For over four years, I have developed a photographic documentary work on Swiss fortified constructions – bunkers. Each element of these photographs has a relation with Switzerland and particularly the mountain landscape that is an inherent part of our identity. The bunkers are a integral part of a finely developed popular defense military system in Switzerland, a military with historically strong links to the landscape.
After the cold war ended many of the bunkers became obsolete. The tendency is to forget them or even to renounce them, my approach on the contrary, aims to expose them from a new angle.
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Amazing photos, incredibly cool subject matter. Check ‘em out - some are very artfully disguised, too.
9 Comments
Cool… I wonder if any of them are up for sale.
I dunno, but if you’ve got 25 million sitting around, you can get yourself a converted missile silo in Nebraska.
You would have to be a Swiss citizen to buy any property in Switzerland.
Driving to various swiss ski resorts from Germany, you pass all sorts of millitary installations from bunkers to small airfeilds with hardened hangers. I always thought it a bit silly that the swiss strategy was to pull back out of the areas with any value- Zurich, Lausanne, Geneva etc. to defenses in the mountains. So any invader would grab the heavy industry, banking and most of the agriculture, while the swiss would control the ski resorts, alpine dairy industry, and the Ricola plant. Ahh, priorities!
My detective skills have located you. You’re missing a brutal heat wave, you bastard.
Well I’m stuck in a non-brutal heat wave here in a hotel with no AC. But plenty of cold beer to keep cool. And plenty of good stories to tell.
Isn’t that what the damn blog’s for? Photos of drunken expats and their hangers-on getting up to no good, and scathing essays full of evil insight on other cultures?
Well, Last weekend was a “What happened in Vegas, stays in Vegas” weekend. I will at no time write about it anywhere. :-)
So any invader would grab the heavy industry, banking and most of the agriculture, while the swiss would control the ski resorts, alpine dairy industry, and the Ricola plant. Ahh, priorities!
Forcing the Soviets to rubble Zurich wastes your troops and trashes the good stuff to little end.
It makes sense to pull back into the hills, preserving your strength and defending in a way that makes it difficult for the bad guys.
Plus .. the war will end someday. Better to start the peace with intact infrastructure then spending time rebilding everything.
Except for the herpes.
Sometimes that comes home to visit.
:-)
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[...] If you didn’t get your cold war military architecture fix from last week’s Swiss bunkers post, feast your eyes on this Soviet submarine base. [...]
[...] We’ve talked about Swiss bunkers, old Soviet sub bases and abandoned missle silos. Available in Washington state is a house for under $600K sitting over a four story bunker with secret passageways and 3 ton blast doors all built by a previous owner. It sucks living in an area with bedrock a few feet below ground level. This entry was written by jmd and posted on 8/11/2006 at 3:55 pm and is filed under general. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL. [...]
[...] unfinished subway, abandoned in the 1920s. Man, that’s even weirder than Soviet sub bases and Swiss bunkers. Too many more architectural oddities and I’m going to have to make a new category. This [...]