of the history of the city. My exploration is driven by a belief that ‘rediscovering’ a historic space that’s currently largely unknown and vacant – but full of potential – could open up possibilities for future redevelopment. And if you’re the first person to find that site, and to think of its potential, this puts you in a good position to take your ideas forward as a project.

  Together with a mixed group of young interdisciplinary professionals brought together through a blog on innovative urban initiatives, called aswespeak.nl we started searching for ‘undiscovered’ forgotten spaces within the city limits. The main focus of the urban exploration excursions was to document them in short movie productions, combined with some rudimentary historical research information, which would both be published on the blog. As the blog is focused on fresh initiatives, every site visit was made with the notion of potential redevelopment in the back of our minds.

  The blog’s interest in undiscovered spaces is quite logical, as newly available voids within the city offer potential space for new initiatives and thus urban innovation. But during our urban explorations I noticed I was drawn more to underground shelters and bunkers than to the more ordinary, more obvious in-sight industrial remains.

  What is the appeal of bunker spaces?

  My professional interest for underground spaces and bunkers seems to come from their intrinsic atmospheric mysterious appeal. Their resemblance is highly functional, their form deriving from its function to deflect and to protect, which makes these structures highly readable and universally semantic, whereas the origins of an industrial heritage site for example are much less open for direct subliminal understanding. The restrained volume of shelters and bunkers immediately invokes the sense of protection, which in turn invokes the sense of danger to be protected from. The (at times) claustrophobic experience directly transmits the historic sensation of the reason these edifices were constructed, without the need for plaques or signing. The anomalous appearance of these bunkers, which were built in a different era for a different situation, adds to their appeal.

  Many military bunkers are still around not because they were conserved, but because they are built to withstand extreme external forces. This resilience – the core of their being – is the primary reason why people try to put them to new use, as destruction is often not an affordable option. With the introduction of reinforced concrete, the bunker has become a solid inviolable entity, while older defensive works composed of building blocks (bricks, natural stone, etc.) or earthen walls are more prone to gradual degradation and partial recycling of its building materials. As a consequence even in the dense city centre of Hamburg or Berlin, gigantic Flak Towers still scan the skies for enemy intrusion. In the Arnhem region the Wehrmacht built vast concrete bunkers to protect their command structure and aircraft arsenal from aerial bombing, while the Dutch government built a network of post–Second World War communication bunkers. All the buildings within the bunker typology were custom built for an extremely specific defined purpose – that is, providing a safe place to direct fire on a specific area, housing a command unit with all its necessities, harbouring specific equipment such as airplanes, rocket installations or whole submarines. Most of the times these structures don’t have any connection with the existing urban fabric; they adhere to a completely different (and now-absent) reality of war maps, lines, sectors, directions and schemes. After this reality is gone, the bunker is left as an erratic in the landscape, devoid of its original reason to exist, adding to the anomalous atmosphere of the derelict bunker.

  The fact that bunker spaces don’t offer the same amount of external reference of its interior layout as a residential or commercial building amplifies the anomalous attraction of their appearance. As the protective shell of the bunker space is the most efficient with the least amount of perforations, there is hardly any external reference to the interior space. The transition from the exterior to the interior becomes much more intense and sensational with the degradation of external reference: the interior has to be discovered, space by space. In the descending into a subterranean building this sensory experience of the threshold between exterior and interior becomes even greater when the mass of the building is hidden from view. The anomalous sensation of entering and exploring these kinds of buildings makes them appeal to the imagination of the visitor and creating a heightened perception: an accidental but nonetheless great phenomenological quality that derives from the edifice’s raison d’être. This anomalous sensation is further increased by the widespread use of reinforced concrete for the protective shell: the tectonic qualities of cast concrete provide hardly any information on its thickness or shape, as opposed to a brick wall or a wooden façade. Thus the raw essence of the bunker’s naissance is still readily available.

  When one walks through it, one can feel the confinement, the claustrophobic spaces, its small highly specific functional openings and its immense walls. This reduces the need for interpretive plaques or handouts for its potential visitors, because the concrete tells its own story. This anomalous presence of the bunker can be a strong tool for redevelopment, as it gives the location a unique universally understandable identity and provides a memorable setting. Places with a strong historical semantic identity offer a highly advantageous foundation for redevelopment, while by redeveloping these places they are presented to a larger audience than their historical significance would normally attract: loads of smaller historical spaces are linked to a larger narrative, but as individual bunkers lack the size or clarity of form to be monumental attractions in themselves (as objects), their possible function as a physical link to a certain story remains largely unused unless enabled through some form of redevelopment (or re-presentation). As the Cold War was a war with very few widely known historic events, it lacks the event-based location
s of, for example, the highly dramatic Second World War, whose historic narrative can be traced across Europe and right through Arnhem. For instance, the presence in Arnhem of the Liberation Route, a remembrance trail following the liberation of Western Europe by the Allies from the landings at D-Day to Berlin, based on telling stories connected to milestones along the route confirms the effective connection between event-based historical storytelling and apt physical locations. With the absence of a larger event/location-based storyline, the physical remnants of the Cold War are much less suitable for exposure and narration for a large audience, even though the Cold War period was of great historical significance. By adding a new function to the historic foundation of the derelict Cold War bunker, a physical link with an underexposed part of history is created.

  But the redevelopers of such sites are faced with the problem of the specific functional layout combined with the extreme inflexibility of the construction material used to make bunkers. As the protective shell uses a lot of space, the interior space is tiny compared to normal buildings. As a surplus in space and dimensions generally provides greater flexibility for re-use, a minimum of highly specific space automatically means a lack of flexibility, and this is a constraint one has to take into account when redeveloping such spaces. The almost-indestructible engineering of defensive spaces makes adaptations to bunkers very costly, making it important to work with the bunker’s structure ‘as it is’ within the redevelopment, avoiding alterations as much as possible. Much more sensitive heritages, such as headquarters of secret service, ghettos, military hospitals, have been reacquired over time for everyday purposes, losing much of their old connotation; sometimes a single plaque mentions the former function, which has to be remembered or cursed, a past function which would probably go largely unnoticed to the public without such a commemoration. These buildings were much more flexible in use, more malleable and mostly situated within and fitting in the urban fabric.

  In times of dwindling armed forces and their withdrawal to smaller bases, many of the tenacious bunker structures open up to a new audience as their sites are opened up to the public, asking for a new purpose. Because of their specific interior characteristics, abandoned bunkers are mostly used as storage spaces for archives or as server farms, a role in which these places are still not open to the public and are mostly withheld from telling their story. The gradual change of function from defensive object to a void space to a container also leads to a lack of attention for preservation: gradually the spaces are filled with endless lines of filing cabinets or servers, discarding undesired original furniture. The bunker shell is stripped of its historic functional interior, thus leaving an empty inflexible shell, devoid of a necessity for preservation. This dynamic leads us to bunkers with much less historic appeal, and which attract less public attention and which therefore are less likely to be eligible for heritage-based funding for their preservation or public interpretation. Therefore, the historic bunker shell is often ignored as an object worthy of preservation and slowly deteriorates if not sustainably re-appropriated. But by adding another functional layer to these empty shells, the focus shifts from preservation to exploitation, replacing the lost function of the interior with a new more public purpose for the bunker.

  Tell me about your Atoombunker Arnhem project2

  The physical memories of the Second World War are very evident in the city of Arnhem; war tourism focused on Operation Market Garden, and the Battle of Arnhem is big and seems to be getting bigger every year. By accident I found out for myself that another layer of conflict heritage objects is scattered across the city of Arnhem and its immediate surroundings. While studying historical images of a part of the green boulevard in between the central station and the city centre, as part of preliminary site research for an urban renewal project, I noticed stairs leading down the square on photos made in the late 1950s. Not aware of the existence of any underground space in that location, I started asking around at the municipality where these stairs had been leading to. This tunnel, built with money from the post–Second World War Marshall Plan, seemed to have been closed down in the late 1960s, because of social safety concerns as nozems3 were roaming the tunnel and using it as a urinal. It was then converted into an atomic shelter, covering the stairs with concrete slabs, building blast compartments by recycling German bunker doors from a nearby Luftwaffe airfield. Nobody at the municipality seemed to know if the converted pedestrian tunnel still existed underground, as there was no apparent entrance. Most civil servants thought it must have been filled up with sand, due to the widening of the street profiles on top of the shelter. After some time doing more research one urban engineer who himself has a keen interest in military history mentioned the existence of manhole which should still lead to the abandoned shelter complex. The decision to investigate the manhole with a friend was quickly made.

  To our surprise we encountered a ladder leading down a black hole after opening the manhole. Going down this ladder carrying a flashlight we first noticed the transition from the square filled with city noise to a place where all noise seemed to disappear. It seemed to be completely cut off from everyday life above ground (Figure 13.1). The original staircases led right up to the concrete ceiling, reinforcing the feeling of being cut off. Dark passageways sealed off by gas proof metal blast doors led to the main shelter space: an elongated space, fully intact, untouched for decades. A hand-driven ventilation system was fixed on the wall along with some meters, portable stoves and toilets, and replacement parts were put away to the side. The ceiling was moist from condensation, while the floor was covered in dust and drip marks. The historic sensation of the place was apparent immediately, amplified by the sense of discovery. It was very exhilarating that such a ‘forgotten’ historical space was located right underneath one of the busiest squares of Arnhem, the Willemsplein.

  Figure 13.1. Discovering the Atoombunker (2012, Arno Geesink).

  The Willemsplein (Willem’s square) is located adjacent to Arnhem’s recently finished new high-speed train terminal designed by UN Studio, which will function as a hub between the Netherlands and Germany. The square is the main pedestrian link between the public transport entrance to the city and the historic city centre, as well as harbours the city’s main trolley bus terminal. The square is situated at the location of the former Janspoort (Jan’s gate) of the dismantled city walls. The remnants of the foundation of this Janspoort embrace the bunker underneath the surface, as the bunker was built right next to them. The transformation of the obsolete defensive ring into a city park or boulevard (from the Dutch word bolwerk – bastion) in 1817 was the first example of its kind in the Netherlands. This one-mile long green boulevard, designed by landscape architect Jan David Zocher – well known for his design of the Vondelpark in Amsterdam – crosses the pedestrian flow from the station at the Willemsplein, which makes it a highly dynamic spot within the city of Arnhem with a large amount of daily passers-by.

  Finding a place of historic significance, with an intrinsic historic sensation, on such a prime location in the city immediately fuelled ideas for possible redevelopment scenarios for the bunker. On top of all the qualities of the location, the bunker space also represented a void within the densely built-up city centre environment on the surface, providing the possibility of adding an extra functional space within this crammed urban fabric. The combination of these factors turned the discovery of the underground bunker into an opportunity for an urban intervention with high potential. Together with Maarten Verweij, a graphic designer with experience in marketing and brand improvement, I started to make initial plans for the redevelopment of this newfound anomalous void underneath the city surface into a space which could be exploitable by adding a new function, while providing an easy accessible historic sensation of the underexposed part of Cold War history.4

  As an architect I strongly favour an interdisciplinary approach to these kinds of pro-active redevelopment proposals; a multidisciplinary proposal can give a broader vie
w on a certain site. Because a redevelopment proposal has to take into account many more aspects besides the architectural character of the space, a wide scope is essential. With our architect’s studio we take the same kind of approach with design proposals which deviate from the formally architectural assignments, often collaborating with brand strategists, graphic designers or product designers. I think this interdisciplinary approach can help create better fitting solutions applied to a specific case and increases the opportunity for surprise and original thinking.

  The route from the station to the historic centre is still the same as it was in the time that the bunker was built as a pedestrian tunnel; thus the location is in the middle of the constant flow of visitors to the city. This location makes the bunker highly useful for a public use with a high frequency of visits. After several brainstorm sessions we distilled a new programmatic addition for the bunker space, taking full advantage of its location as well as creating an easy-accessible historic Cold War bunker sensory experience for a largely uninitiated audience. By converting the bunker space into a cultural tourist information spot, the bunker would make maximum use of its gateway location to the city, informing and directing casual visitors of the city of the temporary cultural happenings in town while simultaneously experiencing the oppressive confinement of the bunker environment. The bunker would also be an atmospheric container for temporary cultural and commercial events, utilizing its anomalous essence as a way to stand out and offer a unique setting for temporary appropriation by third parties.