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Waiting for the End of the World (signed)

by Richard Ross

Photographs: Richard Ross

Text: with an interview by Sarah Vowell

Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press

144 pages

Year: 2004

ISBN: 978-1568984667

Price: 45 €

Comments: English; second hand book; signs of wear

For countless people the answer is the bomb shelter in the basement. In fact, people around the world have been building shelters to protect themselves from man-made catastrophies for centuries. A journey into this quirky, somewhat paranoid, and often hauntingly beautiful underground world.> pictures From the New Yorker: In St. Petersburg, the Trendy Griboyedov Club, a brightly painted subterranean night spot, occupies the site of a Cold War-era bomb shelter. Elsewhere, thousands of similar shelters sit empty and decaying or have been converted to mundane uses such as data storage, now that nuclear fear has been supplanted by more amorphous threats. Ross's photographs of shelters around the world are colorful and melancholy, suffused with a creepy Egglestonian light. "Shelters are the architecture of failure," he says. "The failure of moderation, politics, communication, diplomacy, and sustaining humanity." Most amazing is the scale of such hidden places as Beijing's Underground City, built to hold three hundred and fifty thousand people, or the bunker beneath the Greenbrier hotel, in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, designed to serve as the emergency shelter for the entire U.S. Congress.

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