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"Soviet Memo, 'Concerning the Trip of Iranian Cultural Figures to the USSR'," December 17, 1955, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, RGANI, f. 5, op. 28, d. 347. Department for Relations with Foreign Communist Parties (International Department of the Central Committee), 1953-1957, microfilm, reel 83.

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- modern day "ostalgia" for propaganda Eastern items
- "Cold War was as much about how to live as it was about how to kill"
- East Berlin was designed to maximize private companies' subordination to the state
- cold war=arms race
- arms race w/ architecture: "architecture, in some ways, always represents conditions of conflict in space"
- Operation Gold: tunnel in Berlin
- Alfred Hitchcock's "Torn Curtain" recreated the tension in Germany (first real world setting in a Hitchcock movie)
- Berlin city planning=propaganda
- Soviet War Memorial made up of Bolshevik and Nazi materials
-  ^was an intrusion into west berlin
- opportunity to reorganize society for both sides
- ceremonies memorialized the Russian Revolution
- people from the West who came to the East's May Day felt rejected
- rebuilt traditional building in stone (e)
-  soviet planning: square, parade route, tower
- protest at Stalinallee
- workers felt disconnected from their work
- west Berlin was not allowed banners or signs during gatherings
- Hans Scharoun built a steel structure in 1959
- skyscraper plans for West Berlin
- Hermann Henselmann submitted an alternative design for West Berlin but was rejected
- a skyscraper is planned for the very edge of West Berlin
- Berlin Wall is constructed
- competition for the first TV tower
- Springer building had a gold reflective surface which showed East Berlin back to its citizens
- Oskar Kokoschka painted the view of East Berlin from the roof of the Springer building
- Leipziger Strasse is built to re-motivate East Berlin citizens
- protest at the Palace of the Republic in East Berlin
- asbestos found in the same building ^^

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Hidden Hands - A Different History of Modernism - Ep 1 A Clean White World (C4 UK, 1995)

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- America tried to spread American ideals abroad
- East Germans went to USSR and West Germans went to US
- Germany was divided in style between communism and capitalism
- no opportunities in East Berlin for architects unaffiliated with the government
- American program failed because the architects who returned lacked professional status because they were gone for so long
- American trainees upended the one-way education by thinking about the lessons and making their own conclusions
- "German democracy modeled on American precedent"
- programs were focused directly on architecture
- West German reprogramming was literally organized by a communist
- I'm surprised the Germans wanted to go to America/USSR
- first moment of wonder on American soil
- they touristed around NYC
- 50s America: mix of revivalism and modernism
- taught about politics before architecture
- more urban planning than aesthetics
- ^Germans hadn't learned about that much before
- learned about how to plan residential districts, sidewalks, etc
- new concept for them: community involved in planning
- ^^ this concept breaks communist ideals of government controlling everything
- "This American system is the most wasteful in terms of energy... It is the most humane, however."
- city planning=process of public administration
- learned about effect of Weimar on American architecture
- watched production line during house construction in Levittown
- they thought it was impressive but sad
- more power for the working class than in Germany
- learned about racism in America
- students got tired of visiting housing projects
- Germans sometimes challenged the new teachings
- less boundaries between authority and students
- students started copying American fashion and social cues
- on return the students didn't really change anything because older people were in charge of everything
- the students were generally more aware of the rest of the world than other German citizens
- only 1 out of the 11 became a city planner in Germany

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- switch from basement playrooms to bunkers
- "The evidence is overwhelming that the Soviets intend to use nuclear blackmail as a major weapon to promote their objectives - namely to spread Communism throughout the world."
- $150 do-it-yourself bunker
- bunker style --> linear style of glass office buildings
- way more swimming pools built than bunkers
- President Kennedy tried to make people more aware of the danger
- NEAR: National Emergency Alarm Repeater
- swimming pool companies became bunker builders
- The Atom Bomb House
- Melvin Mininson made bunkers stylish and sexy
- more and more elaborate decorations
- family style!
- "modern day cave dwellers"
- do you defend your bomb shelter or let neighbors in? (ethics)
- kind of similar to gun control?
- neighbors and friends pitted against each other
- "my best salesmen are Khrushchev and Kennedy"
- craze was winding down by 1963

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- "Atlas-F Intercontinental Ballistic Missile silo"
- built in 1958
- being converted into an unconventional home
- looks like a normal mountain retreat from the long driveway
- basement area has blast doors
- launch control center
- "cold war architecture has become kitsch"
- by the time most technology was done being built it was obsolete
- it was where bombs much bigger than Hiroshima were being built
- hard to sell these strangely shaped spaces
- flip side of the non-private glass building trend
- some people buy these silos and build end-of-the-world shelters

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- invented during the cold war
- designer entered design competition in 1943 (designs for a post WW2 era)
- mall design was too radical for the competition
- "America was seeking shelter and a controlled environment."
- design was inspired by government + defense buildings
- Southdale Mall was built so large to protect the citizens of the twin cities (Minneapolis and Saint Paul)
- almost everything in the design was in case of a nuclear attack
- it was even supposed to serve as a full town in case of nuclear war
- designed so that people would even forget they were inside
- "Rouse's Cold War utopia."

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Homeward Bound: American Families In The Cold War Era by Elaine Tyler May

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- new ways of thinking
- Western design groups similar to rock bands
- technology integrated into pop culture
- marked by irony because of the active war
- inflatable buildings (inspiration)
- "How, they asked, can we exploit new technology for the benefit of humanity without producing inhuman effects?"
- life seemed more finite because of the threat of nuclear warfare

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- more concrete reflected an anxiety about surviving nuclear war
- public shelters were not completely buried; private ones were
- designs included techniques to protect people from fallout
- The City National Bank Building was the first privately owned public shelter
- ^combined bunker style with 1950s modernism
- bunkers were used as both protection strategies and aesthetique
- bunker style was basically the gross concrete masses that people often complain about today

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Bomb Shelters of the Cold War Period on JSTOR

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Alastair Gordon, Bomb Shelters of the Cold War Period, The Threepenny Review, No. 29 (Spring, 1987), pp. 26-27

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Design Pedagogy Enters the Cold War: The Reeducation of Eleven West German Architects on JSTOR

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During the Cold War, the United States and USSR used educational exchange programs as instruments of cultural diplomacy. In 1950, East German reconstruction pol...

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As Civil Defense officials promoted a "Self Help" approach to preparedness at home, the privatization of shelters not only raised concerns for morality, it also transformed the home-made...

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Regardless of location, the American shopping mall takes the same form: two floors of enclosed shopping and parking connected by escalators, with a lush central arboretum and two anchor department stores at either end. Today this design seems cliche, but in 1956, it was a revolutionary setup that brought comfort to a nation that feared itself on the brink of nuclear war. America's first mall, Southdale in Edina, Minnesota, was a Cold War-era invention that forever changed the way America lives and shops.

Southdale was designed by Austrian-born architect Victor Gruen. Gruen grew up in the high arts scene in Vienna and designed housing projects and stores for local merchants, but he fled his home and the rise of Nazi Germany in 1938. He settled in America, where he first designed a leather goods boutique for Ludwig Leder on Fifth Avenue in New York. Gruen turned the typical street-fronting New York boutique on its head by designing a mini arcade entranceway for Lederer. Then he turned his attention to larger-scale design, entering a 1943 Architectural Forum competition called "Architecture 194x," which solicited ideas from renowned modern architects to design components of a futuristic model town. (The contest title referred to an unspecified year sometime in the postwar future.)

[Photo courtesy of Southdale Center via Malls of America.]

Gruen answered the magazine's call with a design for the town's shopping center. He proposed a fully enclosed shopping center with stores that were inward-facing, rather than street-facing. Gruen's design also lacked a center square, the green space of traditional urban shopping districts where pedestrians would mingle and stroll. Both of these changes were radical departures from previous designs and from the American shopping experience that existed at the time. In fact, the design was too radical for Architectural Forum, which asked Gruen for revisions until he turned in something more in line with contemporary trends.

But by the time World War II ended and the Cold War began, the country's mindset had changed drastically. Against this backdrop, Gruen's design for an insular utopia had substantial appeal: America was seeking shelter and a controlled environment. Just over a decade after his enclosed shopping center was turned down by Architectural Forum, Gruen built Southdale mall in the Minneapolis suburbs, the world's first enclosed mall. His design for Southdale, which historian Timothy Mennel calls "a Cold War Utopia," would go on to become the blueprint of today's regional shopping mall: an enclosed community combining both retail and non-retail facilities in a single location.

Gruen himself had actually once dreamed of designing open-air promenades reminiscent of his native Austria—spaces where neighbors could mingle and shop in close connection with the natural environment. But his dream shifted as Gruen instead drew influence from the design work of America's governmental and military institutions. Although Gruen popularized the regional shopping mall, the idea of combining both shopping and non-retail services (like movie theaters, the post office, churches, housing, etc.) in a single location came from the U.S. Federal Government. San Diego's Linda Vista shopping center (built in 1942) was an all-encompassing installation built by the government for WWII defense workers, and Los Alamos, New Mexico, (built in 1943) was developed by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission as a combined retail and non-retail facility at the heart of America's nuclear headquarters. That America's first modern shopping centers were built by the government during the Cold War is a key indicator of how the government perceived life in this new atomic age. Gruen took these nascent ideas developed by the government and gave them a refined finish to appeal to his high-end clientele. (He wasn't the only one to do so—Eero Saarinen drafted a plan for a similar shopping center in Willows Run, Michigan, though it ultimately went unbuilt.) Gruen first tried out his Cold War-appropriate design elements in 1952, when he designed Northland Mall in the Detroit suburbs for Michigan retailer J.L. Hudson.

The Dayton family of Minnesota, the owners of retailer the Dayton Company (and later Target) commissioned Gruen to design Southdale Mall. Family figurehead Donald Dayton called the mall a "self-contained community," and it was massive, 810,000 square feet spread across 463 acres. The mall was located far outside the urban population center of Minneapolis, in the suburb of Edina, Minnesota. The suburbs were atypical retail locations at the time, and Edina had a population of just 15,000. What Edina offered was a location ten miles outside the Minneapolis city center, putting the mall outside the eight-mile blast radius of an atomic hit to the Minneapolis city core. A mall located in Edina could serve to house and protect the Twin Cities' population in the event of a nuclear attack.

Groundbreaking for Southdale occurred in 1954. Gruen called for the mall to be built of steel and reinforced concrete, which had been proven more blast resistant than the ordinary variety. Specifically, Southdale was made up of 200,000 concrete blocks and 360,000 bricks, and a 10,000 kilowatt generator completed this post-apocalyptic structure. Southdale's completely enclosed nature allowed it "to keep out, both cold war worries and actual cold," writes Mennel. Shops were to be converted into food combines in the event of an attack. A large basement area, complete with an underground tunnel system, was built at Southdale to act as a fallout shelter and sat stealthily yet ever-ready below the Minnesota shopper's paradise. The mall was strategically positioned directly between two major highways, which would allow easy access to the facility even in times of chaos and traffic. Parking at Southdale—2,800,000 square feet of it—was also built with the idea that it could easily be converted into a tent city for a population seeking shelter.

In fact, Gruen's initial plans for the compound called for actual apartments, business and medical offices, civic and religious buildings, auditoriums, and utilities to all be built on-site at Southdale. This miniature town would be ready to function as a full-fledged operational city on a moment's notice. It could serve the medical needs of those affected in a blast, house others escaping a ravaged city center, and eventually cultivate a return to everyday life with its religious and entertainment centers. While many of these elements were built over time at Southdale, the full extent of community structures in Gruen's initial plan was never realized.

[Photo courtesy of Lileks.com]

Many of the Cold War-conscious design choices were implemented within the mall itself. The paradise was climate-controlled for extended habitation—its air conditioning and central heating achieved a constant homeostasis. Such a controlled environment not only lent itself to stable human life, but to stable animal and plant life as well. Gruen was no Noah, but within Southdale, he did create enough of a perfect ecological microcosm that he was able to fill the mall with exotic birds and tropical plants, notes Gruen biographer M. Jeffrey Hardwick. Enclosed Southdale featured all this in a "Garden Court of Perpetual Spring" with orchids, Magnolia trees, and Eucalyptus trees. It was a space so big and lush, at five stories tall and a block long, that it would be a more than adequate substitute for the outdoors in a ravaged, post-atomic world. Southdale was such an acutely curated substitute for reality that it could make a person forget they were indoors: At the time of its opening, Architectural Record wrote, "[It is] an imaginative distillation of what makes downtown magnetic: the variety, the individuality, the lights, the color, even the crowds—for Southdale's pedestrian-scale spaces insure a busyness and a bustle."

[Graphics by Suze Myers.]

Southdale mall opened for business on October 8, 1956, to much fanfare. Copycat malls soon followed. James Rouse, Maryland developer extraordinaire and the mastermind behind the planned community of Columbia, Maryland, built the country's second enclosed mall, Harundale, which opened in 1958. Eleven miles outside downtown Baltimore, in Glen Burnie, Maryland, Harundale too was beyond the assumed radius of an atomic attack on the city center. And like Southdale, Harundale incorporated auditoriums, fountains, libraries, post offices, and churches as would-be centers of civic life. Harundale was also at constant homeostasis with a fully climate-controlled environment. As Rouse biographer Nicholas Dagen Bloom explains, Rouse was convinced the mall was to be the new center of the American community—it was the new main street of "Rouse's Cold War utopia." Houston's Montclair mall, New Jersey's Cherry Hill mall, and others followed. By the 1980s, over forty years later and close to the end of the Cold War, there were around 3,000 Southdale copy-cats in the U.S.
Editor: Sara Polsky
· Curbed Features archive [Curbed]

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How the Cold War Shaped the Design of American Malls

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Regardless of location, the American shopping mall takes the same form: two floors of enclosed shopping and parking connected by escalators, with a lush central arboretum and two anchor department stores at either end. Today this design seems cliche, but in 1956, it was a revolutionary setup that brought comfort to a nation that feared itself on the brink of nuclear war.

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The late 1960s saw the last surge of utopian thinking in the 20th century. Visionaries on both sides of the Cold War envisaged new ways of living.

Radical design groups in the West, with names and images like rock bands, used architecture to challenge social conformity. In the Eastern Bloc, a new generation brought a cosmic sensibility to design.

Many of the most startling schemes reworked Cold War technologies. Inflatable buildings, geodesic domes and electronic media, once conscripted for military use, were now re-imagined as tools for nomadic life or instruments to liberate mind and body.

However idealistic, these schemes were often marked by a dark undertone of irony. At a time of accelerating concern with the effects of militarism and consumerism on the earth, uncritical celebration of technology was increasingly hard to sustain.

A Blow-up World

The US military deployed inflatable buildings as protective covering for radar installations in the 1950s. In the 1960s, young architects and designers were inspired by these pneumatic structures. Light and portable, they were adopted as a critique of the inertia and monumentality of conventional architecture and furnishings.

Soft Machines

In 1960, NASA scientists predicted the rise of the 'cyborg', a man-machine hybrid. In the late 1960s, artists and designers adapted this idea by augmenting the body with sensory devices and communication tools. Unlike the life-supporting spacesuits worn by astronauts in deep space, these designs were to be tools for expanding the consciousness and the sensory capacities of the wearer.

Critical Utopias

Cold War competition had seen design and architecture deployed to demonstrate the superiority of either Soviet-style socialism or Western capitalism. In the late 1960s, architects and designers came to reflect on the impact of this contest on the planet. Utopian schemes of the age were often underscored by critical attitudes. How, they asked, can we exploit new technology for the benefit of humanity without producing inhuman effects? How might it be possible to live modern lives without spoiling our planet?

Fragile Planet

The Cold War changed the way in which the world was seen. Life on earth came to seem all the more precious when it could be viewed from the vacuum of space. As an editorial in the New York Times in 1970 put it:

'Unless this flowering home planet remains a haven of life, the entire solar system may become as devoid of life as are the mountains of the moon.'

This Cold War future still haunts us: the threat of nuclear warfare may seem somewhat more distant today, but the legacies of aggressive industrialisation in the 1950s and 1960s are all too evident in our global environment. Many of the key questions of Cold War modernity - such as how to design new technology for the benefit of humanity without producing inhuman effects, or how to imagine modern lives outside conditions set by the marketplace - remain just as present today.

This content was originally written in association with the exhibition 'Cold War Modern: Design 1945-70', on display at the V&A South Kensington from 25 September 2008-11 January 2009.

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The late 1960s saw the last surge of utopian thinking in the 20th century. Visionaries on both sides of the Cold War envisaged new ways of living. Radical design groups in the West, with names and images like rock bands, used architecture to challenge social conformity.

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The differences in American and Soviet architecture during the Cold War reflected the ideological battle between communism and capitalism happening in world politics.

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1. How did the differences in architecture between the US and the USSR reflect their contrasting political ideas?