Yidan Karel Li writes about bunker aesthetics, and the desire to outlast the threats of the world.

Part of What Time Tells, an ongoing series on time and the problems we face today. Published in conjunction with Countering Time, AAA’s exhibition about archival time and the idea of afterlives.

At the 1956 Whitechapel exhibition This is Tomorrow, architects Alison and Peter Smithson, alongside artists Eduardo Paolozzi and Nigel Henderson, unveiled an architectural installation titled House of the Future—a projection of what houses would be like in 1981, i.e., twenty-five years into the future.

What’s interesting is that this “house” was, essentially, a bunker—and came fully equipped with utopian affordances: the latest imagined technologies for safety, leisure, and control; “sexualized interior design”¹ and sturdy exterior structures; secure food and sanitation; and more. It exuded an Elysian ambiance that channelled a one-way logic: once you enter, you’ll never have to leave.

^{Image: Interior view of House of the Future, looking down from the viewing platform. Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition, London, March 1956. Collection Centre Canadien d'Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal.}

^{Image: Diagrammatic plan, House of the Future, Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition, London, circa 1955. Collection Centre Canadien d'Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal © CCA.}

Beatriz Colomina noted that House of the Future was a bunker created during a time of extreme external danger, motivated by a desire to escape from “both the threats of the present and from the fresh memories of the war.” She goes on to ruminate about time and the purpose of bunkers.

How can we discuss today a 1956 project that tried to imagine the house of 1981; that is, a house halfway between then and now? How can we look back at a forward-looking house?²

House of the Future existed as a kind of uncanny space that distorted linear time through its Ouroboros-like existence. Its history extended synchronously “backwards” and “forwards,” and, like all bunkers, was designed to be hyper-functional while (hopefully) never used. As geographer Bradley Garrett noted, there is no accidental bunker, because “constructing one requires an awareness of the future and of our own mortality.”³

We transcribe underground all the uncertainties and antagonisms of the tumultuous time we call modern—but since when, and until when?⁴

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The German military term Bunker was used by British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper in narrating Hitler’s last days. About forty hours before Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide, they wed⁵ in the map room of the Führerbunker, fifty feet below Berlin. This 3,000-square-foot bunker—the last headquarters of the Nazi regime and the unlikely venue for their wedding—soon turned into a grim forensic site. On the day of Hitler’s demise, 30 April 1945, war correspondents entered through his red-carpeted corridor and documented this bunker’s opulence: its self-sustained heating, electricity, and water, along with curated paintings and luxurious furniture—upon which Hitler shot himself.

Trevor-Roper acutely sensed the spatial significance of the bunker, where “the last act of the Nazi melodrama was played out.”⁶ It was a theatrical stage where terror, violence, luxury, plus a dash of romance converged. Ironically, Hitler’s death in the bunker—a space designed for secrecy and retreat—catapulted this architectural typology into public consciousness. The bunker, once a private bastion of power, became a site of cultural imagination.

Image: The floor plan of Hitler’s bunker. © World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo.

This new “era of bunkers” represented more than just the emergence of a specific architectural style in the postwar period, it also symbolised a pervasive state of total catastrophe, everyday crisis, and normalised insecurity. From the deployment of air raids during World War I to the incendiary bombs in World War II, and then to nuclear power, we are faced with an escalating gradient of crises. The bunker is a product of a world where dangers are no longer local or predictable but global, abstract, and omnipresent.

In this “normalised insecurity,” bunkers act as material manifestations of our collective anticipation of disaster. Their design reflects a fundamental shift in perception: crises are no longer perceived as occasional disruptions to stability but as ongoing conditions of modern life. The idea of total catastrophe—be it nuclear war, environmental collapse, or biosecurity threats—has been woven into the structure of contemporary society, with an attendant desire for spaces that not only protect but also endure indefinitely.

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The Cold War, or, the forty-five years of waiting for extinction then survival of collective existential crisis,⁷ re-sculpted the measurement and experience of time. This period fostered an ideology of perpetual catastrophe, where the concept of an entire human life lived within a bunker became both a metaphor and possible reality—indeed, civil defence and quotidian life began to merge within the figure of the bunker.

During President Eisenhower’s administration (1953–61), he expressed concerns over the implications and costs of a large-scale, governmental civil defence project—fearing the constructing of a “garrison state.”⁸ Instead, his administration proposed a “national shelter plan” that shifted burdens to the private sector, and oversaw a series of publications depicting guidelines for constructing family fallout bunkers. The proliferation of these handbooks played a critical role in popularising and normalising the idea of “bunkering.”

^{Image: Excerpt from The Family Fallout Shelter, 1959.}

Popular depictions of family shelters portrayed average white American families navigating and enjoying life underground, as always (or even better): canned food and water neatly stacked on shelves, pool and bridge tables ready to use. Mothers cared for children and tended to the house, while fathers hovered over radios—a necessity for bunkers—for broadcast info on “how long to stay in, how soon to go outside, and how long to stay outside.”⁹

Image: A family shelter for four-to-six people, 1958. Public domain via Digital Public Library of America.

Image: Ad for the interior of a prefabricated fallout shelter. Public domain via James Vaughan.

The habitability and, at times, extravagance of these bunkers—also exemplified by House of the Future—was culturally and symbolically significant. They represented a psychological refuge, counteracting public anxieties of nuclear warfare with the promise of safety, control, and continuity. More than just shelters, they symbolised the resilience of American values, projecting an illusion of solidarity, preparedness, and nationalism amidst global instability.

More recent trends have seen bunkers morph into spaces where “military-holiday-future-past [are] all rolled together.”¹⁰ As concerns about coronaviruses, climate change, and cyber insecurity continue to provoke anxiety and drive the bunker market to new heights, some are seeking more than just survival.

Modern bunkers’ manipulation of time and space—its ability to simulate sunlight, landscapes, and seasons—creates a world untethered from the natural cycles of life and death. LED domes are installed to simulate natural light, while digital windows project landscape imagery “so one can wake up with a view of the snow-capped mountains, or the streets of the city.”¹¹ A sense of time re-enters the bunkers, not as a natural rhythm, but as a carefully constructed illusion—a curated immortality where survival is staged as continuity.

^{Image: Artificial landscape imagery in the bedroom of a modern bunker. Courtesy of Sergey Makhno Architects.}

While these new bunkers are blossoming all over, there are also unused bunkers being reincarnated for new uses. The €4 billion nuclear bunker built by former President of Yugoslavia Josip Broz Tito in the 1970s is now an art gallery. This fully equipped mega bunker retains its 1970s aesthetic like a time capsule,¹² and has become a crucial characteristic of the art space in Konjic. Similarly, bunkers constructed during the Second Sino-Japanese War in Chongqing¹³ have been renovated into tea parlours and hotpot restaurants, while shielding pedestrians from the summer heat. Who could have imagined the day when Tito’s bunker would be used for art exhibitions, and bunkers in Chongqing for leisure in extreme climates.

No matter how flamboyant, luxurious, or sophisticated bunkers become, they remain deeply tied to humanity’s instinctive need to retreat and endure—a need that exceeds the historical moments that birthed them. They remind us that the end of one crisis is never truly the end, and that survival, as both an act and an ideology, carries its own costs.

^{Image: Art work of Project Biennial of Contemporary Art, D-0 ARK, in Tito's bunker. © Konrad Zelazowski / Alamy Stock Photo.}

^{Image: People dining at the largest underground hot pot restaurant in the Chongqing air raid shelter complex, Oct 2023. © Cynthia Lee / Alamy Stock Photo.}

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Bunkers are built for an indeterminate future, their very logic tied to the uncertainty of time. In a bunker, the past, present, and future collapse into a singular moment of survival: How long should you stay in the bunker?

While the civil defence bureaucracy claimed fourteen days after any nuclear strike,¹⁴ many eschatologists were invested in indefiniteness. After all, there will always be crisis after crisis, and more to come.

The bunker exists as a reminder that people are always-already under the threat of invasion.¹⁵ The end of the Cold War could be announced, whereas the era of bunkers simply could not. Instead, after a long and dreary wait for a nuclear outbreak that never came, additional dreads, at once palpable and diffuse, have emerged. These dreads may have no target, no destination, no object—it is, as Garrett argues, an ontological orientation in which attachment to anything concrete is lost.¹⁶

From pandemics to climate change, from geopolitical tension to artificial intelligence, many are held hostage by a great variety of threats, imbued with generalised angst and anxiety, drenched in undertones of the apocalypse. The only “near certainty,” said physicist Stephen Hawking in 2016, is the end of our world “in the next thousand or 10,000 years”¹⁷—a reframing of time in the most brutal way possible: that is, by knowing when it ends.

Bunkers externalise our unconscious grappling with mortality. They are spaces that embody the ultimate confrontation with life’s finitude while simultaneously offering the illusion of its deferral. They manifest our deep-seated yearning to outlast the threats of the world, to carve out a refuge where life might continue even when all else collapses.

The bunker forces us to confront not only how we respond to crises but also how we define the boundaries of our futures, our histories, and the spaces we choose inhabit in between. In a total catastrophic time, the bunker exceeds its functional origins, becoming a symbol of the human psyche’s negotiation with time, mortality, and the imagined futures we construct to contain fears and uncertainties. Whether used for war or leisure, placed underground or on the surface, bunkers are houses of the future—destinations where humanity’s enduring desire to survive confronts its entombment within time’s shadow.

Yidan Karel Li is a designer and writer whose research explores the aesthetics of modernity, the politics of art and architecture, and the un-disciplinary practice and research approaches. She has received training in architecture, urbanism, geography, and media studies.

Notes

^{1. “With all those curved walls. The bed, the bathtub, and all the basins are red; the curtains are orange; and the partly translucent honey-colored walls give a voyeuristic sense of X-ray vision. The bed is in the middle of the space, a theatrical stage with electronic controls […] 1956 was, after all, also the year of the first Playboy house.” The interior design of the House of the Future clearly reflected influences from the Playboy-inspired, sexually liberated lifestyle of its time. This aesthetic celebrated modernity and freedom, incorporating sleek, seductive forms and materials that resonated with the cultural fascination for leisure, sensuality, and futuristic sophistication. See Beatriz Colomina, “Unbreathed Air 1956,” Grey Room 15 (April 2004): 28–59, https://doi.org/10.1162/1526381041165458.}

^{2. Ibid.}

^{3. Bradley L. Garrett, Bunker: Building for the End Times (New York: Scribner, 2020).}

^{4. See also David Borkenhagen, “For Jung, Architecture Was a Tool to Represent the Psyche,” Psyche, 13 February 2024, https://psyche.co/ideas/for-jung-architecture-was-a-tool-to-represent-the-psyche.}

^{5. Few people attended the wedding. Hitler’s personal secretary Gerda Christian was invited to the “wedding breakfast” and described the wedding as “gloomy and despondent.” See Jennifer Latson, “The Brief Luxurious Life of Adolf Hitler, 50 Feet Below Berlin,” Time, 16 January 2015, https://time.com/3660353/hitler-bunker/.}

^{6. Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler, 7th ed., with a new preface (London Basingstoke: Papermac, 1995).}

^{7. Luke Bennett, “Presencing the Bunker: Past, Present and Future,” in In the Ruins of the Cold War Bunker: Affect, Materiality and Meaning Making (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd, 2017).}

^{8. See National Park Service, “Civil Defense Through Eisenhower,” a U.S. National Park Service (blog), 2020, https://www.nps.gov/articles/coldwar_civildefense_thru-ike.htm.}

^{9. The Family Fallout Shelter by U.S. Office of Civil Defense Mobilization, 1959.}

^{10. Bennett, “Presencing the Bunker: Past, Present and Future.”}

^{11. Ekaterina Karpukhina, “Will we eventually end up in a bunker during this pandemic?,” Architectural Digest, 27 July 2020, https://www.architecturaldigest.in/content/will-we-eventually-end-up-in-a-bunker-during-this-covid-19-pandemic/}

^{12. Jessica de Korte, “Underground Art in Tito’s Bunker,” The Irish Times, 17 May 2015, https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/art-and-design/underground-art-in-tito-s-bunker-1.2214240.}

^{13. Chongqing was the capital-in-exile of the Chinese government and a major battlefield during the war. It is also a famous furnace city known for the heatwaves.}

^{14. It was believed that after fourteen days the nuclear fallout would subside to a relatively safe level. See Garrett, Bunker.}

^{15. Emily Glass, “Once upon a Time in Ksamil,” in In the Ruins of the Cold War Bunker: Affect, Materiality and Meaning Making, ed. Luke Bennett (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd, 2017).}

^{16. Garrett, Bunker.}

^{17. Stephen Hawking, Radio Times, "Full Interview with Stephen Hawking," January 2016.}