by Luke Bennett
These temporary appropriations by external parties of a few hours up to a month could use the bunker as a void space which they have to fill in in a creative way, giving the bunker space a fresh appeal (Figure 13.2). Appropriating the space in a creative way will be the only rule for curating potential users: any party can temporarily use the bunker, as long as the use is interesting and creative, be it a shoe shop, a gaming event or the Arnhem Zoo. The conversion of the bunker would need to treat it with the utmost respect, keeping it intact and conserving the historic value of the setting, while at the same time making it accessible and safe for a large audience. The size of the bunker would allow a maximum of 150 people to be in the main area at any given moment due to fire safety regulations, a number which pushes the limit and will make it a cramped claustrophobic place, forcing the visitor to casually experience the anomalous interior. The relative small size of the 100 square metre main area is very apt for the intended use and audience; if it was – say – 500 square metres, the whole project ambition would have to be raised, increasing the stakes, political involvement, investments and so on.
Figure 13.2. The Present and Future of the Atoombunker (2012, Arno Geesink).
We propose to keep the bunker as intact as we possibly can, only adding the bare minimum to solve issues such as ventilation, fire safety and accessibility. A single horizontal tiled ridge is added along one long wall which houses all cabling, ventilation and other piping while containing a resin-covered light strip to illuminate the interior. This ridge connects five existing indented portals which are positioned along the length of the space which will illuminate the bunker as well. Some secondary spaces will be filled with installations, technical support and restrooms to facilitate proper use. The stairs which are covered with concrete slabs remain untouched, creating niches at both ends of the tunnel where one can sit and experience the underground location. The existing central staircase is the only one viable for the main entrance, as it is the only one that is not covered by roads on the surface. In order to be able to lock the bunker when not in use, we propose to build a four-metre long industrial hatch. When closed and lying flat in the grass, the hatch will blend in with the park landscape on the bunker surface and when it is lifted up in the air to provide access, the erected hatch will function as a billboard to signify passers-by that the bunker is open to the public. The light emitting from below the ground can guide the curious visitor down into the subterranean space.
Creating a new public space within the bunker in a highly visible location involves some risks, which have to be kept to a minimum to create political support and attract investors, because stakeholders are not eager to participate in a project that becomes a flop. We rather want to use the strategy of try small, fail small.
By keeping conversion costs as low as possible, we intend to keep the amount of funds we need to acquire to a minimum: this means we try not to be dependent on subsidies from the municipality or other governmental layers, which would further complicate the already-complex situation. By keeping the required number of investment partners low the project is easier to manage and the amount of partner demands, compensation and influence is decreased. By approaching selected partners who can contribute in kind in a specific part of the conversion, the threshold for participation is lowered. In this way the conversion itself and the resultant place will be a billboard for the professional activities of the partners involved. For example, Philips is likely to provide the LED-lighting for the interior, while an industrial escape-hatch producer is willing to manufacture the custom-fit entrance hatch.
On the other hand, we have been keen to attract the interest of as many potential local partners in the commercial and the cultural area to be involved in the exploitation of the future use of the bunker. These partners ensure the economic viability as well as the programmatic content needed for the bunker’s exploitation. The bunker will be the connector in a network of all the cultural, public and commercial partners, providing a platform for casual meetings and events. By registering the intention of these partners in an early stage, the viability for exploitation is verified to further develop the plan. In the final phase of redevelopment a collaboration is planned with a custom-made innovative tile manufacturer to sell specially curved tiles with the names of private sponsors etched in the surface which will be used in the interior finish. The crowd-funding campaign for these tiles will double as a marketing campaign as well, raising the profile of the Atoombunker site.
Luckily, an accidental advantage of the underground location is the fact that the bunker conversion doesn’t increase the visibility of the development: most of the activity will happen below the surface and out of sight, while the only physical change on the surface will be the entrance hatch. As this entrance is closed when there are no events in the bunker, the bunker doesn’t add any profile in the city park location. Only when the underground bunker space opens up does the hatch fold upwards, becoming a beacon to guide visitors downstairs. Due to this fact the building won’t stand out as a vacant space when there isn’t anything going on inside, so this – in turn – reduces the need to have a full-time programme five or seven days a week. Plus, if the project were to fail, then the only legacy would be the entrance hatch, there wouldn’t be a failed empty new building left visible in the city centre. Instead, what would be left behind is only what was there before: an underground void underneath the surface.
How is the project developing since you initiated it?
We’re making progress with bringing our project to life. But these things take time (and money!). In the meantime, we try to sustain a public profile for the bunker redevelopment through online media, and we’ve secured over 700 followers on social media and the bunker project has featured in several newspapers and on national radio. Also, by building temporary installations on top of the bunker, awareness has been raised of the world below. During the Arnhem Fashion Biennale an art installation was built in the bunker in collaboration with several artists, which was only visible through an enlarged upside-down periscope installed into a manhole.
While trying to figure out how to make the conversion plans reality several physical issues were encountered: first of all the problematic issue of trying to find space for our site within the already-densely appropriated and planned surface, and heavily utilized underground environment surrounding our bunker. The existing hub-like function of the area results in a high density of present infrastructure, in the form of traffic (pedestrian and vehicular) and utilities such as sewage, gas pipes and electricity cables. On top of that the trees on the boulevard park that was extended in the 1990s on top of the bunker have to be protected from harm, and the redevelopment has to respect the park-like surface location. Conversion of the bunker space inherently involves creating a new main entrance and ideally a secondary one as well. As the local surface area is either a park or a traffic zone, the options are severely limited. The bunker has five entrances, two forked entrances on each end of its elongated form and one broad staircase which leads down to two separate corridors through which the main space is accessed. The staircases are sealed with concrete blocks, upon which a new layer of the city was built after the bunker was abandoned. Only the main central entrance is suitable for access in the present situation, as the other exits are now covered by the widened bus and car lanes. The fact that the suitable access location is right in the middle of the boulevard park makes it a very sensitive part of the redevelopment. While the municipality supports the creation of a new cultural hotspot in the derelict bunker, it also has a policy to preserve existing green areas in the city and to expand these areas, especially extending the boulevard park all the way to the Rhine River, where the old city walls enclosed the historic city centre. The creation of an entrance building, which would have a much-needed billboard function on the surface to reveal the bunker location to the passing crowd, directly opposed this policy. Although small kiosk buildings did exist in the heyday of the boulevard in the
19th century, contributing to its value as an urban space, the reintroduction of an edifice in the park is not an option. After much deliberation consensus was found in the proposal to disclose the subterranean space with a missile silo-like industrial hatch of four metres long, which is allowed to fold open during opening hours, creating a billboard in the meantime. After resolving the issue of the entrance within the park zone, subsequent problems arose: where would the inevitable bicycles of the visitors be parked, where would the garbage bins be stored on the surface, would the people smoking outdoors be a safety hazard for passing traffic? All these quite standard problems become big issues because of the very limited room on the surface, due to the aesthetic (park), physical (roads and traffic) and legal (zoning) constraints. If any of these issues prove to be incapable of resolution, the whole plan could be rejected by the municipality administration.
Second, the resilient essence of the bunker makes it quite hard to freely redevelop the structure. The physical qualities that give the bunker its universal sensory quality, being protective, indestructible, result in thick walls and ceiling, leaving little space for the enclosed volumes which the concrete shell protects. This leads to spaces which are limited, whereas architecture flexibility for varied and innovative use of space is the easiest to achieve through extra-sized spaces. This flexibility is key when changing the intended function of a building or space. But enlarging or modifying the existing spaces in the bunker is accompanied by higher than normal costs, as modifications are directly resisted by the indestructability inherent in the bunker’s original form, and there is no room for extensions because of the underground location. Fortunately, the goal of the conversion has always desired to leave the space intact, ensuring its historic value and the experience of it by the audience. But the combined result is that every modification to enable the bunker to be accessible and safe and to have a comfortable interior climate (illumination, air quality, acoustics) has to happen within the existing untouched shell. So the addition of new infrastructure, new routes and space for visitors to enable the space to be redeveloped all have to be implemented in the already-restricted volume of the bunker. Thus an existing corridor has to become an entrance and fire exit for the visitors, as well as a feed-through for ventilation or the tiled wall has to incorporate a ventilation feed, new electricity cables, increase its acoustic dampening while retaining its original look and feel. As all necessary modifications are accompanied by a list of architectural restrictions, they inherently have to be custom-fitted, which increases the initial redevelopment cost compared to a more common redevelopment project. The high-cost custom-fit modifications have to be kept to a bare minimum to keep the investments low and the interior as intact as possible.
Third, the underground location of the bunker complicates its conversion to a public urban space. All utility connections to the bunker have to be made several metres beneath the surface, underneath busy traffic lanes. The fact that the entire exterior of the bunker is covered with soil means that this exterior is effectively obscured from vision, denying the essential insight in the location during the drawing-up of the conversion plans. Necessary surveying techniques such as ground penetrating radar are quite expensive in the initial phase of a project like this. As the decisions in the initial design process have the biggest impact on the final project cost, a high level of information to base design decisions on is very valuable and actually a requirement in normal situations. But due to the bunker’s anomalous characteristics we have to work somewhat ‘in the dark’.
Have many bunkers been restored or re-purposed in your area?
As Arnhem was a garrison town for centuries and was part of the IJssellinie defence line in the Cold War period,5 there are lot of bunkers in its vicinity. The Diogenes bunker at Schaarsbergen,6 the former Luftwaffe command centre for Western Europe (specifically for directing night fighters) has been used as an archive, but this is now being relocated. The bunker is in need of a new use, and interested developers are looking into the case. There’s an old bunker of the civilian nuclear protection organization which is now in use as an archive as well. A former communications command bunker underneath a children’s playground in the centre of Arnhem, which was ingeniously camouflaged as a massive concrete open air theatre, was saved this fate by its former attendants, who immediately bought the bunker the moment it became defunct, preserving its original interior and furnishing. It is now open to school visits in its original, preserved state.7
There are many more bunkers, which we are indexing at the moment, but most of them don’t have a real use right now. There haven’t been any really creative new uses, but we are hoping to change that. As most bunkers used to be part of a different network as the urban network of the present, their location can make it hard to find a new commercial use. Another converted underpass shelter is situated on the same Willemsplein square as the Atoombunker, but in this case all of the bunker’s entrances are covered by roads, making it inaccessible and so very hard to redevelop.
A string of casemates can be found within the Meijnerswijk River forelands nature reserve on the South bank of the Rhine River, which are part of the IJssellinie (IJssel defensive line). The network of casemates and waterworks and defensive dykes created an intricate system of defensive inundation to delay a Warsaw Pact invasion of Holland. While the casemates are too small to facilitate any new relevant use, the waterworks on the other hand consist of long sluice-like concrete structures which now sit idle in the nature reserves landscape, and these could offer a promising platform for redevelopment.
I have been working recently on a lightweight reinterpretation of a Cold War–era concrete frame air observation tower which can serve as a viewpoint from which to see the defensive inundation system and its remnants in the landscape. More than a hundred of these towers were built in the 1950s to scan the Dutch skies for enemy intrusion, although the telephone-based system of communication was already obsolete at the start of the program. The few remaining concrete frame observation tower structures are beautiful to behold, and I am investigating a lightweight foam-based construction replacement for the original constructively unsound thin prefab concrete frames. As the nature reserve is going to have a bigger focus on its potential role as a city park with more recreational value, an observation tower informing the visitor of the nearly vanished defensive line which partially shaped the landscape could be a nice addition.
What designs, buildings and ideas have influenced your approach most?
As bunkers are built to resist external force, it’s pretty costly to adapt them to new uses. You mostly have to use them as they come, so apparently they end up as archive space due to their robust nature and constant climate. Because of this I haven’t seen that many new uses, but I love the Bunker 599 project by Ronald Rietveld,8 as it shows the workings of a bunker sensationally, with the very simple gesture (which wasn’t that simple in reality) of cutting a pathway right through the middle of the bunker. Belgian architecture firm B-ild has sensitively transformed a small WW2–era bunker into a vacation home, making full use of the tectonic qualities of the bunker interior.9 We have seen several redevelopments of Dutch Waterline forts, turning the fort interiors into museum locations or making use of the beautiful natural location of the fort. Most fort locations are more spacious with surrounding bulwark areas and were built to accommodate quite large numbers of inhabitants and are thus much easier to redevelop as publicly accessible locations, compared to the bunker space. The Vuurtoreneiland (Lighthouse Island) near Amsterdam, which used to be a part of its defensive ring, is presently being turned into a hospitality island, with restaurant and hotel facilities.10 The transformation of Fort Vechten into the Waterline museum by Dutch architect Anne Holtrop is also a fine example of the architectural tension the adaptation of the existing defensive edifice creates.11
How important is preserving a sense of the past of these places?
The Cold War is an underexposed period in Dutch history; alt
hough lots of physical remnants are in plain sight, their historical connotation is not apparent. By opening up this space to the public, we do want them to know what its purpose used to be, and that nuclear war was a real threat in the past. We call our project Atoombunker (nuclear bunker), which will make this clear. The essence of the bunker, its thick walls, steel doors and confined spaces will induce the visitor with the old function of the building. Above all, our desire is to retain and communicate a sense of the past by repurposing bunker spaces, and bringing people back into contact with them in ways that avoid the museum-type approach, and which concentrate upon the bunker-spaces themselves being active story-tellers.
Bunkers don’t just speak to history, but they are also novel spaces in themselves and we want people to experience this aspect too. For, at the Atoombunker, the steps down into this former subway are not like the entrance to a normal building, and the act of using them creates a particular sensation. The descent, step by step, commands a certain slowing of the body’s movement and a concentration. We think that effect is quite ceremonial: making the experience like walking into an event space, and with all of the anticipation and transcendence that that can make you feel. So, in addition to provoking memory, bunkers do have an ability to provoke the body too, because of their unusual physical and atmospheric arrangement.
NOTES
1.See, for example, http://www.aswespeak.nl/lokaal/overzicht-ondergronds-arnhem – 200
2.http://atoombunker.nl/
3.The earliest modern Dutch subculture, related to the Teddy Boy movement (UK) and greasers (or rockers) in the US.
4.See the concept design video for Atoombunker Arnhem here: https://player.vimeo.com/video/67791977 and the websites http://www.atoombunkerarnhem.nl/ and http://atoombunkerarnhem.weebly.com