The reputation as an auteur that Paul Virilio (1932-2018) enjoys today derives from the work he
did for his Bunker Archeology. When in the second half of the 1950s he began photographing
abandoned Second World War bunkers along France's Atlantic coast he was working with glass as
an artistic medium. In 1966 he presented his photographs to the public for the first time in
the magazine architecture principe which he co-edited. At the time he was particularly
interested in the architectural aspects of these wartime installations. He saw the bunkers as
"harbingers of a new architecture" which he sought to capture in the term "cryptic
architecture". The first exhibition of Virilio's Bunker Archeology was staged at the Centre
Pompidou in 1975 while the museum was still in the process of being established. His seminal
book was published in conjunction with this. It laid out all the motifs of his philosophical
thinking: military space and communications warfare camouflage and acceleration a scrupulous
reading of the present coupled with a desire for philosophical speculation. Although it is
almost fifty years since the work was first published Bunker Archeology is still full of
connections to the present. To coincide with an exhibition at the Centre Pompidou a new
edition of the book is being published in French English and German. Paul Virilio (1932-2018)
French philosopher urbanist and critic of the media society. His most important works include
War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (1984) und Polar Inertia (1990).
