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2020 taught us to embrace the indoors. However, as the world enters 2021, some may feel more propelled to seek out shelters that can protect them from calamity. At least that's how the New York and Miami-based practice ABIBOO Studio explains their latest project, the DBX Doomsday Bunker. Led... View full entry
The basic model at Northeast Bunkers is a cylindrical steel vessel eight feet in diameter, in 13- or 20-foot lengths, welded from quarter-inch plate steel and equipped with an entrance hatch on top. Standard features include rust-resistant exterior paint, cedar plank flooring, zero-VOC (volatile organic compounds) interior finishes, two vent ports, floor hatches for storage, and an emergency exit hatch. — The New York Times
Writing in The New York Times, Mira Ptacin surveys the growing demand for underground bunkers across the United States as disease, social unrest, and political instability push some people to prepare for potential worst case scenarios, both real and imagined. Brian V. Camden, principal of... View full entry
The world’s richest people are chartering private jets to set off for holiday homes or specially prepared disaster bunkers in countries that, so far, appear to have avoided the worst of the Covid-19 outbreak.
Many are...taking personal doctors or nurses on their flights to treat them and their families in the event that they become infected. The wealthy are also besieging doctors in private clinics in Harley Street, London, and across the world, demanding private coronavirus tests.
— The Guardian
According to the Guardian, Robert Vicino, founder and chief executive of Vivos Group, a California-based company constructing underground shelters designed to withstand a range of natural disasters and catastrophes, said his firm had seen a surge in inquiries and sales since the... View full entry
"A former Nazi bunker in Hamburg, built by forced laborers to shelter tens of thousands of Germans during Allied air raids in World War II, will soon house hotel guests," reports The New York Times (NYT). Fit with a five-story terraced roof garden, the hotel will house 136 rooms, and is due to... View full entry
Deep beneath the streets of Clapham, London, in a former air raid shelter, Steve Dring and his colleagues are farming. Vertical farming, that is.
The company Dring co-founded, Growing Underground, is cultivating a wide range of vegetables and herbs in vertically-stacked trays in the confined space. It’s part of a growing trend in Europe and the U.S.
— Marketplace
Marketplace visits Growing Underground, a cutting-edge vertical farm inside a converted WWII-era air raid bunker 100 feet beneath London. "If we were growing peas out in the open, we’d have three crops a year," the company's cofounder Steve Dring tells the reporter. "Here, we get 62 crops a year... View full entry
Americans have, for generations, prepared themselves for society’s collapse. They built fallout shelters during the Cold War and basement supply caches ahead of Y2K. But in recent years, personalized disaster prep has grown into a multimillion-dollar business, fueled by a seemingly endless stream of new and revamped threats, from climate change to terrorism, cyberattacks and civil unrest. — The New York Times
On the 75th anniversary of D-Day, we reflect on the remaining architectural vestiges of World War II, an event that incurred the death of nearly 50,000,000 people and shifted the borders of countries and continents. In 1975, the theorist Paul Virilio published Bunker Archaeology, a documentation... View full entry
When one thinks of luxury condos, rural Kansas isn't what typically comes to mind. Then again, the location isn't the only thing unique about developer Larry Hall's 15-story, residential complex sitting underground in a former missile silo. In 2008, Hall purchased the missile launch facility in... View full entry
A bitcoin vault doesn’t store actual bitcoin units. Technically, what’s being stored are private, cryptographic keys. It’s odd to think of a virtual currency needing physical storage, but just like your most precious photos, even a cryptocurrency needs some kind of material container. — Quartz
The company Xapo is using a decommissioned military bunker to safeguard its customers bitcoins. In this article from Quartz, Joon lan Wong describes his way into the vault storing millions of dollars worth of bitcoins and the numerous portals and gates he had to cross. View full entry
Take a walk through BIG's controversial 2,800 m2 Bunker Museum that opened this summer in Denmark— View full entry
The BIG-designed Tirpitz Museum in the Danish coastal town of Blåvand recently had its grand opening and already appears to be attracting plenty of visitors to the historic site. Unlike its heftier neighbor, the German WWII Tirpitz bunker, the museum finely cuts into the dune landscape and... View full entry
Due to the surrender of German forces in WWII, the Tirpitz Bunker's construction was never completed leaving the dugout as a dark presence on the sandy coast of Denmark. The 3.5 meter thick concrete fortification is the country's largest bunker and was intended to be part of Hitler's Atlantic Wall... View full entry
Repurposing and renovation are some of the hottest new trends in architecture, but architects in Hamburg may have elevated the stakes by their proposal to place a 19-meter high "green mountain" atop a World War II bunker in Hamburg, Germany. The new mountain would offer residents lots to grow... View full entry
Trump is President, the climate is chaos, and the wealth gap is starting to qualify as its own national canyon. So if you've got vats of money and are afraid of all the people who don't, what do you do? Build doomsday architecture to survive the collapse of society! In this piece for The New... View full entry
This month marks the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. On April 26, 1986, technicians conducting a test inadvertently caused reactor number four to explode...
Reuters reports that a huge recently-completed enclosure called the New Safe Confinement—the world's largest land-based moving structure—will be “pulled slowly over the site later this year to create a steel-clad casement to block radiation and allow the remains of the reactor to be dismantled safely.”
— The Atlantic
Although it sounds like an early aughts indie band name, the New Safe Confinement structure over Chernobyl's reactor number four is finally complete, constructed at an estimated cost of €1.5 billion. Meanwhile, neighboring city and officially uninhabitable Pripyat has become a hauntingly... View full entry
