David Monteyne. Fallout Shelter

Recent scholarship has documented the growth of the United States' Cold War civil defense program into more nuanced and subtle sectors of American society. Tracy C. Davis's Stages of Emergency: Cold War Nuclear Civil Defense (2007) began this inquiry by looking at the performative aspects of public civil defense drills (or as she concludes, the rehearsal value of the drills), and David Monteyne's new book expands this discourse through a dynamic discussion of the American architectural community's role in civil defense efforts. Monteyne describes his study as “the first sustained approach to Cold War civil defense through its essentially spatial character” (p. xvii) and presents a thorough examination of the architectural aspects of professional debates over fallout shelter designation and design, but he goes farther, using these debates to examine subtextual threads that expose issues of professional legitimization, class anxiety, gender role enforcement, and racial containment. It is a wonderful demonstration of how historical inquiry can expose level upon level of social construction through the detailed examination of a contained topic. By the book's end we have encountered a full assessment of the architectural profession's relationship to the civil defense establishment, and we have also taken a journey through early Cold War American domestic history.

Civil defense · Cold war · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies