1.
The architect has been asked for a bunker. The architect hears: it has to be a bunker-allegory, a museum. No works, no programme, no dimensions.

It is to be a virtual museum "in the true acceptance of the term: able to be realised, potential, possible."
The architect thinks. He was told: "a museum ends up as pure fiction because it tries to maintain a unity and coherence in the group of objects it presents. It is a subjective attempt to take the part for the whole (…) a fragment which replaces the whole."

The architect looks to the scriptures: Loos says "only the monument and the tomb belong to architecture ". Is the bunker a tomb? And if it is, whose or what tomb is it?

The architect is alarmed: Bunker… the word is still echoing. In the murky depths of memory, the first lines of defence on Normandy coasts parade before him.
The Berlin shadows were invaded by the last hideout of the notorious Reich Chancellor.
But through what door can the architect enter the bunker? Where does the bunker and the architect’s knowledge intersect?

The architect shakes off the dust of history. He reveals the plastic artist he has within him. He frees himself from the pressure of theory that we are and dives into informed, careful, measured design.
Bunker... What is the designed identity, the DNA, of its forms?


2.
Pause. The drums of Clausewitz are heard at the end of the room.
The soundtrack has the libretto of Virilio and follows the baton of Xenakis. Mars laughs.


The architect writes the basic conditions down on paper. A form is appearing in his mind:
A bunker like the Moms, "an allegory of the defence of institutions installed by art against the avant-garde offensive" is clearly a bunker whose position is "a static defence, a counter-mobility system". "A territory of clear limits is presupposed", a definition of the frontline: between the avant-garde and rearguard.
It will be a broken up line, the imperative need to eliminate no man’s land. It will fire its machine guns to the sides: hidden in the landscape, its defensive action will be similar to an ambush. It will allow the armoured avant-garde to pass with deceptive ease. When the avant-garde, mature and inebriated, moves seductively to the flank the bunker will fire from the side protected by its lead wings which are firmly anchored to the ground and prove the worth of their being a partial fragment of the whole system: the attacking avant-garde will fall prey to a defensive line simultaneously conjured and surgical. A cold, mortal web.


3.
Under the impetus of the avant-garde movement, the bunker will receive its first impacts.
Here, where the shell is more voluble near the door, invitingly... is another artifice.
The avant-garde believes it has won the first round and penetrates into enemy territory: lives will be cut down.
The proliferation of the bunker’s defensive walls never allow a direct shot, the old rearguard thus impedes geriatric serial-killing and guarantees itself and its own that they will only suffer casualties after the bloody hand to hand combats.

The sequence of watertight spaces and territories, closed by sesames and steel silences, ensures that the conquest of the art bunker has to be done street by street, house by house, man by man. As always, many will lose much at the hands of so few. The de-installation of the slippered rearguard will only be achieved through a slow process.
When there is the simultaneous annihilation of the combatants, what remains is vacuum, nothingness.
The avant-garde brings on the new wave. This time it uses rhetorical napalm and conceptual flame throwers. The bunker seems to be beginning to yield.

In the occupation process, the watchtowers pass into bloody hands. The geriatric rearguard bastion falls. Not even the fact of its structure being submerged, subterranean and unnoticed will prevent its localisation. The avant-garde installs itself in the conquered bunker.


4.
The architect checks his watch: a lot of time has passed since the first battle cries erupted. Years.
He looks with parental tenderness on the casemate he designed. "It’s intemporal !"

In the background, on the horizon, through the peepholes of the watch towers he spies a new baying horde in full cry. The die are cast: there’s going to be a new attack. Within the bunker too, combat orders are heard. "To your posts!" In a fragment of glass, the remains of a formerly brilliant mirror, an old avant-gardeist is amazed to see his long white beard. He goes up to his post and is determined to sell his skin dearly. Both his and the Bunker’s that cost so much to conquer:

Outside there is the echo of warlike cries.
Nestling in the belly of the bunker, old avant-gardeists hear in fear: "Down with the Rearguard! – Death to the Installed! – Long live the Avant-garde!
– Attack!!".

* * *

- A fable for a fable: if the Bunker Project is presented as a fable, an allegory of the (a)moral state of art and its satellite institutions, it is pertinent to perform another tale. If the art institutions, taking advantage of the sound of a vaster collective reason, are creating monsters of cold individualism and Himalayas of narcissi, it must also be (a)moral to shoot at the face of the Fangios of contemporaneity that... dust to dust.

It is strange that the loose, rebellious hair that flies in the wind in the swift cabriolet-vortex of hyper-contemporaneity, is never driven forwards, in the direction of progression when this, in a rush, moves them and throws them back!

Through this generous, altruistic, collective, "kholkose and sovkhose" function of the avant-garde – a function which is undoubtedly as pertinent today as it has always been – the lost innocence of the fructifying plough is transmuted. It changes its skin. Sibilantly, cold bloodedly, its former friendly agents and prophets slowly seek out a sunny rock where they can install themselves.

What’s left? ...The seed, formerly lying between the avant-garde channel and the ripped womb of the earth. The seeds, those that escaped the birds of prey...


The genuine reason to be – unconscious certainly but omnipresent – of the avant-garde is the (à la longue cynic) attack on the Bunker.

This is why it is strange that the architect was asked to give the Bunker its form, with him not being a military expert or even an enthusiast. But it’s not strange that it was precisely the architect who was the figure able to define that institution of the museufication of power! One day a fellow called Tafuri said more or less this, when he decided to push the boulder of Sisyphus towards the modern architects: "You cannot pursue the making of class architecture; you can only submit architecture to a critique of class".
And bang! Firstly, it is not the duty of architects to start revolutions. Secondly, there is no point in architects wanting to materialise the substance of these revolutions in an avant-garde way... because – thirdly – any revolutionary whose whim it is to institute a new order (or fashion, read it as you wish) will only result in class treason...because up to now there’s been no proletarian architect or architect who hasn’t been bourgeois...

If one day a statue and a road will be named after Mr Tafuri, it will be done – Oh heresy, oh profanation – by those recognising in the base metabolism of architecture the genes of bourgeois conservatism. There is no avant-garde architecture.

One day someone understood this. He had the task of designing a Bunker.
- But a Bunker...design it ?
- Hum...well...

One day someone understood that the task of designing a Bunker was no more than a sub task of another which was vaster, more solid and pressing: to inform as to what a bunker is.
To form.
To give it a positive and negative. This, of course, is the great force of architecture: it has inside and it has outside and it has that which is between and in the middle and has the time that we take to incorporate all these things.

One day someone, Duarte Soares Lema, architect, understood that the Bunker already existed. It was already thought out. Many people had already wasted a lot of time in trying to give it form. He also understood that it was not because its form was established and figured in the manuals and canons of military engineering that the bunker would be formed in formaldehyde.

To this architect, the bunker, exterior and interior, suddenly seemed an ambiguous game, semantically full of kaleidoscopic readings: depending on how we arrange the angle of light to fall on it, the bunker presents one, two or even three significant metaphors to us.

The first and, perhaps, the most obvious sees the interior landscape of the Bunker imagined by Miguel Leal as the materialisation of the installed, resistant body of rusted art institutions - from the apparatus of disciplinary control - snarling "No passarán!" at the tremulous flesh of the pubescent avant-garde.

The second, from the exterior, looks into the red line of the horizon, trying to sense in the morning air the smell of the gunpowder from the afternoon victory. It is centred on the avant-garde themselves. Through them, the bunker is identified and is seen as an aged Goliath ready to be defeated by energetic Davids.

The third, a view of the doorway that in the crossfire of positive and optimist, sceptical and pessimist reflects the natural perspective of the architect, a permanent survival of this condition, squeezed between desire for creative freedom and the tremendous constraints of the whole order to which it sees its discipline subjected.
In this third kaleidoscope, the bunker has grown old, submitted to former cyclical and solar time. A time as old as the world which, in everything, is contrary to the linear hurry of contemporaneity.
Duarte Soares Lema does not invent what has been invented but deliberately dislocates the readings: the Bunker is not what we were expecting to find there; it is not inspired by futuristic Flash Gordon vision, it does not yield to millenarian facilities of the current calendar, neither does it impose any new model on us.
It doesn’t perspire with anachronistic sweat either; it’s not based on hitlers or mussolinis.
The Bunker we can see here has chosen to be, presents itself as, intemporal. At least, this is the nature of its symbolism.

It was surprising nonetheless to learn its identity, its DNA: as the figuration of David versus Goliath, Duarte Lema chose to follow the wartime norms defined by the Finnish army along the Salpa Line.
This continuous 350 km line of campaign fortifications on the south-eastern border of Finland, made up of 728 bunkers, was set directly against the advance of Soviet troops in World War II and today is a national monument that, for all Finns, will always represent their hard fought independence and (simultaneously) the inherent precariousness of the geographical location of that national territory.

Strangely, just as with our avant-garde, the Salpa Line of today has a long white beard. Once again we must acknowledge the choices of the architect. Now representing the mummification-museufication (of re-conquest) of Finnish power and sovereignty, the Salpa Line bunkers, spread over the Karelja region, see their sub-arctic lichen and mosses echoed in the webs of the spiders inhabiting the institutions of Portuguese art.

Institutions needed by the avant-garde to legitimise themselves before History.

And so here we are back at the beginning...