I consider death as being the biggest enemy of human. It is death that, due to instinct, he tries to control in many aspects. Of course he never achieved that, but only to delay or run away from it. The hope for immortality is the extension of survival.
The issue of this project is the relevance between survival and constructed environment. The structures promise the preservation of life. Earth greets once again men into underground structures and new lands, hiding them from a situation raging in another space. A situation of destruction.
It is attempted a historical recursion to defensive constructed environment of the human societies. From walls and castles to super modern underground shelters. Emphasis is given to the shelters built during the Cold War and the propagandistic industry that emerged within. There are shown examples from citizen shelters as well as military shelters.
The propaganda, the great number of human looses, the war shelters are documents inextricably connected with the science of architecture and the use of its knowledge for the enhancement of ideologies and the blooming of an industry in the name of the ‘invisible’ danger. Danger that in many cases is created by the men themselves. Shelters are promising the continuation of life and civilization deep underground, remote from the sunlight and the fury of war. As if civilization is guaranteed only with survival and comfort.
The architectural form of the war sheltering structures represents the most honest realization of the actual need in war. This realization is recognized in the design as well as in the use of the material. Bare reinforced concrete, hard and almost rough. With out coloring and ornament, aiming only to protection. The view is limited in the necessary levels, those of the sight contact of the enemy so as the user of the structure can hurt him. As if war has bared the structure the same way it has done to the human spirit. Wild and untouchable, filled with marks from bullets and explosions. The only thing standing from the war structures is the worn out concrete and the traces of battle. Details have no space in the memory of these structures.
In contrast of war and the structures that accompany it, are put the natural disasters. Which are the sheltering methods, how men thoroughly build shelters, who and what is that, that man is trying to hide from.
Natural phenomenal could hardly named as disastrous, edgy and lethal if the only judge was nature itself. The process that nature functions includes an ironic aspect towards men. Evolution, destruction, death and rebirth are stages that is very logical to meet in nature’s character. Death might be considered as weakness for human societies and always trying to defeat it, for the environment although is one more function in the march for evolution. Through natural phenomenon nature is not gaining revenge but adaptation.
The egoistic attitude of men, that until recently was forcing nature to drastically adaptations, today propagandize nature’s salvation. The basic aim though is only the salvation of men. Fearing that nature and its functions will evolve in an unfriendly for men environment and his survival, men beg now for a more eco- logic way of thinking.
He finds again shelter in the soil, the cradle of ground. It is not by chance that when we long to hide and protect something we burry it in the ground. In safety.