Preparation

Emergencies, by their very nature, cannot be predicted. However, the likelihood of disaster always threatens to befall us.  Weather channels erupt with blizzards, cyclones, tornadoes and flooding.  Fires strike with or without the presence of lightning, but with its immediacy and apparent randomness.  Plant closings, job losses, and real estate foreclosures produce more indicators but their implementation may still take us by surprise. 

Humans are not the only animals with the ability to prepare for lean times.  We create codes and processes in preparation for many instances which will never arrive.  We institutionalize responses to emergencies by creating and staffing public services such as firefighters, police, and emergency medical personnel.  The entire Department of Defense - in effect, the entire governmental system - exists to provide help in times of need.

Prediction of a state of emergency seems easy during a war, but with what effects?  Interruptions to services and sleep are expected, but bombs follow no predictable pattern or schedule.  Armies change tactics and weapons.  Citizens prepare for one threat and are faced with another, from a totally unexpected corner.  Rationing of gasoline and rubber might be anticipated to provide troops with needed resources for mobility, but who would have guessed that silk for stockings would have been sheared for use in parachutes during WWII, or that spices would become impossible to obtain since boats from the sources of such staple goods as salt and pepper – India, China, France – were sunk?

The most inspirational examples of community resilience persist in stories of London during the Blitz.  For eight months, between September 1940 and May 1941, few nights passed without aerial bombardments.  Although casualties were predicted at the start of the war to tally over 1 million people, civilian deaths numbered about 67,000 throughout the Commonwealth[i], a significant reduction from the initial prediction. 

How did Londoners protect their lives and city without succumbing to the temptation to flee, or give up hope?  Resourceful and responsive citizen volunteers minimized disruptions and furnished essential services.  Wardens of the Air Raid Precautions Service (A.R.P.) were organized in posts located every few blocks in London; their familiarity with the buildings, resources, and people in their ward were critical for the initial tasks of registering residents and distributing gas masks.  During bombing raids wardens patrolled in pairs to maintain blackout conditions, escort people to shelter, douse incendiary bombs, perform upkeep on public shelters, and rescue people after air raids.  The 1.4 million volunteers’ service was personal, protective, local, and relied on close acquaintance with their neighbors.

Not every job depended on volunteers, but every job supported either war or recovery.  The Ministry of Works’ primary task was to keep industry functioning, making essential repairs to factories after bombings, often within one or two weeks.  Their “Special Repair Service” teams completed structural repairs to private buildings and also built new structures, travelling in “Flying Squads” of caravans with their own supplies.  Their self-sufficiency helped locals recover by leaving community resources for residents.

In damaged cities, life took on a new-found spontaneity and culture of adaptability.  Taxi-drivers found new routes around bombed intersections, medical aides treated patients without benefit of much training, and communications were handled by everyone: Army signalers, volunteer radio operators, even teenagers on bicycles.  When shops were bombed, shopkeepers moved their stock to an intact spot without concern for the niceties of ownership or lease.  A wartime columnist told of an unusual sharing of resources, “It was funny to see raw sirloins of beef being carried from one stately club, which was temporarily cut off from the gas supply, to another equally stately establishment, which had offered the hospitality of its old-fashioned coal ranges….”[ii]  The expectation of continuity demanded no less. 

Although clearing up after bombings took time, billeting for people who had lost their homes was handled immediately – sometimes with friends and family, but often with strangers far from home.  Sir John Anderson  who designed British evacuation schemes beginning in the summer of 1938, divided the country into three areas: sending areas - urban districts where heavy bombing raids could be expected; neutral areas that would neither send nor take evacuees; and receiving areas - rural districts where evacuees would be sent.  Although families on both sides were concerned that "compulsory billeting would be far worse than war," bedrooms were requisitioned and filled with little consideration for preference or proclivity.  Urban dwellers were encouraged to arrange with friends and relatives in other parts of the city to provide shelter in case of emergency… and a temporary lodging allowance was paid as an incentive.  Throughout the war very few people slept rough, without a shelter of some kind.

There were three factors that supported resiliency in the city while under terrible duress:  the urban form, intimate knowledge of one’s neighbors and surroundings, and redundant and scalable solutions for sheltering.

Great redundancy was built into the city.  Underground transport was independent from the interconnected network of streets above ground.  Neighborhoods were small enough that people could get from home to work on foot or bicycle.  Land use patterns distributed factories and stores throughout the city so that no single area was a primary target. The tremendous number of structures lowered the odds of any one being hit.  (The density did cause collateral damage through bomb attacks and resultant fires, but access to firefighting services was close at hand.[iii]) 

Winston Churchill exhorted the House of Commons on 8 October 1940, “We must so arrange that, when any district is smitten by bombs which are flung about at utter random, strong, mobile forces will descend on the scene in power and mercy to conquer the flames, as they have done, to rescue sufferers, provide them with food and shelter, to whisk them away to places of rest and refuge, and to place in their hands leaflets which anyone can understand to reassure them that they have not lost all, because all will share in their material loss, and in sharing it, sweep it away.”[iv]

People – volunteers, civilians, and the military willing to undertake intense and irregular work when confusion reigns - is the most effective component of preparedness.  Peter Ackroyd writes in London: A Biography, “It is difficult fully to define that particular spirit, though it is clear that Londoners made a deliberate effort to seem unafraid, and that this self-control may have sprung from an instinctive unwillingness to spread the contagion of panic. After all, what if this city of eight million people were to regress into hysteria?” 

Finally, there were multiple options for dodging bombs, from as close as the dining table or only as far as the Tube stop.  There were Morrison shelters, a steel-topped table with mesh sides and a sprung base to become a bed at night.  Distributed in kits of 359 pieces and three assembly tools, over 500,000 of these were used during the war.  They measured 6’-6” by 4’ long, and could accommodate two adults and a child, or more people if necessary.  They were designed to be placed on the lowest level of a structure, and could withstand the force of “substantial debris” falling without collapse.

The Anderson shelter was the popular backyard version, which could house six people on narrow benches.  In the simplest installation, a rectangular area was excavated, corrugated metal shaped into a protective half-oval and covered with earth, and the metal ends reinforced with sandbags.  These had the benefit of being virtually indistinguishable from the gardens and yards from the air, after a few months of vigorous plant growth.  They had the severe disadvantage of trapping groundwater and condensation, often soaking the blankets and supplies placed within them for safekeeping.

If people were in transit, there were Communal Shelters available.  Often located in church crypts, apartment cellars, or other available spaces, they were rudimentary spaces that could house 10 to 50 people.  They offered no more than benches or a floor space, with sandbagged entrances.  They were not designed for to meet any specific structural resistance, but were pressed into service as an alternative to being caught outside with no protection.  The communal shelters that housed the greatest number of citizens were the London Underground stations.  Many stations opened after 9 pm every night, and were outfitted with bunks, clinics, canteens, toilets, and entertainment.  Many people staked their claims early to spaces along the walls, but space was at such a premium that hammocks were strung across the tracks after trains shut down for the night.  The nightly ablutions, hair rollers, bedtime stories and children’s pajamas became as much a routine in public as they had been at home.

And when the barrages were over but the war was not yet won, “The city seemed to resume its normal course, with its postmen and bus-drivers and milkmen and errand boys, but there was the strangest feeling of ennui or despondency after the spectacular damage of the Blitz.”[v]   Years of preparation were complete, and the enemy diverted.  Evacuees returned home, and people became complacent about the air-raid and all-clear signals. 

Becoming prepared is only half the battle – remaining so may be the more difficult task.  It is difficult to sustain the energy necessary for constant preparation over a long time period.  When emergency supplies are not activated for a while, we break into the storerooms or fail to set aside additional resources.  We lose our exhilaration at the prospect of another shift at the volunteer post.  We enumerate the difficulties of evacuating versus the comforts of remaining home, even when threats are nearby.  When faced with crisis after crisis, we suffer from disaster fatigue, and find it difficult to evaluate the relative strength of one threat against another which passed with no consequences.  Even with unceasing reminders from television and media, we forget the past.

It is only through constant interaction with other people – trusted friends, neighbors, colleagues – that coercion works.  Their behaviour impacts our own, and we model our actions to mimic theirs.  We fill bathtubs and water jugs before storms, shop for bread and peanut butter, stock candles and batteries.  Told over and over about the severity of the storm, we will only evacuate if urged by those we trust, because we see only the trouble of the endeavor, and not the potential for deliverance.

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[i] Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

[ii] Panter-Downes, Good Evening, Mrs. Craven.

[iii] Except during the Second Great Fire of London, on 29-30 December 1940, when the German Army waited for the River Thames water levels to shrink to uncharacteristically low levels and dropped 10,000 incendiary bombs.  Resiliency, in this case, depended upon water… which wasn’t there.

[iv] Mitchell, Blitz Spirit.

[v] Ackroyd, London: The Biography.

Ruins

Buildings surround us, intact and crumbling structures measured by the dynamic process of weathering and time.  Whatever defenses man constructs, in time the roof shall be stripped away, the walls crumble, the doors swing wide and hollow, the windows break.  The force of nature and the entropy of weather shall prevail.

Ruins may be the real remnants of previous inhabitations, or artifice and conceit.  Confected from scavenged bricks and forms stolen from the past, the picturesque quality depends not a bit on the authenticity, but on the setting.  British ruin-lust began in 1716 with Lord Bathurst and Alexander Pope's Albert Hall, the first truly “Gothic” playhouse found in a gentleman’s garden, and then the fashion exploded: crenellations with inconstant proportions, “medieval” windows too large to defend against arrows, octagonal towers beneath high escarpments, accompanied by none of the true defensive features.  A stable government precluded the need for fortification, and so gentlemen who might otherwise have fought turned to manufacturing the receipts of war; but gently, so that they might become the backdrop for frolics and picnics and gaiety.

The cult of melancholy extended through garden design at Stowe and Stourhead to leave its mark on follies, through literature and theatre, the poems of Wordsworth and Coleridge and Eliot, and in art.  Horace Walpole developed the Gothic Revival in form, through architecture at Strawberry Hill, and in fiction in The Castle of Otranto.  His novel blends supernatural fantasy with romance, populated by enough plot twists to keep Shakespeare happy; scenes take place in a mouldering castle near an empty church, a stone tower and dismal dungeon, and a hillside cave, all places rife with the echoes of former lives, appropriate backdrops to launch the Gothic novel craze.  The eccentric settings for his real-life existence harnessed the irregularity of a great work built over centuries, his version instead constructed between 1749 and 1776.  Fan-vaulting, engraved tombs, fretwork, arched windows and turrets became an “oracle of style and taste” which many of his peers in Parliament and others followed.

The architect Sir John Soane also wrote fiction, in "Crude Hints towards the History of My House," the story of his return to the ruins of home following a tragedy; but he is best known as a collector of antiquarian elements from ancient buildings, filling his house with sarcophagi and sculptures, paintings, scrollwork, brackets, baubles, and ephemera.  Soane was appointed the architect of the Bank of England from 1788 until his retirement in 1833, rebuilding nearly every part of the three-acre site. War with France threatened security of the bank and vaults, so he devised an interior-focused arrangement of corridors, courts, and skylit banking halls behind a fortified and windowless screen wall.  During his tenure as surveyor, he commissioned Joseph Gandy to paint the stalwart Bank in ruins, a cutaway view for his own delight, his personal Pompeii.  

Soane had actual pieces of the abandoned city within his vast collection.  Fragments of ancient cultures, from Egypt to Rome and Athens, framed Soane’s Neo-Classical penchant; for an antiquarian, they created a wistful self-portrait of desires and obsessions, stability, and a tangible connection to history. 

Travellers to Rome brought back so many fragments of the temples and monuments, it is surprising that there is anything at all left to visit.  Sigmund Freud wrote in Civilization and its Discontents, “we cannot help wondering what traces of those early stages can still be found by a modern visitor to Rome – whom we will credit with the best historical and topographical knowledge. He will see Aurelian's wall virtually unchanged, save for a few gaps. Here and there he will find stretches of the Servian wall that have been revealed by excavations.… One need hardly add that all these remnants of ancient Rome appear as scattered fragments in the jumble of the great city that has grown up in recent centuries, since the Renaissance.”[i] 

Tours of the monuments of Rome have long been a design-school requirement, the grand tour, a pilgrimage to the places where architecture was born.  Why do we bother with ruins?  Is it to experience the visceral impact of history?  To imagine the horrors of the past in contrast to our naïve and colorless lives?  To acknowledge that perfection (or completeness) can never address our deepest desires?  The sense that our own fragile body has survived beyond the demolition of such an imposing and permanent thing as a structure, imparts a wicked frisson of delight.

In many places in Rome, what we see in ruins is the structure beneath the artifice, the underpinnings of brick and tufa and cement once invisible beneath the noble sheets of marble and travertine.  “There is anyway something peculiarly mournful about them; they are so sober and tidy, you feel the hand of the workmen in them more than anywhere else, the little individual moment of skill and patience, and probably haste too… spent on something never meant to be seen, and that was never seen again, once the workman was through, until the whole tragedy had been finished for so long the place was anybody’s to go picking around in.”[ii]

Adolf Hitler was obsessed with the ruins he visited in Rome.  In 1938 he visited Benito Mussolini in Rome, commanding his attentions for a tour of the city’s great monuments.  His state architect, Albert Speer, had proposed “Teorie von Ruinwert” (A Theory of Ruin Value) in 1934, requiring the use of marble, stone, and brick in new edifices, so that they would someday resemble their Roman counterparts.  "The idea was that buildings of modern construction were poorly suited to form that 'bridge of tradition' to future generations which Hitler was calling for. It was hard to imagine that rusting heaps of rubble could communicate these heroic inspirations which Hitler admired in the monuments of the past. My 'theory' was intended to deal with this dilemma. By using special materials and by applying certain principles of statics, we should be able to build structures which even in a state of decay, after hundreds or (such were our reckonings) thousands of years would more or less resemble Roman models….  (Hitler) gave orders that in the future the important buildings of his Reich were to be erected in keeping with the principles of this 'law of ruins'." [iii]

In the end, very little remains of the work of the Fuhrer’s architect.  The Nazi’s scorched earth policy, to destroy infrastructure to prevent its use by their enemies, was returned to them tenfold.  The only projects of Speer’s that still exist today are a portion of the Nurnberg Zeppelinfeld and a double row of lampposts marking the Strasse des 17. Juni.  Not much of a legacy for the man who envisioned the new wonders of the world, but the destruction of the Nazi monuments reflected the political will of the inheritors. 

Durable structures of the past were planned to last the duration of an Empire, throughout the reign of dynasties.  As the buildings of today decay, they are less likely to leave regal silhouettes for the tourists of the future.  Robert Smithson writes, “Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future. Instead of being made of natural materials, such as marble, granite, (they are built with) plastic, chrome, and electric light. They are not built for the ages, but rather against the ages. They are involved in a systematic reduction of time down to fractions of seconds, rather than in representing the long spaces of centuries.”^[iv]

How shall we design modern monuments with the great attraction of ruins?  The American sculptor Robert Morris summarizes the visual register, “Approached with no reverence or historical awe, ruins are frequently exceptional spaces of unusual complexity, which offer unique relations between access and barrier, the open and the closed, the diagonal and the horizontal, ground plane and wall.  Such are not to be found in structures that have escaped the twin entropic assaults of nature and the vandal.”[v]

Architects have certainly been accused of vandalizing context in the design of new structures, especially in the ragged forms of decontructivism.  But we persist in the desire to create places with the timeless qualities which make them beloved by users, owners, and the community of critics at large.  Not all architects are antiquarians, enamoured with details of dentils and moulding and captivated by broken shards; instead we transform these into new and glittering frames of light and mirror.  Will these become the 200-year or 2,000-year structures of the future? 

The manufacture of artificial ruins established an alternative history, and concocted a glorious heritage for  newly minted gentlemen in the eighteenth century. Hitler looked to the future to glorify the present.  For the real future of our buildings of today, the Romans shall give some indication: even if buildings are beloved, very few will survive the depredations of man and nature.  The useful pieces will be carted away for re-use, scattering the building DNA across the globe, but leaving little trace on the sites where they once stood in their families of stone and brick.  It is the triumph of time over strength.

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[i] Freud, 8.

[ii] Clark, 142.

[iii] Albert Speer 1970, 56.

[iv] R. Smithson, “Entropy and the New Monuments”, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings.  Berkeley, University of California Press, 2^nd Edition, 1996.

[v] Robert Morris, American sculptor, in Harries, 246.