Omaha Bunkertecture

Energy Systems Company, 2152 Howard St

Here is one of the few buildings in Omaha where its bunker-like qualities are probably actually an example of form following function, although I would argue it is an unsuccessful one.

The Energy Systems Company provides steam and chilled water thermal energy to buildings throughout Omaha. The facade of this building serves as a sort of screen for its inner plumbing -- you can see the numbles of the business just hinted at in the gaps between the screen, and I am led to believe that it very literally is a series of tubes in there, looking like the sort of thing you find when you tear a wall open in the movie Brazil.

The building provides something called "district energy," which is all done via an octopus of water and steam pipes that spill out from the bottom of the building, wriggle their way throughout the city, and connect up to buildings throughout. If you could click a button and make the surface of Omaha clear, you would see these tubes, just as you do in the older versions of Sim City, where the entire city needed to be connected through a network of underground pipes.

I wish there were some way to reveal this in the architecture of the building, rather than mask it with slatted walls. There's something intellectually exciting about knowing that this building serves to superheat and cool water, which it then pumps throughout the city, like a strange heart feeding water through a series of metal and plastic veins. I don't know precisely how this might be done, but I do know that bunkers always feel isolated and self-contained, their design a function of their need to segregate their inhabitants from something murderous outside.

Omaha World-Herald Building, 14th and Douglas

This is actually the former Qwest Communications building, and before that the Pacific Northwest Bell Headquarters, and looks it. It's the most purely Brutalist building in Omaha, and the most beautifully so; it was first constructed in 1954, at a time when the Bell Telephone Company was making great efforts to seem like the communications network of the future. They contracted Omaha's Leo A. Daly firm to design this building -- the same firm responsible for the iconic First National Bank Tower, which looks as though three sleek skyscrapers were making love to each other, and the Nebraska Medical Center's Hixson-Lied Center for Clinical Excellence, which looks as though space aliens had designed a church on Mars.

Unidentified Building, 7th and Leavenworth

It is very nearly impossible to determine the function of this building. An online search for its address suggests it may be a landscape and construction business, but that seems impossible. Not only does the building have no visible signage on it, but it looks very industrial, like a water-waste treatment plant. Additionally, it is so thoroughly wrapped in high fences and barbed wire, and so bristles with security lighting and exterior security cameras, that its design insists that this is a building of clandestine purpose, and is very off-limits.

This may be the most unwelcoming building in Omaha -- and, as though its nearly featureless solid concrete exterior weren't discouraging enough, whoever maintains this building has actually put its Dumpsters right up against the fence, abutting the street corner, instead of discreetly tucking it behind the building or in a basement, which is what buildings that actually want visitors do.

Spring Lake Magnet Center, 4215 South 20th St

If there is one area of architecture that can claim almost universal appreciation for bunkertecture, it is in the design of public schools. Photographer Richard Ross calls it "the architecture of authority," and while this blog will occasionally jokingly compare bunkertecture to prison architecture, there are very real parallels between the design of American prisons and American schools, especially those designed in the mid- to late-20th century. In part, this was because there were some architects that specialized in public institutions, and so would go from designing prisons to public hospitals to public housing to public schools, often applying the same design principles when the institutions had the same needs.

And the logic was often the same. If we are being charitable, we can say the goal was to maximize safety -- a concern in school design since at least 1927, when a rampage killing in a school in Bath, Michigan, left 57 injured and 45 dead. And so buildings are designed against vandalism and violence, with hallways that can be quickly evacuated or quickly locked down, depending on the event.

But, uncharitably, part of the function of this type of design is to establish authority. Schools can often have a warehouse feel to them, where the hallways are used mostly as a mechanism of transporting groups of children from one nearly windowless, boxlike room to another, with stops along the way for lockers, which are designed almost exclusively for storage -- no matter how desperately students may try to decorate their lockers, it always feels like a metal box with a mirror and some photos taped up. The halls often also have kiosks or bulletin boards, but their function is mostly the efficient communication of school business. I have not been inside this magnet school in south Omaha, but would be curious to see the degree to which the staff has rebelled against the anonymity of the space, which often happens. Teachers will hang student art or invite students to add murals to the walls, but to little effect.

Omaha Public Library, W. Clarke Swanson Branch, 9101 W. Dodge Rd.

The third of three bunkers on West Dodge, this is another of Omaha's libraries, and, like the Main Branch library downtown, seems designed by somebody who thought books might try to escape occasionally and so must be sealed behind stone, like the vampire in the movie The Keep.

I always like to find out who libraries are named after, and this one was no slouch. You no doubt have heard of the Swanson brand of TV dinners, broths, and canned poultry -- that's him. Or, more properly, it was his father, Carl A. Swanson, although after Carl's death W. Clarke and his brother took over and invented the TV dinner, which is the sort of thing that will endear a man to readers everywhere.

Note the cement severe posts I mentioned earlier supporting the overhanging roof. These posts often support this sort of roof, leading me to wonder if Omaha architects of this era ever heard the word cantilever or if they just found the lack of external bracing to be too plain.

This building does have some modernist dash to it, though; it's far less imposing than its sibling buildings on 90th, looking neither like a nest of spies nor Portchester Castle. It's almost like one of those townhouses you find in the pages of Playboy from the 60s, except those buildings have windows -- this building scarcely does.

Embassy Plaza, 110 W. Dodge Rd

The second of three concrete bunkers on the corner of 90th and West Dodge, Embassy Plaza is both the most imposing and boasts the most windows. Unlike most Omaha bunkers, which seem built by architects who feared glass, this one features windows that stretch from the first to the third floor, which would give the building a fairly open look, but for the fact that the windows are tinted, making the building seem secretive. What goes on in there? Clandestine government agencies? Private security forces?

I've actually been in this building -- I worked here for six months in the late 90s -- and so can say with some confidence that back then there was nothing so dramatic. But, having been inside, I can also say this building displays a feature unexpectedly common in Omaha buildings: A massive interior atrium, including, when I worked there, a small restaurant.

Omaha architects of the last century seemed never to do anything that might make a building attractive to foot traffic. There often isn't even a way for pedestrians to enter a building except to cross a parking lot. There are few if any outdoor amenities, and buildings that have them often feel makeshift, as though the owner realized smokers were going to congregate somewhere and so bought a bench and some ashtrays; the latter generally go unused, with cigarette butts often littering the ground outside these buildings.

American National Bank, 8990 W Dodge Rd.

If there is one corner that can be considered ground zero for concrete bunkers in Omaha, it is 90th and Dodge. Perhaps the builders there thought the intersection would literally be ground zero, as three of the four corners look like aboveground bomb shelters.

This first building is the American National Bank building, a large local baking concern whose flagship building on Dodge has one of the distinctive features of many examples of Omaha bunkertecture: recessed windows protected by a cage of concrete beams. The results, as in this case, sometimes look like a modernist building is rising up behind a Medieval castle, and give the impression that the builder was so worried about glass windows getting smashed by something that they built a protective series of stone posts in front of it.

Plaza 90 Shopping Center, 2327 N 90th St.

Despite its rather swank name, Plaza 90 is an almost derelict former shopping mecca in what was once the far western suburbs of Omaha, and its a curious mix of concrete bunker and swinging 60s rock wall. Many of the buildings have no windows to speak of, or, if they do, they have been covered by concrete slabs -- a design decision more appropriate to a casino, where you are never supposed to see outside because the setting sun might remind you that you've been gambling since 6 am.

Center Mall, 1941 S 42nd St

Windsor Woods, 2502-2526 S. 114th St.

W. Dale Clark Library, 215 S 15th St

Situated somewhere on the architectural map between "modernist government building" and "four-eyed Cylon face," the main branch of the Omaha library system has two notable qualities. Firstly, it is named after the retired chairman of the Omaha National Bank and former chairman of The World-Herald board, so there's a lesson there in the value of chairmanship in Omaha.

Secondly, it is the western terminus of Gene Leahy Mall, a project conceived of in the 1970s to revitalize Omaha's downtown by digging a sort of lagoon in the middle of a 9.6-acre plot of downtown and then surrounding it with concrete walls; it was intended to be a sort of "living room" to Omaha, because nothing says "living room" quite like concrete walls. Despite some landscaping, the area has tended to attract mostly homeless people and callow youth, and typically feels like a sort of exercise area for an especially progressive prison. There are even a group of quarrelsome, territorial geese who occasionally act as fellow prisoners, in that they will attack you for no reason. Fortunately, there are plans to revitalize the mall, although it seems part of that plan is to replace its current asphalt paths with concrete.

The library itself is credited to two designers,  Hellmuth, Obata and Kassabaum and Latenser & Sons, Inc. It's not clear who is responsible for what, although, based on how these things usually work in Omaha, the former, located in St. Louis,  probably did the initial design and then the city decided it was too expensive and contracted for a cheaper version from the latter, who were local. I don't know who was responsible for the decision to build the library out of the sort of rough concrete that is sometimes used to dissuade transients, because if they lean against it the material will tear their clothes or scratch their skin. Hellmuth, Obata and Kassabaum are responsible for a lot of unusually-shaped brick and glass structures with a lot of windows, like the Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. Latenser & Sons, Inc, in the meanwhile, is responsible for many of the best and most iconic buildings in Omaha, including the Douglas County Courthouse, the Brandeis Building, and Omaha Central High School.

Omaha Police Headquarters, 505 S 15th St

It's probably appropriate that one of the most Stasi-looking buildings in Omaha is the police headquarters downtown. The building dates back to about 1972, and, believe it or not, the building used to be so oppressive-looking that it was renovated in 1992 to replace black concrete with grey, add flowers and plants, and open up the front of what was then described as a "fortress-like" facade.