We’re all familiar with the plot of a movie that occurs in a city still standing in a post-apocalyptic era. The streets are empty, except for a few survivors who wander aimlessly, searching for signs of life. Buildings begin to crumble and rust away after years of neglect, public transportation sits idle, and overgrown weeds spring from the cracks in the unmanaged sidewalks and streets. The scene feels eerie because we can’t imagine letting our physical environment sit in decay. It seems impossible that our built environments where we live and work each day suddenly fall silent. It’s a city without a pulse.
In 1945, the United States dropped 2 nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While the act devastated and destroyed these two Japanese towns, it also created an entirely new political climate, one based on apocalyptic fears. As tensions with Soviet Russia heightened, and the United States entered an age of potential nuclear destruction, the landscape itself adapted in response - becoming littered with bunkers and fallout shelters, the “concrete responses to the political social and existential anxieties of the atomic age.”
Fast-forward nearly seventy years, and we’re currently faced with a new apocalyptic scenario of our own. Assuming you’re reading this, we have all survived the Mayan Apocalypse. Congratulations. However, that’s not to say that out apocalyptic fears - and its resultant architecture - has come and gone. Our apocalypse is more based on the fear of natural disaster - hurricane, tornado, viral disease, even infected-zombie-people - than nuclear attack; and our apocalyptic architecture is less of the bunker variety, and more of the vertical farm/fortress - let’s call it ESD: Extremely Sustainable Design.
More on apocalyptic architecture of the 21st century, after the break...
