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The Dutch design firm Atelier Van Lieshout the Vostok Cabin — a mobile, steel-plated shelter. The walls are recycled from ships and the cabin comes equipped with benches, a toilet, and a wood stove. It’s more of an art project than a practical design. The designers write:
The material due to its previous life is crooked, damaged and irregular. There is no straight edge to be constructed from these disastrous supplies.
The Cabin looks like an improvised defense/attack apparatus made by a local blacksmith in order to have a better chance of survival in times of revolution and civil war.
Link via Gizmodo | Studio Website | Photos: Dezeen
Arnie Cooper of Popular Science visited a resort under construction outside of Barstow, California. It’s called Terra Vivos, and promoter Robert Vicino is selling shares of this 1960s-era underground complex built to survive a nuclear war. He’s renovating it to turn the facility into a fairly comfortable bunker that can protect owners:
The Barstow bunker was built to withstand a 50-megaton nuclear blast 10 miles away, 450mph winds, a magnitude-10 earthquake, 10 days of 1,250°F surface fires, and three weeks beneath any flood. Vicino says that a soon-to-be-installed air-filtration system will also neutralize any biological, chemical or nuclear attacks. The Barstow branch will stock enough food and clothing to sustain 135 people for at least a year, and in a lifestyle that Vicino describes as compact but luxurious, like being on a cruise ship.[...]
Vicino says he has 5,000 additional applicants on file but that he is being selective in order to create a balanced community. “You wouldn’t want 200 doctors in one facility and no plumbers,” he says. “If the toilet breaks, that could be a real disaster.” People can bring guns, but they must check them at the door. If someone misbehaves, the security staff will lock him in a detention center. Vicino is also thinking about survival of the species, not just his customers. He plans to stock each Vivos bunker with a freezer full of DNA samples of as many species as he can collect. Whether it’s preserving humanity or reseeding a scorched planet, he asks, “don’t you want to be one of the guys repopulating the Earth?”
Link | Image: Terra Vivos
In American culture, the standardized fallout shelter sign is an icon of Cold War life. Bill Geerhart of Conelrad, a website specializing in the social history of the Cold War, wrote an article that can be called the definitive history of the sign. The project was headed up by an Army Corps of Engineers manager named Robert Blakely, who navigated the sign through the bowels of the US federal bureaucracy. The earliest version was created by a graphic arts company in Virginia:
Blair, Inc. frequently worked on government contracts and the ideas generated in Blakeley’s office were shared with their designers. Blakeley stated to CONELRAD that he provided the following basic guidelines to his people to convey to Blair, Inc.: “I gave them the fact that it had to be a simple reproducible image…and I did say ‘tell them that in the design they had to have a place for us to print directional arrows.’” Blair, Inc. was also instructed by Blakeley that the sign “had to be something that would get people’s attention and give them direction to the location.” To this end, Blakeley said that he asked a representative from the company what the best color combination was for this purpose. The response that came back as quoted by Blakeley was: “orange or yellow and black is the one that is most dominantly used in the graphics field.” He added “And I said ‘if that’s right, let’s do that and it was that simple.”
Link via Ace of Spades HQ | Conelrad
Photo: Annie Scott
Most hotels try to convince you to book your stay with them by touting their five-star ratings. Not Null Stern Hotel in Switzerland! Not only does it have "zero star" rating, the hotel is actually a converted bomb shelter.
Annie Scott of Gadling stayed there and lived to write about it:
The "Null Stern," or "Zero Star" Hotel is a cross between a hostel and an art installation by Swiss concept artists Frank and Patrik Riklin. The former air raid shelter retains remnants of its past purpose and challenges one’s perception of what "hospitality" means. There are ear-protecting headphones and heavy machinery, as well as sleigh beds and a sexily-dressed female butler. It was quite an experience.
Link – Thanks Willy!
