Culture

Bunker Touring in Berlin

The Berlin Underworlds Association in Berlin gives tours of the city’s haunting underground spaces, which are still packed with bunkers left over from World War II. There is a peculiar kind of architectural beauty to these structures, limited as they are by lack of sunlight and space. Over at Subtopia, Bryan Finoki analyzes pictures of […]
Image may contain Lighting Crypt Indoors Building Room Housing and Bunker

Bunker

The Berlin Underworlds Association in Berlin gives tours of the city's haunting underground spaces, which are still packed with bunkers left over from World War II. There is a peculiar kind of architectural beauty to these structures, limited as they are by lack of sunlight and space. Over at Subtopia, Bryan Finoki analyzes pictures of Berlin's underground, talks about his appreciation for cities that lurk below our feet, and ponders how bunkers have influenced above-ground architecture.

Bunkerarchitecture

Then Finoki asks this strange but poignant question:

I wonder, how much volumetric space is taken up in underground bunkers, how much air capacity exists trapped in these concrete structures? I've asked this before, but could we estimate exactly how much real estate, or in this case, air space, is devoted around the world to the underground?

I too would love to know. We could estimate the volume of the Big Dig in Boston, the undersea tunnels of BART in the San Francisco Bay Area and the Chunnel in the English Channel. Then we'd move on to subways, and finally delve all the way back in human history to the elaborate underground caves where Cro Magnons hid from Ice Age cold.

Bunker Touring in Berlin [via Subtopia]