The bunker builders preparing for doomsday

At the theatre and lounge level, we sat in leather recliners and watched a 4k screening of the Bond movie, Skyfall. The cinema was connected to the bar, which was intended to act as "neutral ground" for future residents. They had a beer keg system and one of the residents had provided 2,600 bottles of wine from her restaurant to stock the wine rack. As he showed me this, Hall insisted that recreation, sharing and community was as important to the condo's design and management as the technical systems.

Given the severe limitations of underground living, anything extraneous must be eliminated. The entire building must be thought of as a single unit, where the actions of each resident inevitably effects all other residents. This is what makes the bunker more like a submarine than a tower block. In the event of a major incident, the umbilical cord to the world on the other side of the blast doors would be snipped and the clock would start ticking to a resupply.

On the other hand, in an era of surveillance dominated by what some deem to be a concerted push by Silicon Valley elites to eviscerate all forms of privacy, subterranea may be humanity’s last refuge against total transparency – at least for now. One prepper I interviewed suggested that the bunker he was building in eastern America was the best escape plan possible. He told me: "We can’t build a celestial ark like Elon Musk, we can’t leave the Earth, so we’re going to go into the earth. I’m building a spaceship in the Earth."

The consultant

Inside the Survival Condo, Hall said, would also be a system of rotating jobs for the five years, both so that people would be occupied ("People on vacation constantly get destructive tendencies") and so that they would individually learn the different critical operations in the bunker. This was a lesson learned from the ASU’s Biosphere 2 project. In fact, Hall hired a consultant who had worked on Biosphere 2 to assist in the planning of the Survival Condo who went over everything in meticulous detail. From the colours and textures on the walls to the LED lighting to help prevent depression. As Hall said:

“People come in here and they want to know why people need all this "luxury" – the cinema, rock climbing wall, table tennis, video games, shooting range, sauna, library and everything... but what they don’t get is that this isn’t about luxury, this stuff is key to survival.”

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