Doomsday Design: The Reality of Disaster Preparedness in America

Photo: Julia Abbonizio/Getty Images

What’s the first thing you would do if you learned that a cataclysmic disaster was about to unfold? If there was no cell service and you couldn’t reach your loved ones, you might reach for a go-bag, a portable generator, or a liferaft. If you frequently think about disaster preparedness and doomsday design (it’s difficult not to these days), you might conceive of your home either as a potential emergency shelter, or as a place from which you might have to evacuate one day. Since the advent of the nuclear age, we’ve become accustomed to thinking of “the end of the world” in a terrifyingly literal way, less as one of several surmountable calamities, and more like a hard stop on civilization itself: doomsday. Wildfires and extreme weather have increasingly been bringing the effects of climate change to our doorsteps, and the threats of earthquakes, global conflict, and even digital warfare aimed at disrupting infrastructure are all enough to make an Atomic Age backyard bunker seem like a really good idea. But doomsday bunkers and even innovations like earthquake beds are often just speculative designs, meant to spark conversation amongst panic shoppers, or else they’re solely the domain of the ultra-wealthy.

In the past two decades the design world has increasingly turned its attention to emergency preparedness, particularly in the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks in 2001. The first major design exhibition at a newly renovated Museum of Modern Art was SAFE: Design Takes on Risk, organized by Paola Antonelli in 2005. Fast-forward to April 2020, when the Italian architect and curator recorded a video from her home office to welcome museum visitors to MoMA’s website in the early weeks of COVID lockdown with an essay titled Grace under Pressure, which revisited SAFE in the context of the pandemic. “Safety is a basic human need,” Antonelli wrote. “It is the most urgent after food, water, shelter, warmth, and sex, as American psychologist Abraham Maslow explained in his quintessential Hierarchy of Needs, developed in 1943 at the height of WWII. Design helps us be—and feel—safe.”

The objects in the exhibition ranged from Kosuke Tsumura’s 1994 “Final Home,” a parka with 44 pockets for toting emergency supplies on the go, to Neo Human Toys by Twan Verdonck from his 2001 Boezels collection; each Boezel is a soft, round, animalesque toy designed to offer comfort and coziness. Antonelli’s curation makes it clear that feeling is as important as being when it comes to safety in a crisis. But if you search for prepper supplies online these days, you’re more likely to find a militaristic array of survival gear that seems plucked from a 1980s action movie.

The architecture writer Geoff Manaugh tells AD that despite appearances, doomsday design is very much “a real market.” Beyond certain retailers like Be Prepared, “it can look more like a hodgepodge of different tools and services—things like knives, fire-starting tools, water-purification equipment, and, of course, construction firms that specialize in things like bunkers, whether those bunkers are for riding out natural disasters or hiding from Armageddon.”

This idea—that Armageddon will occur, civilization will disappear, and only people with robust stockpiles of supplies will be ready—presupposes that any supplies we can purchase will be sufficient to sustain us in the absence of community. That’s something that industrial design professor Tom Weis, who teaches at RISD and co-founded the Altimeter Design Group, confronts regularly both in the classroom and running tabletop exercises on global security with the likes of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations. Surprisingly, one of the key things that emerges from the exercises is an enhanced understanding of the distinct human qualities and strengths of the people involved; participants are invited to consider what capabilities they might bring to a crisis: their special skills, and gauge their ability to listen, observe, or lead. Rather than focusing solely on objects, Weis’s designs for disaster preparedness elicit insights about human relationships and networks.

“I’ve taught this class called Design Culture and Global Security [at RISD],” he tells AD. “And as one opening exercise, I have the students prepare a 72 hour bag, just to facilitate those conversations. They would assemble these bags over the weekend then in class we’d talk about what they chose. When COVID happened, one thing that came up in conversation was, ‘In some cases, I might just be really bored. So I want to have stuff that’s going to be entertaining that allows me to play games with people.’ And then I had another student who had pre-written all of these letters to herself about times when she felt really competent and in control of things as this reminder that in a time of crisis that things are going to be okay.”

Orkan Telhan, the chief data and information officer at the mycelium tech company Evocative, echoes this idea. In fact, mycelium, the medium on which he and his colleagues work, is itself a vast networked lifeform. Telhan, who previously taught emerging design practices at the University of Pennsylvania’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design, says “the moment when you think about going to Home Depot and buying stuff, immediately you acknowledge the fact that all of the doomsday preps are mostly an individualistic effort. Like, you go and hide in your bunker. So ‘doomsday’ is technically an imaginary moment where things are going to collapse for the whole community, or the capitalist arrangement of the society where everything is [determined by] supply and demand logistics, that's going to fall apart, and individuals need to save themselves.”

This is the model of doomsday prognosticating that Manaugh sees through the lens of the prepper market, and it has a signature aesthetic to match. “Right now, the aesthetic seems pretty militarized and very masculine, with a touch of the wild-game hunter tacked on for good measure,” he explains. “But that means there’s a huge niche out there for designers of survivalist tools and everyday-carry emergency items to explore different looks, potentially attracting different kinds of consumers. When we say ‘bunker,’ for example, it brings to mind a gloomy, concrete-walled man cave with fluorescent lighting and bunk beds, but almost all purpose-built, high-end bunkers and so-called panic rooms are now indistinguishable from luxury apartments.”

Architects haven’t missed the doomsday design memo. Serhii Makhno, founder of the multidisciplinary design practice Makhno Studio, has created a concept for a shelter called Underground House Plan B. “The global coronavirus crisis was the catalyst for visualizing [the idea],” he says. “[It was] our piece of conceptual architecture. We recognize that the world holds many surprises that even the most advanced countries might not be prepared for. This realization led us to conceive a bunker as a viable alternative for certain locations or for individuals seeking to protect themselves and their families while maintaining a comfortable living standard.”

Alfredo Munoz, founder of ABIBOO Studio, designed the DBX Bunker to provide robust support and safety (it has a hydroponic garden) but acknowledges the limitations of the solo survival solution: It’s meant to last one year. “Our commitment to self-sufficiency, intertwined with the principles of sustainability, served as a guiding light for this project,” the architect tells AD. “The requirement of bunkers to operate independently from external networks or infrastructure is critical for ensuring safety and sustainability during emergencies. Drawing from our space architecture experience, the DBX bunker is equipped with systems for air purification, water accumulation and filtration, energy generation, and food production, enabling up to 12 months of complete autonomy.”

For Orkan Telhan, it all circles back to the question of survival in the long term. “Take the Seed Vault [in Svalbard, Norway]—they’re hiding these heirloom seeds in the vault, and one day somebody is going to open the thing and take the seeds and start all over again,” he says, noting that knowledge and infrastructure for connecting people, not just supplies, are both critical. “Ultimately, those who have the know-how to use the technology—not just the seed itself—they’ll be able to survive. But for me, the more utopian thing is like, how do you do this beyond the individual? So that there are people who do not know each other, or who do not necessarily agree with each other, who can still survive together?”

Manaugh concurs, noting that the most useful thing anyone can do in terms of preparedness for these situations is to learn the necessary skills for survival. “Take a good skills class, understand what it is you’re even preparing for, and winnow down your search for gear or a hide-out after that,” he says. “There’s something very eerie, to my mind, in the idea of a family surrounded by expensive survival gear, huddled underground somewhere on a remote property, but with no idea how to use anything. They’re still doomed—they’re just stuck together with tools they can’t use under desperate circumstances in a collapsing world.”

Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest