Today's Cold War Gothic: a nuclear war shelter and survival stash was unearthed in Brooklyn.
This should remind us of the British Cold War underground sites recently declassified, or documented by Subterranea Britannica.
The Brooklyn Bridge postapocalypse also makes for an interesting companion piece to other American ruin sites not built for nuclear attack, but from the same era. Ditto for contemporary imagined ruins.
Or compare this week's trove with the older ruins discovered in New York City. Walls under walls under walls, fortifications buried under successive layers of fear and power: the imbricated, urban Gothic.
(via Warren Ellis)
I'm reminded of Albert Speer's Theory of Ruin Value.
One website notes: "Interestingly, Hans-Ernst Mittig argued recently (1993: 21) that there is no proof that the theory of ruin value existed before 1969 at all (when Speer first published his memoirs). He went on to state that the theory of ruin value has left no traces in any publications of the Nationalsocialist period, and Mittig concludes that the popularity of this idea must be due to a contemporary fascination with ruins today." (https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/citd/holtorf/7.4.html)
Posted by: Steven Kaye | March 23, 2006 at 11:02