Built to Destroy

By Enrique Ramirez

Working for the United States Chemical Warfare Service and Standard Oil Development Company in 1943, architects Erich Mendelsohn (1887-1953), Konrad Wachsmann (1901-1980), and Antonin Raymond (1888-1976) designed full-scale models of German and Japanese apartment housing at Dugway Proving Ground, a weapons testing facility in the northwestern Utah desert. These buildings were designed to test the efficacy of the Army’s AN-M69-x napalm incendiary bomb. All three architects provided the War Department with vital information about building construction techniques in major German and Japanese cities. The three architects also worked with other members of the German design community in the United States (including Hans Knoll and Paul Zucker), designing interiors for these buildings. The interior furnishings, including tables, sofas, flooring, and even infant cribs, were tested for their ablity to burn.

Using formerly classified material, as well as archival and primary sources (such as Wachsmman’s 1930 treatise Holzhausbau-Technik und Gestaltung and Raymond’s Architectural Details from 1938), this thesis considers the Dugway project as evidence of a new, incipient relationship between the architecture profession and the military and scientific establishments during the Second World War. Mendelsohn’s, Wachsmann’s and Raymond’s “Typical German and Japanese Test Structures” thus consititute a new type of building - an architecture to be destroyed.