Below This Level There is None

We inhabit the megalopolis only to the extent we declare it

uninhabitable. Otherwise we are only lodged there 1
And so, long live the underground Eh! But here, too, Im lying!
Lying because I myself know, like two times two, that it is not at all
the underground that is better, but something different, completely
different, which I thirst for but cannot ever find. Devil take the
underground!2.
Not Strictly Underground
In a justly renowned passage, Michel De Certeau delivers a powerful
critique of the citys upper levels. [T]he view from above, he argues,
renders space abstract, diminishes its complexity, for [o]nes body is no
longer clasped by the streets . Nor possessed, whether as player or
played, by the rumble of so many differences. The citys agitation is
momentarily arrested by vision. The gigantic mass is immobilised before
the eyes [and the] ordinary practitioners of the city live down below,
below the thresholds at which visibility begins 3. Adopting the view from
above does not depend upon scaling the heights of the citys upper levels,
but has become a generalised perspective, a perspective which
coordinates verticality as the key axis of the urban environment. The
emphasis on verticality, Henri Lefebvre confirms, tends to produce
homogeneity to the extent that an edifice is constructed with upward
momentum, it abstracts from the local specificity of the territory.
Verticality, and the independence of volumes with respect to the original
land and its peculiarities are, precisely, produced 4. In place of the
elevated viewpoint, these theorists mobilise an engagement with the
ground level, the street and the dynamics of the pedestrian city. Yet
efforts can be made to broaden or more specifically, to deepen - the
process of levelling the heights of urban prestige, the placards of
prosperity and success identified by Alfred Bosson, one of the pioneers of
skyscraper design5. This deepening responds to the pressure of the spatial
down-turn propelled by the De Certeau and Lefebvre yet it continues its
descent to discover that beneath the pavement lies not only the
Situationists beach, but the underground.
This movement is prefigured in the Dostoevsky quotation that commences
this account. The narrator of Notes from Underground catalogues the
ascent of the crystal palaces and crystal edifices that, though
beautiful and lofty, nevertheless constitute the architectural equivalent
of the the full triumph of Baal, the ultimate organisation of the anthill.
Initially, it seems, sanctuary is to be found in the underground. Yet
1

Jean Francois Lyotard cited in Hilde Heynen Architecture and Modernity (London: MIT
Press, 1999) p. 220
2
Fyodor Dostoevsky Notes from Underground Trans. Richar Pevear and Larissa Volukhorsky
(London: Vintage, 1993) p. 7
3
Michel de Certeau The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of
California Press, 1987) pp. 91 93
4
Henri Lefebvre The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwells, 1991) p. 337
5
Dennis Sharp and Peter Wyde Alfred Bosson and the American Skyscraper in
Architectural Association Quarterly, Jan June 1982, Vol. 13, No. 2 3, p. 27

Dostoevskys commentator realises that the equation of subterranean and

subversive cannot be coherently sustained.
The contradictory impulses generated by the underground provoke an
investigation of its complexities. Out of the tunnels, the caverns and the
bunkers, will emerge an shadowy architectural figure that has the
potential to problematise some of the contemporary conventions of spatial
design. [G]hosts, pockets, traces, necessary clouds: subversion must
produce its own chiaroscuro6.
Tunnel Visions
The high gained from such subterranean exploration is so fucking intense
theres no need for a chalice in this Wonderland. Unequalled by anything
on surface level, the bowels of the city is a sight to behold 7.
It is not only the theorists of urban space for whom the underground is
something of a lost dimension. Every time we turn on the tap, pull the
chain, pick up the telephone, there is an underground movement; a gurgle
of water, an impulse along a wire As we bask in the electric sunshine of
our city surface, we are quite unaware of the subterranean labyrinth
beneath our feet. Very occasionally we become aware of this troglodyte
city In our everyday lives, our ignorance of the world below extends to
profound depths8. The underside of London, for example, possesses its
own meshwork woven from diverse piping for utility distribution and waste
dispatch systems, entwined with the bricked channels of the lost rivers
such as the Westbourne and the Fleet and suspended in a regolith of
demolished buildings, domestic and industrial refuse and the vast
accumulation of human remains. In cross-section, London is rather like a
cake that has risen gently over the centuries [a] cake [with] many
layers9. The nature of some of these buried amenities might be regarded
as corroborating Gaston Bachelards binary opposition between the
rationality of elevated space and the the dark entity the one that
partakes of subterranean forces the irrationality of the depths 10.
However, we should not forget that beneath the surface, lies not only the
operative equivalent of the repressed and the unconscious but also what
can perhaps be regarded as analogues of the ego-superego apparatus: the
communication networks (including the Post Offices 23 mile rail circuit)
and the transport facilities.
Moreover, we should be clear that the functional parameters of these
tunnel and pipe networks are not exhausted by the civic amenity uses for
which they were constructed. Sewer systems have provided
accommodation for refugees from a variety of troubles. The narrative of
Harry Limes inhabitation of the Vienna Sewers in The Third Man was
parasitic upon authenticated accounts of 1,000s sheltering in its chthonic
curves until the middle of the last century. Today, sewer systems continue
to represent a last ditch habitat for the desperate. In Ulan Bator, for
6

Roland Barthes Le Plaisir du Texte (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1973) p. 53

Subterranean London in Graphotism Issue 18, 1999 p. 24
8
Richard Trench and Ellis Hillman London under London (London: John Murray, 1985) p. 7
9
Andrew Davies, Down to a sunless city: Beneath your feet lies another London, The
Independent, September 26th 1994 p. 2
10
Gaston Bachelard The Poetics of Space (Boston, Mass: The Beacon Press, 1994) p. 17
7

example, the manholes that connect to the sewage and heating system
offer relative warmth in comparison to the surface of the worlds coldest
capital. Recent reports indicate that this has led to a situation where
many of Ulan Bator's nearly 3,000 street children live [in these] fetid
places11, with up to 6 children inhabiting each manhole, from which
passing pedestrians may be solicited, into which charitable donations of
food descend and in which the inhabitants, although relatively warm, are
afflicted by a staggering range of diseases and infections 12.
In spite of its initial hostility to the spontaneous re-designation of tube
station complexes as air-raid shelters during Londons Blitz, the
government eventually supported the initiative and other areas of the
network were exploited for their incidental security (including a three mile
section of the Central Line being occupied by Plessey as an aircraft
component factory)
However, the reappropriation of underground
transport systems does not always attract official sanction, a circumstance
rendered graphically in Walter Sterns promo for The Prodigys Firestarter
(1998). The damaged pastoral evoked by the inner sleeve illustrations of
the groups previous long-player - which began with a vocal sample
announcing Ive decided to take my work back underground to stop it
falling into the wrong hands is obliterated in the rigorously sustained
chiaroscuro mise-en-scene of the service tunnel. The clip is redolent of
those derogatorily identified as molemen who dwell in the New York
subway system. Estimates of the population size range between 1,000 and
5,000; this after concerted efforts by the Manhattan authorities to restrict
access, to render suitable resting places inhospitable (through installing
intense overhead lights and sealing amenable alcoves) and to encourage
stubborn occupants of this dangerous netherworld to return to the surface
and a suitable outreach programme 13.
Equally, the Firestarter video is suggestive of a more transitory
transgression of the citys underground utilites: that mounted by graffiti
writers. Jean Baudrillards prescient essay Kool Killer, first published in
1976, addresses graffiti as the end of the repressive space-time of urban
transport systems, a free and wide-ranging offensive whose practices
care little for architecture, they defile it, forget about it and cross the
street14. Yet, rather than seeing graffiti as indifferent to architecture,
perhaps it can be positioned as inspiring an alternative approach to the
built environment. In graffiti-space, existing surfaces become vulnerable to
an optical rescrambling that can exceed simple recoloration or refiguration
and extend to introducing what are apprehended by the passing
commuter as new textures, new planes or even new depths to the
underground canvas. Furthermore, graffitis navigation of space in this
instance, the space of the submerged rail-routes is as important as its
alteration of space. Before the spray-cans are triggered, the writers have
frequently engaged in an intricate negotiation of the tunnelways. Such
negotiation depends upon such diverse tactics as stealing access door
11

Living in a Manhole: Mongolias Street Children, Economist January 2000

See Kate Connolly Plight of the Sewer Children 7 th November 1999, The Observer, p.28
for a similar account from Bacau, Romania
13
See Liesl Schillinger The Moles of Manhattan, Independent on Sunday March 3rd 1996,
p. 4
14
Jean Baudrillard Kool Killer, or the Insurrection of Signs in Symbolic Exchange and
Death (London: Sage, 1995) pp. 76 85
12

keys (unforgettably demonstrated in the Style Wars documentary);

avoiding surveillance cameras, trip-wires, transport police and possible
sentence for criminal damage; manoeuvring around live rails and
overhead cables with the very real possibility of injury or even fatality 15;
adjusting to the extremes of silence and deafening noise, bright corridors
and pitch black stair-wells; and, fundamentally, developing an intimate
knowledge of the labyrinthine system from which [w]hat were once
ignored became openings to underground frontiers: manhole covers, pushbacked doors, and tunnel entrances all brought a brave new cradle of
humanity to our attention 16. Thus the geography generated by graffiti is
one in which the mundanity of the underground transport network can be
transfigured not only through the visual stimulation of its sombre surfaces
but also through the substitution of the prosaic use value with an
excessive surplus that works to activate the hidden levels of the city as
dynamic spaces.
While architectural designs approaches to what might be termed the
civic underground are obviously diverse, it is possible to discern one
prominent imperative, which can be described as the light-bringer
aesthetic. Foster and Partners Canary Wharf Station, occupying the
drained West India Dock, presents a powerful instantiation of this
methodology where the signature high-tech elements are deployed to
engineer what has been described as like a cross between Canterbury
cathedral and the set of Aliens, as offering an almost religious
experience17. The interplay of the vectors of glass and steel and their arcs
and angles operate to attract and then multiply the available light. This
mechanism can be seen to be paralleled in two relatively recent entrance
structures to underground complexes orchestrated by I. M. Pei at the
Louvre extension and at the Miho Museum.
To a certain extent, these projects can be interpreted as orientated
towards expelling the undergrounds darkness and its mutability of use.
While there are clearly comprehensible justifications for eliminating the
obscurity of the underground not least questions of personal safety - it
remains regrettable that the universal application of these principles
would ultimately erode any distinction between the locations of surface
and depth and would banish the shadow as a contributory element to lived
space.
Subterranean Homesick Blues
The point now is that I found a home or a hole in the ground, as you
will. Now dont jump to the conclusion that because I call my home a hole
its damp and cold like a grave; there are cold holes and warm holes. Mine
is a warm hole Even hibernations can be overdone, come to think of it 18.
The preceding section revolved around the meshwork of utility services
that characterise the underside of the contemporary city. Habitation did
15

An encounter with an overhead is horrifically detailed by Zism in 3 a.m Wake-Up Call in

Graphotism Issue 14, 1999 p. 18
16
Mark Sinckler and Ephraim Webber Pushing Back the Doorways in Graphotism Issue 17,
1999 p. 31
17
Andrew Smith Tubeway Armies November 7th 1999, The Observer, p.28
18
Ralph Ellison Invisible Man (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1965) p. 9 and p. 468

enter these tunnels but it was of a impromptu, illicit character involving

the detournement of spaces designed for other purposes. In this section
the focus will relate to underground accommodation that has been
purpose-built.
Excavation is hard work, and to make a place for oneself underground is
no trivial enterprise19. In the light of this remark, it could be anticipated
that only the most industrially sophisticated and financially secure could
pursue subterranean subsistence. As we will discover, this anticipation
resonates with the frequent presence of the underground lair in fantasy
film. However, there are altogether more lo-tech approaches to live below
the earth. Yet lo-tech does not necessarily imply a low culutural level. The
picture of the caveman dragging his mate by the hair is a cartoonistss
clich, betraying nostalgia for bygone days rather than a portrait of the
kind of people who prefer to live underground 20. If historically.
troglodytism was frequently a response to persecution, geographically, its
distribution is widespread: from the enormous residential cave at Shandiar
in the Zagros Mountains of Iraq, through the mud domes covering the
bazaars of Sojare in Iran, to the underground cities of Cappadocia in
Central Turkey carved out of the tufa that evolved from volcanic ash, past
the multistoried troglodyte town of Pantalica in Sicily, to the
subterranean settlements of Andalucia, the indigenous American tribal
structures detailed by William Morgan 21 and the schools, factories, hotels,
and government instituions that lie below the rich fields of Tungkwan in
Hunan Province, Southern China.
This last example indicates that troglodytism has yet to disappear from
the earth. Indeed, thousands still remain in the Cappadocian caves despite
the area having been designated a national park, being subject to strict
planning control (contravention of which may attract arrest) and incurring
an influx of inquisitive tourists and corollary amenities (including Club
Meds Four Star underground complex Kaya Oteli in Uchisar) 22.
The Egyptian Hassan Fathy and Japanese Kisho Kurokawa have both
conducted separate architectural experiments in developing enclosed
dwellings that are designed with sensitive attention to North African
climatic conditions and the regional vernacular 23. Their officiallysanctioned projects can be identified as an extension of archaeological
historian Barbara Jones concept of the overground underground that she
applied to surface funerary monuments that nevertheless exhibited
characteristics ordinarily attributable to below ground constructions. As
such, perhaps more viable candidates for the active inheritance of the
troglodyte tradition lie in the direction of the UK anti-road protestors
tunnel systems, intended to frustrate the rapid clearance of territory.
19

Barbara Jones Some Medieval and Eighteenth Century Curiosities and Utilities in ed.
Harriet Crawford Subterranean Britain: Aspects of Underground Archaeology (London: John
Barker, 1979) p. 25
20
Bernard Rudofsky Architecture Without Architecture: A Short Introduction to NonPedigreed Architecture (London: Academy Editions, 1964) p. 19
21
See Process, 1981
22
See Lesley Gillian 'God designed the basic structure; and man added the finishing
touches.' Independent on Sunday May 18th 1997 p. 63
23
See ed. Jean Dethier Down to Earth: An Old Idea, A New Future (London: Thames and
Hudson, 1982) and Kisho Kurokawa Intercultural Architecture: The Philosophy of Symbiosis
(London: Academy Editions, 1991

Yet these earthworks represent only one dimension of subterranean

accommodation, the other dimension unlike the geotectures described
above depends upon a more radical transformation of the site. In
science fiction dreams and architectural projects alike, the man (and
sometimes woman) of the future would live in a realm all by his own on
the stars, in the sea or underground 24. One of the most adept architects
of the fantasy underground is scenographer Ken Adam. In You Only Live
Twice, for example, Adam fashions two superb examples of the subsurface complex as home of the powerful: Tiger Tanakas Japanese secret
service HQ that is accessed through the lowest level of an underground
car park and the volcano criminal nerve centre, constructed on the largest
studio set ever built in Europe and employing 700 tons of structural steel
and 200 miles of tubular steel 25. With these buried bases, Adam attempted
to express the neurotic electronic world we are living in which, up to then,
I hadn't seen in the cinema26.
Adams cinematic constructions can be regarded as constituting the
abstract machine of the underground lair the fullest manifestations of its
principles and potential. However, developments in the real world of
recessed residencies are rapidly converging with his filmic futurism. The
Yates Fieldhouse at Georgetown University, Washington D.C, for example,
for which Daniel F. Tully Associates were responsible, could almost be a
SPECTRE R & R complex with its visible athletics track and sports fields
functioning as a roof to protect the tennis courts and basketball pitches
concealed underneath. Similarly, Houston, Texass 6.3mile system of
privately- owned and -maintained underground sidewalks that operate to
connect the Downtown business district and occasionally emerge as
skywalks bridging the street, represents an exercise in urban circulation
that more closely resembles the set of some future-noir extrapolation of
contemporary fears of the unruly street.
Yet even these idiosyncratic instantiations of underground accommodation
- and perhaps Adams too take on a sober mien when juxtaposed to the
effortless ambition of the renegade Archigrams unbuilt architecture. The
Crater City project Peeping from the trees. Concealed underground. Or
explicit! as its nomenclature indicates, proposes sinking apartments for
16,000 around the periphery of a vast and perfect crater, in the process
balancing a dramatic presence with subdued external impact. Peter Cooks
The Metamorphosis of An English Town suggests a concrete response to
the critique of verticality mobilised earlier on. The town, presented in
cross-section in the successive sequence of sketches, is transformed from
its typical geometric silhouette in which height retains a symmetry with
prestige into an vegetal blob with only the vestige of structures visible
above its soft surface. Eat into that tower, indeed! 27.

24

Aaron Betsky and Erik Adijad Architecture Must Burn: A Manifesto for Architecture
Beyond Building (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000) no page numbering
25
See David Sylvester Moonraker, Strangelove and other Celluloid Dreams: The Visionary
Art of Ken Adam (London: Serpentine Gallery, 1999
26
Jane Withers Sketchbook: For Your Eyes Only, The Independent November 6th 1999 p.
21
27
ed. Peter Cook Archigram (Basel: Birkhauser Verlage, 1991) pp. 126 127

As we approach the end of this section, a shift in scale is required, a

movement from the macro to the micro. The claim that [u]nderground
houses have usually resulted from strictly aesthetic considerations 28
derives its impetus from the many technical obstacles the assail the
would-be burrower. In addition to the obvious need to establish adequate
ventilation and secure ingress and egress that will remain accessible in a
variety of emergency eventualities, any burrow must be shielded against
the effects of moisture, negotiate the range of existing utilities present at
the site and reinforce the structure against ground movements. These
physical problems surmounted there remains the apparent psychological
impact of going underground spatial disorientation, claustrophobia and
the reported consequences of prolonged dislocation from natural light and
external views29.
Perhaps in an effort to eschew the effects of isolation from the suns rays,
contemporary underground accommodation frequently features a carefully
aligned vitreous faade (something accomplished with flair by Future
Systems residence for MP Bob Marshall Adams on the Pembrokeshire
coast) or an arrangement of skylights (of which the domes and atriums
atop Arthur Quarmbys Mole Manor represent somewhat baroque
examples). These buildings return us once again to the realm of the lightbringer. Not for their architects nor indeed their inhabitants is the natural
and spontaneous balance of light and air superseded 30. Instead, it is
precisely this balance that is actively sought whether in the arrangements
to draw surface light below or in the substitution of daylight with the harsh
illumination of the artificial bulb. In the diverse troglodyte dwellings and
the overground underground of Fathys and Kurokawas projects, however,
we see intimations of an architecture that embraces darkness as positive
force.
Bunker Mentality
In a beautiful submarine, interest is lost in the surroundings. Living
becomes bad living and bad living freezes life 31
Using the techniques of archaeology, I have explored the subterranean
world of one of the esoteric forms of the times: the blockhouse 32.
The final underground figure that demands investigation is that of the
military bunker. Predictably, these possess a number of distinct forms. The
Vietcong tunnel systems, for example, bear superficial parallel to the road
protestors retreats. The proximity is one of kind rather than degree.
Compared to the Cu Chi complex in the environs of Saigon, which
stretched to 200 miles of excavated channels complete with command
posts, arsenals, hospitals, educational facilities and accommodation for up
28

Katshuhiko Ichinowatari Editorial Process, 1981, p. 4

See Underground Space Centre Earth Sheltered Housing Design: Guidelines, Examples
and References (Van Nostrand Rheinhold Co.: New York, 1979
30
Andrea Branzi No-Stop City, Residential Parking, Climatic Universal System in ed. K.
Michael Hays Architectural Theory Since 1968 (London: The MIT Press, 2000) p. 59
31
Coop Himmelblau, Gracious Living Makes Frozen Lives (1978) in Coop Himmelblau The
Power of the City (Frankfurt: Verlag Jrgen Husser, 1992) p. 76
32
Paul Virilio and Claude Parent The Function of the Oblique (London: Architectural
Association, 1996
29

to 10,000 guerrillas33 the systems sunk under Fairmile and Newbury

appear rudimentary. Again, the citadels and war-rooms buried beneath
the UK capital might be relatable to some of the structures associated with
the transport and utility artefacts. But, again, on closer examination we
are confronted with sites that display a more thorough-going commitment
to defensibility, autonomy and sustainability. These sites are afforded
stimulating documentation in the efforts of Subterranea Britannica whose
energies are dedicated to mapping this invisible underground 34. Some
sites are now accessible to the public including Kelvedon Hatch - the
subterranean labyrinth whose entrance is disguised as a rural bungalow
and was once intended to house devolved central government in the
event of nuclear calamity and the Scottish complex at Anstruther. Finally,
the individual shelters may at first sight appear not too distant from the
buried residential accommodation yet the former demonstrate little
pretension to comfort or, necessarily, to the circulation of natural air or
light. In the event of the decommissioned bunkers being sold, the
demands of conversion to anything approaching the standards
contemplated by any conventional resident are onerous indeed. That said,
in the last year of the previous millennium, the international press
reported that defunct underground military installations were being
advertised by more esoteric estate agents precisely for the features that
satisfied their original purpose. One such property consultant specialised
in what he described as Y2K-friendly bunkers and announced that "[i]f
you want to be completely safe from a nuclear attack or from chemical or
biological attacks, this is the place. This home offers the ultimate in
privacy and security."
In an essay entitled The Geopolitics of Hibernation, published in 1962
and illustrated with a public information diagram of an apple pie family
contentedly settling down in their personal if worryingly shallow
shelter, the Situationist International delivered at devastating critique of
the bunker mentality. The network of shelters which are not intended for
use in war, but right now presents a still far-fetched and caricatured
image of existence under a perfected bureaucratic capitalism The world
of shelters announces itself as an air-conditioned vale of tears The
subterranean sickness reveals the real nature of normal surface
health35. The situationists contended that they were confronting an
environment in which the underground bunkers distracted the post-war
population from appreciating that their own overground urbanism of
despair was already organised according to the fortification of isolated
cells of life.
More recently, urban analyst Mike Davis has reinvigorated this approach in
his detection of a [m]ilitarisation of city life so grimly visibile at street
level36. The contemporary city surface, he contends, exhibits a neomilitary syntax in which space in introverted. Residential architects are
borrowing design secrets from overseas embassies and military command
posts. One of the features most in demand is the terrorist-proof-security33

See Justin Wintle Romancing Vietnam (London: Viking, 1991

See http://www.subbrit.org.co.uk and, for further research
http://www.chrisevansbooks.com/forts.html
35
The Geopolitics of Hibernation, in ed. Ken Knabb The Situationist International
Anthology (Berkeley, California: The Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981) pp. 78 - 79
36
Mike Davis City of Quartz (London: Vintage, 1992) p. 223
34

room concealed in the houseplan and accessed by sliding panels and

secret doors. The lessons learned below ground in the missile silos and
average suburban bunker are being repeated in the upper levels of the
city.
These apocalyptic analyses are corroborated by some of Paul Virilios
theses. His repeated assertion of the infiltration of the militarys
movements into daily life37 encompasses the notion that the political
triumph of the bourgeois revolution consists in spreading the state of siege
of the communal city-machine, immobile in the middle of its logistic glacis
and domestic lodgings, over the totality of the national territory 38. If Virilio
later accelerates his account to target the colonisation of time rather than
space as the militarys ultimate imperative, his earlier writings
nevertheless provide ample evidence that what had been developed in the
underground rises to transform the upper levels. His Bunker Archaeology,
an extended investigation of the German Atlantic Wall defences, can
convincingly be read not simply as historical documentary but also as
future prognosis of urban space.
Virilio is careful to acknowledge the aesthetic appeal of the bunker an
appeal enigmatically demonstrated in Jane and Louise Wilsons video
installation Gamma that disinters the Greenham airbases subterranean
spaces39. Indeed, in his own architecture, notably the Church of SainteBernadette du Banlay in Nevers, France, the bunker device exerts a
powerful pressure. Intriguingly, Virilios architectural manifesto attempts
to answer the question of verticality posed earlier. For him, the the
traditional stability (habitable stasis) of both the rural horizontal order and
the urban vertical order gave way to the Metastability of the human body
in motion, in tune with the rhythms of life 40. [U]rbanism will in future
have much more to do with ballistics than the partition of territories. In
effect, the static vertical and horizontal no longer correspond to the
dynamics of human life. In future, architecture must be built on the
oblique, so as to accord with the new plane of human consciousness 41.
To encounter an architecture that engages with the momentum of the
diagonal as a means to disrupt the specificity of conventional axes of
construction, that deploys the bunker as an element in a design repertoire,
and takes the imperatives of the underground overground, the anarchitect
Lebbeus Woods remains a provocative example. Woods unique work
offers the eye an impression of the city after the catastrophe: a structure
resembling an aircraft fuselage embedded in what remains of an ordinary
building; small pods are raised on stilts above residential rubble; exterior
surfaces have latched onto host edifices like vast, rusty parasites; tracts of
urban landscape are engulfed by what look like poorly constructed suits of
medieval armour all overlapping, dented metallic planes; and the whole
interwoven by a chaos of piping that resemble buried utilities brought to

37

Paul Virilio Popular Defense and Ecological Struggles (New York: Semiotext(e), 1990) p.
233
38
Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics (New York: Semiotext(e), 1986) p. 14
39
See Paul Virilio The Aesthetics of Disappearance (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991) p. 103
40
Paul Virilio and Claude Parent The Function of the Oblique (London: Architectural
Association, 1996) p. 13
41
ibid. p. 65

the surface42. Woods projects present an environment in which the notion

of a city level has become radically destabilised: the conventional vertical
hierarchy of use has been obliterated with no apparent logic of upper or
lower being discernible in his plans; the orthodox delimitations of one level
from another are disrupted as whole sections of buildings are separated by
precarious pillars or are joined together by what amount to tunnel
structures. Woods arresting imagery and inspirational arguments the
two are inextricably integrated - betray little sense of interior spaces, it is
the exterior that appears the primary target. This balance reflects Woods
hostility to the programming of the predesigned, predetermined,
predictable or predictive43, the inside of his freespaces become useful
and acquire meaning only as they are inhabited in a process of continual
flux. That said, the almost total absence of identifiably transparent
materials in his blueprints suggests that the habitats are unlikely to be
ones in which natural light contributes extensively to their occupants
experience. Instead, they will be architecture caught in sudden light, then
broken in the continuum of darknesses an architecture, then, of
shadows.
Hello Darkness, My Old Friend
And so it has come to be that the beauty of a Japanese room depends
upon a variation of shadows, heavy shadows against light shadows it has
nothing else 44
Approaches to the underground have frequently involved efforts to
eradicate the threatening darkness. Even Ralph Ellisons invisible man in
his bunker retreat boasts of having wired the entire ceiling [with] exactly
1,396 lights of a powerful wattage and plots a time [w]hen I finish all
four walls, then Ill start on the floor 45.
Yet not all approaches to space endeavour to place it in the glare of
illumination. Eighteenth century architect Etienne Boulle for one, offers
encouragement for an alternative aesthetic. One must, as I have tried to
do in funerary monuments, present the skeleton of architecture by means
of a naked wall, presenting the image of buried architecture by employing
only low and compressed proportions, sinking into the earth, forming,
finally, by means of materials absorbent to the light, the black picture of
an architecture of shadows depicted by the effect of even blacker
shadows46. The Situationists, for their part, began to add new vocabulary
to an architectural language of shadows. Ivan Chtcheglov rued the fact
that [d]arkness and obscurity are banished by artificial lighting 47 and
proposed a sinister quarter in his attempt to return a measure of magic
to city life.
Gaston Bachelard went further still, fashioning this
42

See Lebbeus Woods Radical Reconstruction (Princeton Architectural Press, 1997),

Lebbeus Woods Anarchitecture: Architecture is a Political Act (London: Academy Editions,
1992); Lebbeus Woods Borderlines (Basel: RIEA, 1999) and the synoptic overview in Angus
Carlyle Welcome to the War Planet in Themepark Volume 1, Number 1, 2000.
43
Woods, Radical Reconstruction op cit. p. 16
44
Junichiro Tanizaki In Praise of Shadows (Stony Creek, Connecticut: Leetes Island Books,
1977) p. 18
45
Ralph Ellison Invisible Man (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1965) p. 10
46
Anthony Vidler The Architectural Uncanny: Essays on the Modern Unheimlich (Cam, Mass:
MIT Press, 1996) p. 170
47
Ivan Chtcheglov Formulary for a New Urbanism in ed. Ken Knabb op cit. p. 2

architectural language into poetry of gloom in which [t]he first, the

oneirically definitive house must retain its shadows 48. For Bachelard,
there is a close connection between this dimness and the territory below
street level, a connection that intensifies the rumination enabled there:
[t]he cellar dreamer knows that the walls of the cellar are buried walls,
that they are walls with a single casing, walls that have the entire earth
behind them There, secrets are pondered, projects are prepared. And,
underneath the earth, action gets underway. We are really in the intimate
realm of underground manoeuvres 49.
There remain, of course, compelling justifications for bringing light into
urban space. But need the equation of vitreous with virtuous, of
illumination with perfection always apply? If room can be made for a
measure of darkness in our city levels, then inspiration is already there
buried not only in the pages of poetic discourse and the plans of
architectures renegades but most emphatically in the practices of the
underground itself. Troglodytes, mole people, bunker soldiers, graffiti
writers, road protestors all these have encountered sublime shadows in
their subterranean lives perhaps it is time their experiences were brought
to the surface world.

48
49

Gaston Bachelard The Poetics of Space (Boston, Mass: The Beacon Press, 1994) p. 13
ibid p. 20, 21