Those Magnificent Men and their Atomic Machines

Thursday, August 20, 2015

Under Cover: The Schoharie Valley Townsite Project


With Special Thanks to Anthony Casendino

In 1959, the Cornell College of Architecture launched a study to design a city that could survive nuclear attack. In the view of Prof. Fredrick W. Edmondson, existing cities were ill-suited to the demands of the Cold War, and he proposed to design from whole cloth a new alternative, better adapted to the rigors of the nuclear age. The Schoharie Valley Townsite project was one of the most ambitious civil defense proposals of the Cold War: a factory-town that could not only withstand nuclear attack, but maintain war production even as the hydrogen bombs burst around it.