DoomsdayArchitecture of doom: DIY planning for global catastrophe

By Lee Stickells

Published 24 November 2014

A thriving industry has grown up around planning for apocalypse, with the design and equipping of the ideal home as a key element. Discussion of survival retreat design focuses on issues such as strategic location, energy self-sufficiency, water supply, waste treatment, food production, and home security. Survivalists can easily be caricatured as lonely lunatics sitting on piles of freeze-dried food and exotic armaments in their foil-lined bunkers. Researchers say, however, that survivalism is rarely about extremist action. Rather, it is more often about tinkering with tools, exchanging ideas, and creative storytelling. We can see the design of the survival retreat as a wilder version of the more familiar impulse towards DIY and home renovation. Survivalists use these projects as a focus for developing the personal skills, knowledge, and praxis needed to embrace a radically changing world. Potential chaos and crisis are embraced as the opportunity for developing personal autonomy. Seen in this way, the survival retreat starts to seem to be an eccentric but understandable reaction. The challenge survivalism poses is thus not extremism. Survivalists tend to privilege privatized, self-regulated, individualist modes of living – but exit from the grid challenges the collective infrastructures that have been so vital to more equitable urban environments. What, then, of our public networks such as water, electricity, transport, and telecommunications? What of our common urban future?

Environmental catastrophe, economic collapse, global pandemic … does it feel like the world is ending? If you think Armageddon is near and are trying to get ready, you are not alone.

National Geographic Channel’s Doomsday Preppers— a reality TV series that profiles various “survivalists” readying themselves to survive a range of apocalyptic circumstances — is the network’s most-watched series. It has prompted a slew of similar programming such as Discovery Channel’s rival Doomsday Bunkers.

Of course, even after an apocalypse one needs a place to live.

Since it first aired in 2012, Doomsday Preppers has featured survival retreats ranging from pre-fabricated steel shelters and decommissioned missile silos, to hand-built forest cabins and buried shipping containers. What has emerged is a picture of the ideal survival retreat (or “bug-out location” to use prepper slang) as rural, secluded, self-sufficient, and fortified.

The show has even spawned an appthat challenges you to “design a multi-level dream bunker complete with everything you need for post-apocalyptic bliss.”

The roots of the survivalist industry
The idea of a domestic structure for emergency protection is not new. The Cold War nuclear fall-out shelter programs of the late 1950s and early 1960s provide an example of this as a mass phenomenon.

The kind of survival retreat we can see in Doomsday Preppers emerged a bit later. It solidified around the concept of a dedicated, self-sufficient (“off-grid”), secluded, and secure home.

The late-1960s saw a surge in publishing and communication networks that disseminated discussion and advice on designing for this ideal. These networks also helped establish the roots of the present-day survivalist industry.

In the late 1960s, the American architect Don Stephens ran seminars on how to build and equip a remote survival retreat. Publications such as Joel M. Skousen’s The Survival Home Manual: Architectural Design, Construction and Remodeling of Self-Sufficient Residencies and Retreats(1977) also appeared.

Today, an Internet search will find dozens of similar titles, such as Dirt Cheap Survival Retreat(2011) and The Everything Guide to Living Off the Grid(2011).

There are also any number of survivalist (or prepping) blogs, forums, expos, equipment suppliers, consultants, and even celebrities such as bestselling author James Wesley Rawles(who wrote the Patriotsnovel series), editor of SurvivalBlog.

A thriving industry has grown up around planning for apocalypse, with the design and equipping of the ideal home as a key element.