Architecture Principe no. 7 October, Paris

“Bunker Archéologie,” a special issue of Architecture Principe, was the only issue of the magazine that used a photograph on its cover. The issue contains two brief statements by Paul Virilio along with a sequence of full-page images categorizing the remains of World War Two artillery bunkers and submarine bases located along the French coast that Virilio had photographed nearly a decade earlier. Virilio would go on to develop the material from this issue into an exhibition and a book in 1975. As the title suggests the issue presents these structures with an archaeological objectivity, linking their sites to the eighteenth-century defenses of Vauban, and beyond that, to the Roman tumuli of antiquity. The issue, however, ultimately sought to establish the significance of their connotations for contemporary architecture: “Their geometry is no longer affirmative, it is eroded, used up. The angles are no longer square, but depressed, to escape every grasp mass is no longer founded on the earth but is centered in itself, independent, capable of movement and articulation. This architecture floats on the surface of an earth that has lost its materiality.” CB

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