Four floors underground in an undisclosed location near Concordia, Kansas, there sits an imitation ‘General Store’. The General Store is replete with chilled food counters, ceiling signage, tiled floors, shopping baskets and rows of canned goods. The General Store is one of fourteen storeys that comprise the Survival Condo, a luxury bunker complex built in a former Atlas Missile Silo.

On surrounding floors of the bunker complex, one can find a grandiose infinity pool with fake windows onto a glowing sky; a golf course; dog walking park, rock climbing wall and car vaults. On the fourth floor, the semiotics of Whole Foods functions as a psychological shelter, as much as a physical one. When Survival Condo owner and CEO Larry Hall designed the complex, hired psychologists advised that rows of powdered food and canned goods would signal physical survival in a way so explicit as to unsettle the residents’ mental stability. Pop cultural narratives in which communities are left to fend for themselves (from Lord of the Flies to LOST) abound in tales of humans, ultimately, destroying one another in their desire to survive. 

One distinguishing feature of the luxury bunker is the negation of ‘survival’ in favour of signifiers of ‘choice’. The consumer system, embodied in the aisles of the General Store, is the ultimate symbol of choice. Though these bunkers were built during a Cold War nominally over, they serve the same purpose as much 20th century propaganda: they sustain the mythos of the American Dream.

The underground frontier

Deep underground, deluxe bunkers tap into two symbolic representations of America that emerged in the 1800s: one of America as an agrarian idyll, a new Garden of Eden; the other of America the industrial powerhouse.

In the bedrooms of the Survival Condo, fake televised windows look onto wide-open pastures, idyllic scenes of agrarian Midwest America. Such landscapes have long been embedded in American discourse. 19th century American artists depicted westward expansion as the settlement of otherwise untamed, disorderly terrain (as in The First Harvest in the Wild, Asher Brown Durand, below). The notion of the frontier, and the romanticism of land expansion, has persisted throughout American cultural history. Now, with luxury bunkers, America’s treasured land finds new fruit underground. As part of this, the underground itself is cast as a new frontier, untapped land to cultivate. The Survival Condo proffers hydroponic gardens, able to grow an abundance of new food for years to come (below). This is the newest iteration of the open land, the idea of property as freedom, on which the US was symbolically built.

Signals of optimistic hope and triumph, however, are interwoven with those of anxiety and despair. “Prepare for anything” the Survival Condo website instructs, reminding us of the perpetual potential for catastrophe. Having acquired his deluxe doomsday shelter, tech entrepreneur Antonio García Martínez told the New Yorker: “When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos” (New Yorker, 2017). Yet America’s founding myths were already rooted in paranoia, and in threat of chaos. Historian Richard Hofstadter charted the recurrence of paranoid projections as a driving force in US politics, from conspiratorial fears of the Bavarian Illuminati and Masonry to the Red Scare of the 1950s and 1960s. The concern for the collapse of traditional “All-American” social values has been threaded through each.

Today, too, bunker providers Rising S and Survival Condo highlight the fragility of the American economy, the latent capacity for unrest and revolt – if not another Civil War – to erupt at any moment. Each brand counters this with cues of dutiful urgency. Keeping with the moralistic and religious overtones of Manifest Destiny (expansion was seen as God’s Will), Rising S Bunkers’ logo features three crucifixes charted above an ‘S’. Meanwhile the nomenclature of the “Survival Condo” urges the survival of a certain vision of American life. That vision’s individualism and ambition are indicated by “Condo” – a high-rise apartment building in which each unit is individually owned. Such notions percolate into the decadent layout & facades of the Survival Condo, which in turn form a meticulously recreated idea of what luxury living means today.

*~ Excursus on the Madonna Inn ~*

Above, left to right: the Madonna Inn, Room 218: ‘Carin’; the Madonna Inn, Room 137: ‘Caveman‘; Vivos bunker deluxe bedroom.

The Madonna Inn, San Luis Obispo California, holds 110 rooms. Though known for its pink décor and carbonate rock walls, each room is uniquely outfitted and extravagantly decorated around some all-American theme. Suites include the ‘Caveman’, the ‘Love Nest’, ‘Pioneer America’ and, simply, ‘Italy’. For Umberto Eco, the Madonna Inn is really “a series of motels”. In this sense, it is a microcosm of America’s own sprawling, expansive cities, among which Los Angeles stands out as “a giant city [...] grown almost simultaneously all over, in which all parts are equal and equally accessible from all other parts” (Reyner Banham, Los Angeles).

Each suite in the Madonna Inn uses ornamentation to suspend a particular idea of space and time. Its aesthetic entrails are full-scale models of, variously: cowboy charm; baroque charm; continental charm; etc. One particularly roseate suite, the ‘Love Nest’, is “accessed by a quaint trestle bridge” its entrance “adorned with love birds entwined with hearts and vines. …French-styled furnishings surrounded by shades of pink create a charming ‘nest’ for two in this hilltop semi-suite." In Room 116: Pioneer America, the setting evokes the simple life of “pioneers… seeking rich, fertile soil for their crops“. Enclosed within fenced pastures, the room features a framed rifle mounted by the bed, and a wall-to-wall frontier map.

The Madonna Inn is not a “luxury” hotel. It is, however, is an indulgence in myth, and a testament to the power of facades to uphold them. Likewise in the luxury Vivos bunker complex (above, right) and Survival Condo, fake windows and floor-to-ceiling fish tanks construct an illusory panorama, situating the resident within a hermetically sealed ideological projection. Each holds a commitment to individualism, with no two rooms in the Madonna Inn alike. Deluxe bunkers are also completely customisable, with Rising S. offering an endless list of upgrades, all from materials “MADE IN AMERICA“. In their bespoke individualism, both sites refer back to the wonder of mass production and consumption. As Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer observed of the culture industry, authentic choice has been eradicated by the “uniformity” of production. Through superficial distinctions: “something is provided for all so that none may escape” (Adorno and Horkheimer, The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception).

The Madonna Inn’s interiors do not produce the idea of a hotel, but rather a projection of what an American hotel can mean. The Madonna Inn and the super-luxury bunker share a state of contiguity. In both sites, decorative facades seek to persuade the guest that technology offers something better than ‘reality’.

~ * ~

Conspicuous Consumption 

As with the embellishments of the Madonna Inn, the luxury bunker glimmers with surplus ornamentation. In 1899, Thorstein Veblen defined conspicuous consumption as “a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure”. For the most part, a bunker is designed in the hope you won’t need it. These caverns of splendour and leisure you hope to never use align with Veblen’s description of servants, whose primary purpose had become: “the evidence they afford of the master's ability to pay.”

Despite their internally conspicuous features, deluxe bunker owners tend to remain as obscured as their under-land retreats. Generally alluded to as “Silicon Valley types” (Financial Times), the network of anonymous bunker owners points to the location of power itself as underground and invisible. Larry Hall doesn’t share the names of Survival Condo clients, while journalists defer to the term “1%“ (Vanity Fair, CNN). This leads to an ironic parallel, with bunkers advertised to those susceptible to the Paranoid Style Hofstadter described - collective fear of ostensive moral and social collapse at the hands of some sinister group. However, in becoming an elite, anonymous community, bunker-owners are themselves perfect targets of the rhetoric levelled at the closed, suspect groups that defined the Paranoid Style in American politics. Bunker haves and have-nots become separated by the same mutually incredulous, exponential suspicion that ran through the Cold War for which those repurposed missile silos were first built.

The scale of luxury in super-luxury bunkers correlates with the risk of economic (and by extension social) collapse levelled at their patrons. Or, the greater the opulence, the greater the paranoia surrounding the socioeconomic conditions that made such opulence attainable. It seems fitting that a shooting range is proudly counted among the amenities of most luxury units (including Rising S’ “The Aristocrat”). The reasons for building a shooting range into a bunker - not least a silo formerly housing lethal weapons - are both symbolic and practical. Cinematically, shooting ranges have long represented sites of both community and competition (Lethal Weapon, Beverly Hills Cop, Twin Peaks, etc.). Often embedded amidst vast acreage, they hold sentimental associations with the bounty of American land protected from encroaching industrial development. The gun range represents a cross-generational ritual, the comfort of conventional hierarchies and normative ideals, all carried into the bunker’s space of preservation.

In another sense, the shooting range reminds you that destruction is not to happen anywhere else. Jean Baudrillard observed that the fake shopping pavilions and explicit phantasmagoria of Disneyland Florida serve to communicate the “fake” by contrast to the “real”, shoring up the illusion that the outside world is the “real” one (Simulacra and Simulations). Along with the simulation Whole Foods Market, the shooting range functions to protect residents from any animalistic tendencies that might arise during total lockdown. Create the illusion of civilisation – and a designated space for violence in the gun range – and the violence embedded in cultural narratives of post-apocalyptic isolation won’t permeate beyond that space’s neatly manicured borders.

From ‘city upon a hill’ to ‘cities under a hill’

The ultimate gated community, luxury bunkers contain a fundamental tension between incarceration and stasis, and the desire to expand and escape. Their commercial positioning points to the stamina of a mythic America as ‘city on a hill’ - a centrifugal tendency to form a constellation of closed, discreet sites caught between the utopic and the real. Like the Madonna Inn, deluxe bunker design perpetuates a cultural preference for representative space over organic space. Ultimately, however, these super-deluxe bunkers might have more in common with Egyptian Pharaoh’s tombs, nestled deep within the pyramids. These ancient burial chambers were stocked with jewels, food, even servants and pets (sacrificed with their masters) in the hope that those passed could keep their riches with them in the afterlife. Such a ritual, perhaps, provided a more psychological ‘cushioning’ for the ruling class. At a cultural level, it also perpetuated perceptions of just which signals of luxury and wealth should be enshrined. 

The buyers of multi-million dollar bunkers might have put their money back into the under-funded systems they fear could bring their demise. Yet the embellished decor and symbolic facilities of these settlements signal the desire to preserve a wider-reaching topology of the American Dream, its power dynamics and aesthetics. Through state of the art technology (MADE IN AMERICA), nostalgic values are rendered, and preserved, in futuristic configurations. Such opulent, ornamental fabrications of the American mythos form a mask of horror vacui, without which the underground bunker dweller is left to wonder how they got there.

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