Introduction.

Even though I wanted to discover steemit through my permaculture blogging activity and was not much of a #challence / #competition / #contest fan, I chaned my mind rapidly, after I read about this contest. So here you have it. This is my official entry for the „Abandoned Shit Weekly“ #aswcontest contest by @customnature. This weeks topic is "Overgrowth".

Object in question.

This post will be a quite detailed write up about the U-Boot-Bunker Valentin in Bremen Farge, Germany. Unbelievably it is a human made structure, while at the same time being north Germanys bigges mountain massif as the majority of the structure is completely abandoned for now 73 years. I am talking about a massive bunker (as big as 1,5 former twin towers) that was planned to be a failed 2nd World War game changer from the German side. I was meant to be a submarine factory secured within a gigantic bunker, releasing the insane ammount one submarine per day. Towards the end of the 2nd World War the structure was build for two years by up to estimated 10.000 forced labourers and was never finished. After the war the bunker was bombed by the Americans to test some of thier most powerful bunker bombs, as the ceiling and walls of the U-Boot-Bunker Valentin where never seen before 4,5m (15feet) thick.

Here is a little collage I made to show you the size of the colossus structure. Of course the bunker is laying and not standing over 400m high..

Outside photos.

As I mentioned before the majority of the structure stayed abandoned ever since it was erected, which is now 73 years. The roof plate of the bunker was penetrated several times with test bombs and was left behind as a broken up, yet not destroyed concrete massif with valleys, cliffs, bolders and believe it or not, even water holding ponds. Trees, bushes, herbs, mosses, mushrooms and all kinds of insects, birds, mammals, including north Germanys biggest population of bats started to inhabit this artificiual mountain and slowly nature took back what was once taken from her. Because of the special ecological situation the bunker was even turned into an official nature reserve and is fenced off.

You might be surprised, that a 420m long, 90m wide up to 33m high structure would be north Germanys biggest mountain massif, but look at the following images. All landscape is just flat as a plane. No peaks, no hills, no ditches. It is a beautiful landscpae, intensely agricultraly used and with many beautiful typical villages scattered thoughout. The bunker lays right at the Weser, a river that connects the close by city of Bremen with the North Sea.

Inside photos.

As the structure was once meant to be a submarine factory until today the water bassin is filled with rain water. After birds and mamals this amazing nature reserve also involves the inhabitants of the third biosphere, fish.
The rest of the inside is like a cryptic cave, like something left from an old civilization, where we still need find all meaning. Hundrets uopn hundrets of unfinished plate holders, beam sockets, cascading set-offs, beams, indentations and trenches are spread all over the structure, giving this wet and dripping, heavily weathered cave a very mystical feeling. This stunning cryptic inner landscape stays always at the same temperture, summer or winter, thats how massive the concrete walls and ceiling are.

My intimate connection with the place.

Having studied Architekture and Design at an art academy I was searching for a project for my master thesis. I searched long and finally encountered the whole world of monumental and very archaic bunker structures, all steming from the late 2nd World War period, where Germany build thousands of them. I was intrigued by their monolythic and compact apperance and how many of them started sinking into the ground surrounding them, as they where never build with foundations.
They where colossuses, seeming to contradict the law of graviti, as they rotate through the dunes of the Normandie in infinite slow motion. What a bizarrely beautiful „static“ choreography of such mass murder weapons…

Having found U-Boot-Bunker Valentin, I knew I found my project site and elaborated following concept over the next 3 months.

The utopian and quite phantastic idea was, that the bunker would have been converted into a massive biosphere archive. An archive for all knowlege ever collected about the biospheres air*, land and water, which are also the biospheres the bunker itself is directly interfacing with. The bunkers massive walls would keep the data save from outer damage and its constant temperatures would be ideal for long term storage.

An istitute would have been founded, collecting data from all over the world and saving and converting the data into RGB-Microfilm and store it in containers. These containers would be moved into the huge Data-Cave by spider like robots, that would constantly feed the physical cloud with new physical data packages but also move data packages around, as the data cloud, growing from the massive ceilings of the bunker would be mapping the growing content in the cloud puffs, that would be growing, merging and changing constantly.

Three dedicated stations for visitors would make it possible to directly interact with the local biospheres. It would be possible to learn and interact with plants and animals form the erath/soil, from the air and from the water. This parcour would be connected to intimate retraction spaces, that would be some kind of memorial witnesses of the terrifiying past the concrete space inherits, despite its positive adressment of saving knowlege across boundaries.

And here I am presenting this idea to my professors as a young adult...

As always. Thank you for your time and tuning in for yet an other lengthy article.

All the best.
Moritz

All photos are taken by me and all graphics designed by me.
All content is original!