THE BANALITY AND THE ECSTASY

It never occurred to me that I would draw it later.  Why draw banality?

During our Ottawa trip, (previous page about Ottawa here), we went to the Diefenbunker.   The Diefenbunker is a relic of the Cold War.  Another name for the facility is the Cold War Museum of Ottawa.

The technical name for the facility is CFS CARP.  CFS stands for Canadian Forces Station, and it is located in the rural farming community of Carp, Ontario, which is about 30 miles outside of Ottawa.

The facility was designed to house the government of Canada during a nuclear war.  It was built in the late 50s.  It has four floors, all of them underground.  You enter the facility via a long underground tunnel.  And this tunnel leads to the entry, which has 35 cm thick steel bank vault type doors.  Once inside, it feels like you might be in a ship;  narrow corridors with door after door either side of the corridor.  The construction, colors and materials are of the most bland and utilitarian combination imaginable.  The entire structure was early cold war military spec.

It was designed to house 500 people for 30 days of self sufficiency.  There are underground cisterns.  Underground fuel tanks.  The top layer of concrete is 10 meters thick.  The foundation of the structure is supported on a series of spring mounts, which are designed to help buffer the structure from the shock of nearby atomic explosions.

The basic shape is a square floor plate extruded into a basic box.  An incredibly interesting feature is the small box that is separate from the main box.  These two boxes are connected via a tunnel.  And the small box was designed to house the gold of Canada.  So in the late 50s, with the specter of total nuclear war, their best solution was to create a people box, and a gold box.  And because you have to go thru the people box to get to the gold box, it would seem that the most precious thing this structure is designed to protect is the gold.

These two boxes can be seen in my drawing above.  The only other architectural element is the underground tunnel, which is what you first enter to get to the bunker, and that can also be seen in the drawing.  I used a Choisey One Point perspective construction.

There are not many drawings on the web describing the Diefenbunker.  That may be because of security.  It was decommissioned only in the mid 1990s.

And the most profound part of our experience in the bunker were sets of musical performances.  The evening that we were there, about 30 musical groups played thru out.  These were either solo performers or pairs of performers.  And all of them played musical selections that they considered to be appropriate for the cold war.  For example, one oboist played part of a Shostakovich symphony, given Stalin’s approval of the composer.  One soloist played a zither.  Another played a theremin.  A duo played a violin and drums.  If I would have had to come up with something to play, I might have gone with Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, played say a third above the root.

As you walked thru this cold war relic, there was this haunting music emanating from all parts of the bunker.  Walking thru the corridor, the musical landscape would change as you left one performance in one room and then came upon another.  Like I said, it was absolutely profound.

Without overstating it, the limits of what human beings are capable of were on full display.  There was the potential for limitless human carnage and a banal architectural response to that.  And there was the ecstatic and limitless beauty of the music.