Bunker Valentin, 1999

This bunker was built in the 1940's in Germany near Bremen. It was intended to be a fortified factory for U-Boats. It was immense, about 2 city blocks long and perhaps 100 feet tall, with thick concrete walls.

The circles you see were the foundations for huge turntables, like those in rail yards, that pivoted the sections of each sub before they were bolted together. At one end of the building the subs would be rolled into a test tank and sumberged before being floated out into the Wesser River and then into the North Sea. Fortunately, it was put out of action in a bombing raid before any were built. 10,000 slave laborers worked on it; 6,000 died.

I shot one Quicktime panorama of the bunker and I've included it here. It's about 500k, so please be patient while it loads. I'll be adding more photos soon.

I've discovered that these 360 degree panoramas give an amazing sense of space that you can't get with traditional photography. They capture much more of what it's like to actually explore modern ruins. They are composed of a dozen separate photographs taken with a 20mm lens and stitched together with Apple's Quicktime Authoring studio. I've taken others in the previous year and have some of them in other sections of this website... Cape Canaveral launch pad ruins, the airplane graveyard in Tucson, the New York State Pavilion from the 1964/65 World's Fair, and the S.S. United States.