by Tom Vanderbilt
(originally published Jan/Feb 2001 in ArtByte: The
Magazine of Digital Culture)
Sands, New Mexico, birthplace of the apocalypse.
The American desert, land of lost civilizations,
wayward prophets, and air-conditioned fantasy,
has long been the country's last New Frontier, where
dreams might be played out with a
minimum of interference—if only, as in the scene in Joan Didion's
Play It as It Lays, we can keep
sweeping the drifting sand back to the perimeter of the
yard. It is a vast tabula rasa, where one's
mark can be seen for miles—whether it be the earthworks of
endowed artists, the ancient trails of
primeval visitors, or the pockmarked craters of an aerial
bombing range.
In this regard, the desert was the perfect home for the
Cold War, not simply for its sheer size and
emptiness, but because the desert, in America, has come to
signify the future. The Cold War was
at heart a conflict projected toward the future: the race
to see who would first reach space, whose Air
Force would first reach 10,000 bombers, who would explode
the first 25 megaton warhead.
Despite its overwhelming aura of fatalism and apocalypse,
it also concealed a perverse
undercurrent of optimism, a belief that the science and
technology that was being funded by the
so-called "imaginary war" would someday mean a
better life for all—if it did not kill us first.
It is no surprise that the place where people most often
go to reinvent themselves in a country of
reinvention is the desert city of Las Vegas. It is, after
all, a city that has witnessed many
futures—the Mormons, the Mafia, the Manhattan Project—and
would not exist at the scale it does
without the massive technological life-support systems
upon which it rests its confidence in
unimpeded future growth. The city exists as a collective
delusion that it is not a desert, and such
an illusory environment is fertile ground for those
seeking to nurture their own illusions.
The desert has attracted all manner of dreamers, from
millenarian cultists to visionary artists to the
advanced weapons scientists of the United States Air
Force. They have all made their mark, tested
something or another on America's proving ground. Like
bleached bones or bullet-ridden "No
Trespassing" signs, these dreams lie in the desert
sand, faded and chipped but intact, legible.
Several months ago, I traveled to the deserts of Arizona
and New Mexico in search of these relics of
the future.
There have been few dreams as outsized as those of Paolo
Soleri, the enigmatic Italian-born
architect and onetime disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright.
Lured to the desert in the 1940s to toil at
Wright's Taliesin West, Soleri soon estranged himself from
the master and began developing
plans for model cities based on a theory called
"Arcology" (a somewhat fluid and elusive notion,
like the concepts of fellow traveler Marshall McLuhan).
Soleri's plans for towering cities that
would house millions of people, sketched out madly on
endlessly spiraling sheets of butcher's
paper, became a cause cèlèbre in the art and planning
worlds. There was little Soleri was not
willing to imagine, as captured in this New York Times
description of his 1969 Corcoran show:
"Lucite models of polyhedral cybernetic cities scaled
higher than two Empire State Buildings;
intricate representations of structures resembling jet
engines, only 2,000 times their size, and
accommodating as many people as San Francisco; plaster
casts of graceful, sculptured bridge spans;
plans for floating cities, space cities, cities within
bridges, megastructures so huge that their
inhabitants would be able to build houses within their
frameworks."
In retrospect, the year 1970 hardly seems a propitious one
for building a hyper-urbanized
megalopolis. America's cities were seething with crime and
social unrest, suburban outmigration
was in full blossom, and LBJ's "Model Cities"
program—which rebuilt blighted urban areas—had
been abolished by Nixon the year before, its resources
channeled into the Vietnam War.
Undaunted, Soleri broke ground on Arcosanti on a basaltic
mesa overlooking the Agua Fria river,
some 60 miles from Phoenix. The Times described it as
"less an apartment building than a
2,500-inhabitant megastructure with a volume roughly
equivalent to that of St. Peter's in Rome
...an alien body on the land, it will be an almost
self-contained space colony, and its chief purpose
will be to test whether man can build environments that
have only a minimal effect on
the ecology of his planet." Newsweek, commenting in
1976 that "a magnificent, inspiring
and domed city is rising out of the Arizona desert,"
concluded that "as urban architecture,
Arcosanti is probably the most important experiment
undertaken in our lifetime."
Today, Arcosanti houses roughly 100 inhabitants, and only
an estimated 4 percent of the original
plan has been built. In a cruel irony, the city will
likely be lost in the malarial spread of urban
sprawl from nearby Phoenix before it is finished. Another
epitaph for Soleri's dream appears as I
exit I-17 and head toward Arcosanti, past a cluster of gas
stations. As the road turns to gravel,
I see a sign for "Arcosanti: An Experimental
Community." To the right, however, I see another
form of experimental living: a group of "manufactured
housing" units for sale. The trailer
is the desert's most ubiquitous living form, its prefab
mobility attractive to those likely to pull up
stakes when fortune or water runs dry; the trailer
succeeds where only a madman would install a
permanent house. Where Soleri's utopia envisions communal
living in densely clustered, rationally
planned superstructures, the trailer, for all its lack of
architectural merit, more faithfully evokes the
sense of margin-dwelling and mobility by which Americans
have sought their fortune in the desert.
Arcosanti surges into view only after you drive down a
rutted and twisting road (a car company
once offered to pave it in exchange for sponsorship; the
offer was turned down), and
suddenly the view is filled with a kaleidoscope of soaring
blocks of poured concrete, earth-colored
apses, circular windows, and metal sculptures—as well as
looming cranes and other detritus of
construction. The scene startles for its sheer visual
novelty, but then one's mind begins to play back
all the old images of dream architecture and future
civilizations. Suddenly, Arcosanti, with its
vaults and creeping vegetation and amphitheater-like steps
descending in a semicircle
around one apse, seems almost a ruin, like something
derived from the iconography of
science fiction, specifically that variant of science
fiction concerned with dystopic visions of the
future. A dream civilization arising out of the imagined
ashes of a nuclear catastrophe, Arcosanti
could be the city in Planet of the Apes, or the refuge on
the hill in The Omega Man, or the
self-contained dome-world of Logan's Run.
For decades, Soleri's workforce has been idealistic youth,
an impression reinforced on this visit. From
one apse comes the honk of an avant-garde saxophone.
"They're practicing for Burning Man," a
guide tells me. Burning Man, that Archigram-like "Instant
City" on the desert at Black Rock, is
actually a useful referent for evaluating Soleri's utopia.
Arcosanti has a very small full-time
population; the bulk of its residents carry out short-term
internships. With its perpetually
recharging constituency of like-minded people, living and
working under the eye of the
benevolent dictator, it works quite well. Like Burning
Man, though, it is a temporary
fantasyland, a respite from the mainstream environment;
one wonders what would happen if
Arcosanti were ever to incorporate a large and varied
population or any of the other elements of a
real city.
With its ecologically minded architecture and anticonsumerist
rhetoric (even if it survives by
selling its iconic bells and ceramics), Arcosanti hardly
resembles a Cold War landscape, but
Soleri's grandiose visions, with their redemptive faith in
technology, can't be considered in isolation
from the time in which they were spawned. As George
Collins writes in his book Visionary
Drawings of Planning and Architecture, "Following World
War II, the visionary revived, ostensibly
simulated by reconstruction programs and the desire to
invent structures that would keep people
safe from atomic attack, leading in the latter instance to
radical decentralization plans and even
underground living schemes."
From Kiyonori Kikutake's underwater Marine City to Hans
Hollein's Airplane Carrier City—which
proposed mounting the U.S.S. Enterprise on a hillside and
turning it into a series of
residences—the Cold War's twin axes of technological hope
and doom prompted visionary
architects to respond with plans for cities that would use
technology to survive on a
planet—"Spaceship Earth," as the suggestive phrase
went—that was itself no longer habitable.
Ironically, many of the schemes were influenced by the
Cold War's architecture itself (e.g.,
Archigram cited NASA's Cape Canaveral as an influence,
while Buckminster Fuller's domes and
hyperboloid housing towers resembled radomes and nuclear
reactors, respectively). Like Fuller,
Soleri was a technological optimist, with early plans
calling for "Cosmodomes" that featured
self-contained environments and artificial suns; his theories
bristled with unintended Cold War
phraseology like "complex systems" or "miniaturization,"
as in cities that would
miniaturize their inhabitants. Arcosanti was a survivalist
project, a shelter from a society that
would kill itself in one great bomb flash or in the slow
strangle of resource-consuming sprawl.
Where most visionary architects' projects existed only in
theory ("The Radiant City is on paper," Le
Corbusier had written. "When a technical work is drawn
up [in] figures and proofs, it exists."),
Soleri had found his drawing board in the desert. The
metaphorical spaceship that Soleri proposed
took literal form in Biosphere 2, which lies some three
hours away, north of Tucson. What began as
a fringe idea (i.e., Martian colonization) in the cultist confines
of Synergia Ranch, a 1960s
commune in New Mexico, was famously transformed with an
infusion of oil scion Ed Bass'
money into the extraterrestrial habitation simulation
complex that was a media spectacle in
the 1980s before the project collapsed due to problems
ranging from the well-being of the
bionauts to the integrity of the scientific research being
conducted. Now billed as a "wellness center"
and still sporting its Bucky Fuller geodesic dome, the
Santa Fe-based Synergia Ranch survives,
albeit under a different guise. That some of its more
outlandish original ideas should have been
blown up to Biospherian proportions is a metaphor in
itself for the kinds of research that found
funding during the Cold War.
Appropriately, the Biosphere resembles some kind of alien
landing craft, a massively hulled vessel of
glass and concrete surrounded by an array of attendant
domes and service buildings. The site is
now managed by Columbia University, which employs it to
quietly conduct research on global
warming and other respectable topics. With a handful of
other visitors, I register for an "Under
the Glass" tour, which means that we don hard hats
and pass through the airlock to view the
former living and working quarters of the biospherians.
While scientists still scuttle around
the various passageways, it is clear, standing in one of
the now-deflated dome-covered "lungs"
that once served as the internal air source, that the
originally envisioned Biosphere is dead,
reincarnated as a rather extravagant greenhouse. The
interior is no longer self-sufficient, and the
decontamination procedures that occur at the airlock are
intended to prevent bringing germs
outside—not the other way around. As we sit on a concrete
ledge watching the water of the "Ocean
Biome" lap against the manufactured shore, the air
warm and dank, we see hundreds of ants
working their way along the concrete floors and walls. The
proverbial cockroaches after a nuclear
war, the ants are a symbol of the problems that plagued
Biosphere: no one seems to know how
they arrived, but once they began to proliferate no one
knew exactly how to get rid of them, or the
consequences to the ecosystem if they did.
The Biosphere was designed by architect Philip Hawes, who,
like Soleri, had made a pilgrimage to
Taliesin West. Hawes cited Egyptian and Mayan influences
and, like Soleri, was concerned with
creating environmentally sensitive architecture. But in
its lavish funding, scientific trappings, and
belief that humans could replicate their environment
through technology, the Biosphere
cannot be detached from Cold War thought. The airlocks and
decontamination chambers, as well as
the self-contained air and energy systems, are of a piece
with the headquarters of the North American
Aerospace Defense Command, that city within a mountain in
Colorado Springs whose 10-ton blast
doors and blast intake valves will, upon a nuclear explosion,
"button up," ensuring its residents'
safety for at least 30 days. The notion of extraterrestrial
colonization that Biosphere posits
was given its first major impetus by the military, with
early Air Force studies noting that a "lunar
base possesses strategic value . . . by providing a site
where future military deterrent forces could be
located."
I find deterrent forces of a more earthbound variety an
hour south of Tucson, at the former Air
Force launch complex 571-7, once operated by the Strategic
Air Command. It is the only place in the
country where a tourist can view a fully preserved ICBM
silo, once the home of a 33,000-pound Titan
II missile (the largest the U.S. ever built) with a range
of 9000 miles and able to carry a
nine-megaton warhead. With its coterie of polite elderly
women volunteers, the site might easily be
mistaken for a provincial historical society museum (Dr.
Strangelove slept here!), were it not
entirely underground. It is the last tour of the day, and
one lone man and I accompany our guide, a
lanky, long-haired "missile nut" (his phrase), down
a hatch. A nearby sign warns of rattlesnakes.
With its echoing metal tunnels, banks of gray metal
computers, closetfulls of white
rocket-fuel-handler suits, and submarine-like vault doors,
the Titan site is a steely mausoleum of
America's nuclear past, as well as a fantastic vision of
an alternate future in which not only
defense installations are located underground, but factories
and housing as well. The thermonuclear
strategist Herman Kahn proposed a kind of evacuation
nation, a permanent civil defense
footing in which it was "perfectly conceivable . . . that
the U.S. might have to evacuate two or three
times every decade."
Yet, in spite of its ominous atmosphere and connotation,
the Titan is arguably inseparable
from the technological optimism that characterizes utopian
projects like Arcosanti. If Soleri's New Age
space city in the desert is inspired in part by the ideal
city schemes of Le Corbusier, so too is the
Titan an expression of Le Corbusier's modernism, the
factories and power stations he so respected.
The Titan's subterranean Launch Control Centers are domes,
a form favored by Buckminster Fuller
that saw use both in Fuller's ultramodern "Dymaxion"
housing and in blast shelters by the
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, who learned at places like
the Aberdeen Proving Grounds that the
dome was the form most structurally resistant to blast
effects. There is nothing superfluous to the
Titan site: the "hard space" only covers those functions
essential to launching the missile (the
site itself exists simply to launch the missile once);
everything outside the 6000-pound blast
doors one reaches via a series of catwalks and staircases
is "soft space." If forts were once
constructed to house armaments, there is no distinguishing,
here, between the weapon and the
system constructed to house it: the architecture is the
gun, the missile the bullet.
Sitting in one of the jet-fighter chairs once reserved for
the flight-suited Launch Control
Officers, listening to the klaxon sound, watching the
warning lights flash, and staring ahead, into
the imaginary airspace charted on the radar screens, the
future as once imagined looks
terrifying to me, its grandiose geopolitical rhetoric lost
in the cold array of the flickering console, the
rotary-dial phones, and the safe that once contained the
Emergency War Orders. If Arcosanti
and Biosphere 2 represent different forms of folly, varying
visions of a better world, the Titan may be
the maddest scheme of them all: a series of Underground
Cities that actually got built, in
places where no one was likely to pay much attention.
To find the single largest collection of relics of futures
past, I drove east, to the White Sands
Missile Range, an arid territory in New Mexico's Tularosa
Basin so large it could swallow up
Delaware and Rhode Island. For more than half a century,
the secret landscapes of White Sands
have witnessed the testing of prototype weaponry, ranging
from the V-2 rocket to the atomic bomb to
the Boeing 747-mounted airborne laser.
I rattle across its back roads, sending the occasional
startled Oryx—a Kalahari antelope
introduced decades ago by the state's wildlife agency—bounding
out of the mesquite brush.
Squat, dun-colored bunkers and shiny radar towers shimmer
briefly on the horizon, only to
vanish in a mirage-like haze, as if jammed by the radar of
the sun. Markers announce cryptic fields
of activity: "Zurf Site," or "Phenomenology
Test Bed."
White Sands bills itself as a "multi-service test range,"
which these days means the grounds are
open to anything from automakers testing car paints to a
solar furnace that can focus a
5,000-degree beam on objects. Its tenants include everyone
from the U.S. Army Research
Laboratory's Information and Electronic Protection Division
to NASA to the Directorate for Applied
Technology, Test and Simulation, which boasts "the
most complete assembly of nuclear weapons
environment simulators in the Department of Defense."
Another tenant, the Army Research
Lab's Battlefield Environment Division, has the mission of
"owning the weather," which includes
the Biospherian task of re-creating various global environments
to test weapons systems. As public
affairs officer Jim Eccles and I drive past one of these
"climatic chambers," he notes, "if we want it
to be like Alaska in the middle of winter we can put a
shroud over the launcher and cool it down to
20 below zero, or we can heat the item to re-create Middle
East conditions—about the only
thing we can't re-create is snow."
For every active facility, however, there seem to be three
abandoned buildings. We pass a peaked
concrete blockhouse, a foreboding Inca temple with the
logo "Army" stenciled on its side, which
sits opposite a rocket gantry several hundred yards in the
distance. "Launch Complex 33" is its
formal name; in September 1945, the humble building had
the distinction of ushering in
America's rocket age. Fogged window slits face the gantry.
One story has Werner von Braun and a
group of rocket scientists scrambling out of the bunker
following a V-2 launch. "So they go out the
door in the backside and look up at this big empty sky,"
Eccles says. "It only goes up four miles,
[then] they terminate the flight because it's erratic. So
it starts back down and looks as if it's
headed right toward them. They're all trying to get back
into the blockhouse, while other people are
still trying to get in or out." The rocket crashed a mile
away.
White Sands was a place where the future itself was
tested, where scientists and soldiers sent
machine and man up against the barriers of nature,
confident that engineering would win the
day. Here, "bunker busters" were tested for
their effectiveness at penetrating enemy fortifications;
here, Col. John Stapp—the "Fastest Man Alive"—rode
the rocket sled "Sonic Wind" to 632
miles per hour and then was stopped in 1.6 seconds as he
experienced 42gs of pressure.
(Stapp survived this pressure—more than 40 times his body
weight—intact, with some bruising
and temporary eye damage, and in another case of Cold War
technology transfer the research was
used to help develop car-seat restraints.) White Sands was
the imaginary battleground of the
American Cold War psyche, with exotic weapons fighting
unfought wars. Everywhere there are
ruins and relics of simulations and tests. On one playa
rests what Eccles calls the "only landlocked
ship in the U.S. navy," a "desert ship"
brought here to practice naval missile launching; in
another area is the "Large Blast Thermal Simulator,"
which as Eccles notes is the "world's
largest shock tube." By transforming liquid nitrogen
into a gas, the tube is able to create
simulated "blast waves" of up to 1250 psi.
"You can have it flow down the tunnel of the shock tube
and strike the item so you get a shock wave similar to the
blast of a nuclear explosion," says
Eccles. Built in the 1990s, the shock tube is now vacant.
"There's not much demand for that
anymore," he notes, with dry regret.
The final stop, appropriately, is the place where it all
began: Ground Zero. A basalt obelisk marks
the precise spot, while a nearby wooden structure covers
what is one of the last intact sheets of
trinitite, the glassy material that was formed on the
desert floor in the heat of the bomb's
explosion. "A lot of people selling Trinitite on Ebay
will advertise it as not radioactive," Eccles offers.
"Real trinitite will emit radiation. It's not hazardous—the
only way it would pose any danger
is if it were ground up and eaten."
Archaeologists of futures past, we've arrived at a nuclear
tomorrow entombed beneath the desert
floor. I am reminded of J. G. Ballard's story "The Terminal
Beach," about a man marooned on a
Bikini-like atomic test island. "The series of weapons
tests had fused the sand in layers, and
the pseudo-geological strata condensed the brief epochs,
microseconds in duration, of
thermonuclear time. Typically, the island inverted the
geologist's maxim, 'The key to the past lies in
the present.' Here, the key to the present lay in the
future. This island was a fossil of time future,
its bunkers and blockhouses illustrating the principle
that the fossil record of life was one of
armor and the exoskeleton." At White Sands and the
other fossil tomorrows adrift in the American
desert, we see portents of how the future was going to be.
Whether dystopic or Edenic, these
visions summoned America's ultimate faith in technology,
as well as a more primitive desire to
bring human meaning to a natural landscape.