Museum of Modern strategy
Bunker Project: South Matosinhos, Portugal

"[...] this worthless object"

The architectural object that is being conceived here should be affirmed through its uselessness and as a vestige, or rather, as an allegory (expression of an idea in a figurative form) of the current situation in the art system. What is interesting is that there is no real programme, only an idea, a concept and a mimetic desire. There is also no real relationship with the place (such as it is understood in architecture). BUNKER appears in its true uselessness and decontextualised (functionally) from its urban surroundings. Therefore, it also ends up rejecting traditional architectonic practice - the question of programme, of place - due to the presence of a client with nothing more than a stolen plot, a fictitious entity, and a handful of concepts.

"[...] its rear defense with a staggered entrance and its dark interior in the blinding ligth of the gun's opening toward the sea."

For some strange reason, the openings of this BUNKER are pointing (in functional terms) towards nothing.

"[...] as if this piece [...] could be identified as a funeral ceremony; [...] a religious space."

This religious character has been indelibly linked to the role of art since the mid-19 th century. The independence of art, linked originally to the loss of its utilitarian value (social function), has been accompanied by growing sacredness and a distancing from essential practicality. Equally the role of sacramental temple has been attributed to the museum, which, however, is better defined as a funeral monument - a place of veneration for something that is no longer and that, being decontextualised, has been disconnected from its primary function.

"Why this analogy between the funeral archetype and military architecture?"

Paraphrasing: Why this analogy between the funeral archetype and the museum?

"[...] if the war were still here, this would kill me, so this architectural object is repulsive."

The repulsive nature of BUNKER should be a result (in spite of the possible presence of what are already paradigms of modernism) of its form, of its war analogy.

"Major aspects of existing aspects remain between the blind screen of the lateral walls, the passive imperviousness in the rear sections, and the offensive opening in the front; as for the top, apart from the observer's box, with the tiny stair case leading to the concrete nest, there are only the cannon's gas discharge pipps emerging from the concrete slab sunk into the earth."

What stands out here is the purely defensive nature of this structure - even if only because it rejects the mobility of the avant-garde, essential to short-circuit the system. In art, the lack of motion leads to a suppression of critical and social potential.

"Going further back into the rear of the fortification, you meet once again the system of staggered nearby defenses, with its small firing slits- one along the entrance axis, the other on the flanks-with low visibility, through which the immediate surroundings can be seen, in a narrow space with a low ceiling. The crushing feeling felt during the exterior circuit around the work becomes acute here. The various volumes are too narrow for normal activity, for real corporal mobility; the whole structure weighs down on the visitor's shoulders. Like a slightly undersized piece of clothing hampers as much as it enclothes, the reinforced concrete and steel envelope is too tight under the arms and sets you in semi-paralysis fairly close to that of illness."

The idea of a semi-paralysis that Virilio mentions is perfectly transferable to the arts system, especially if we take into account that this very system acts as a structure to control and dominate discourse. Foucault (The order of things, 1971) refers distinctly to three groups of devices to control discourse: those of exclusion, (the forbidden word, the distinction of madness, the desire for truth); those of submission (commentary, author, disciplines); those of restriction (ritual, the societies of the discourse, social appropriation of discourses). The arts system incorporates several of these devices and acts internally as a control device in itself.

"Slowed down in his physical activity but attentive, anxious over the catastrophic probabilities of his environment, - the visitor in this perilous place is beset with a singular heaviness; in fact he is already in the grips of that cadaveric rigidity from which the shelter was designed to protect him."

Paradoxically, the institutions that are part of the arts system, and most notably the museum, condemn a work of art to the state of cadaver at the same time as they announce their desire to preserve it. Despite all that, the museum itself (and, mainly, our use of it) is also evolving from this monolithic position, and, in another self-contradiction, this one here — a strange and motionless object — is even starting to move towards something different.

"War is at once a summary and a museum ... its own. War is at once prospective and retrospective; fortifications aim not only to conserve power but also to conserve all combat techniques."

The defensive attitude that we have already mentioned refers exactly to this desire to conserve power.

"Historian R.G. Nobécourt points out, "The fortress had important psychological value, for it tended to unite the occupier and the occupied in the fear of being swept away; the fortress provided unity and identity where there was none."

The museum, in particular, and the arts system in general, both appear as fictions that manufacture themselves and that seek an identity through a process of self-validation. Can we make use of it?

"The artificial climate of the new arms required that military construction correspond exclusively to artifice. "

Undoubtedly all this project lives on extreme theatrical dramatisation, which is where it seeks its own critical capacity.

"Anachronistic in normal periods, in peacetime, the bunker appears as a survival machine, as a shipwrecked submarine on a beach."

Its decontextualisation in relation to the chosen location, its effective non-functionality and its purely virtual nature bring the Bunker closer to this image of a sunken ship.

"Defensive architecture is therefore instrumental, existing less in itself than with a view to "doing" something: waiting, watching, then acting or, rather, reacting. "

The defensive attitude yet again - a question that comes down to survival.

"The function of this very special structure is to assure survival, to be a shelter for man in a critical period, the place where he buries himself to subsist. If it thus belongs to the crypt that prefigures the resurrection, the bunker belongs too to the ark that saves, to the vehicle that puts one out of danger by crossing over mortal hazards. Literally, casemate means "strong house," reinforced house; it is always a case of habitat, or rather of a kind of clothing, of collective armor in the final analysis."

"The bunker has become a myth, present and absent at the same time: present as an object of disgust instead of a transparent and open civilian architecture, absent insofar as the essence of the new fortress is elsewhere, underfoot, invisible from here on in."

"The blockhouse is still familiar, it coexists, it comes from the era that put an end to the strategic notion of "forward" and "rear" (vanguard and rearguard) and began the new one of "above" and "below," in which burial would be accomplished definitively."

The process of suppression and sanction of avant-gardes and the institutionalisation of art may be recalled here. This lack of differentiation between the rearguard and the avant-garde or vanguard, visible in theories such as those that pronounce the end of history (F. Fukuyama and others), is extremely dangerous because it seeks to suppress any possibility of reconstructing art (and the social whole). What remains, making literal use of a phrase of Virilio, are the notions of visible and invisible, which ultimately included art in the indifferent magma of entertainment.

All the quotations were taken from the book "Bunker Archeology" by Paul Virilio (Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1994).

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