The ostensible purpose of architecture- that of creating sustaining human environments- was irrevocably shifted by the landscapes of total mobilisation during World War 2. It is interesting to note the parallels between the observatory forms as envisaged by Mendelsohn, and the artillery range control bunkers of the 1940s Atlantic Wall constructed by the Todt Organisation in occupied France, the Channel Islands, and round to Norway.

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Virilio's 'Bunker Archaeology' is an unexpectedly moving analysis of these massive structures, part of a whole which stretched from the Pyrenees past Normandy. Apparent too is the link between the age of position warfare and the age of ballistic missiles; some of these structures were adapted for the V1 and V2 rocket programme.
The concept of Total War inflected the concept of the Total Piece of Art or Environment in its wake. The orientation of modernism to a positive view of human energy shifted, and ambivalence about the balance of destructive and creative forces began to spawn an architecture of militarised possibilities. Relation to the technological sublime overtook human scaling as the engine of design innovation, whether manifesting as sci-fi futurist camp or following bunker archaeology.

"You were changing
didn't want to stay the same
Re-arranging
dropped a letter from your Name..."

Neil Jung: teenage fanclub

Inside the tallest building is this wonderful pile of Styrofoam bodies which had been used in testing chemically resistant suits. Their backs are hollowed out to make room for instrumentation."

Dugway military proving grounds.

Eric Mendelsohns' engagement with militarised forms isn't merely at the level of an aesthetic parallelism.He dropped the first h from his name, and participated as consultant in an altogether paradoxical construction project; Germantown at Dugway Proving Grounds, Utah,...

"a Rhode Island-sized tract of saltflats and mostly non-arable land southwest of Salt Lake City, which for half a century has served as an environmental test bed for some of the most elaborate and toxic chemical and biological warfare experiments ever undertaken in this country."..."In March 1943 the US Army corps of Engineers began construction at Dugway on a series of 'enemy villages', detailed reproductions of the typical housing found in the industrial districts of cities in Germany and Japan. As they constructed, they deconstructed, analysing the component parts of the houses, looking for weak points even as they created ostensible shelters."

Building a simulacra of German urban target zones, this was a true "object to be destroyed." Above all, architecture ceased to have a necessary relation to public and visibility. A global industry was henceforward created which had as its core the architecture of erasure and disappearance, which although one of the largest enterprises ever undertaken by humanity was destined to remain invisible to the vast majority. Except at the point of possible annihilation, the worldwide web of concrete, steel, and remote sensing remained beneath the threshhold of perception. Eniwetok, Los Alamos, Menwith Hill, Faslane, Greenham Common... the world of civil engineering split between visible celebration of technocratic movement and invisible armouring of shelters test sites and silos. Could it make sense to see the architecture of "new brutalism" as a refusal of this split? An attempt to re-integrate the unwritten histories of late twentieth century civil and military engineering? Enough re-writing was going on in the ideological sphere to make the idea of memory and militarised space an important area to work in.

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