VIRILIO, Paul
Bunker Archeology

Paul Virilio’s legendary research, in a new edition!

When, in the second half of the 1950s, Virilio began photographing abandoned Second World War bunkers along France’s Atlantic coast, he was working with glass as an artistic medium. In 1966, he presented his photographs to the public for the first time in the magazine architecture principe, which he co-edited. At the time, he was particularly interested in the architectural aspects of these wartime installations. He saw the bunkers as “harbingers of a new architecture”, which he sought to capture in the term “cryptic architecture”. The book was published in 1975, in conjunction with Virilio’s exhibition Bunker Archeology at the Centre Pompidou in 1975, laying out all the motifs of his thinking: military space and communications warfare, camouflage and acceleration, a scrupulous reading of the present coupled with a desire for philosophical speculation.

[publishers’ note]

Published by Spector Books / Centre Georges Pompidou, 2025
Facsimile & Reprints / Essays / Architecture