Ambivalent structures

Abstract

The research and accompanying studio practice titled Ambivalent Structures interrogates the latent connection of the bunker with the urban terrain, channelling its psychological influence while addressing contemporary anxieties regarding power and control. Military bunker facilities have long been the subject of intense interest for artists and architects, particularly since the end of the Cold War. Their presence has been linked to discourse surrounding developments in modernism, minimalism in art, and architectural brutalism. Bunker construction occurred on a massive scale during the Second World War with the building of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, a series of fortifications that was intended to stretch along the entire west coast of Europe and Scandinavia. The Atlantic Wall’s construction employed new types of reinforced cement moulding technologies that are still in use. Imposing and monolithic, these structures retain a deeply ambivalent nature, as they can be at once places of security and danger, of refuge and warfare, and indeed of life and death. Cold War secrecy served only to heighten the bunker’s psychological power within the civilian population; their hidden presence fuelled the imagination of populist culture of the time in films such as Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove (1964), while writers such as J.G. Ballard pondered their influence on urban infrastructure and the post-war utopian aspirations of city planners in works such as Concrete Island (1974) and Crash (1973). Here, manifestations of the bunker and its effect on the psychology of Ballard’s characters were conjured through the run-down tenement tower blocks, motorway exit ramps, multi-story car parks and pedestrian underpasses of the built environment. Ambivalent Structures is a visual and textural exploration of the aftermath of modernity through its attendant buildings and structures that are inextricably linked to the violence of war, pondering their psychological influence on the individual.