Adam Longenbach
In the years that followed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, thousands of young men enlisted in the US military, were deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, and became embroiled in conflicts that were often fought not on the battlefield, but in rural villages and in cities. To prepare for that type of warfare, American troops often trained at bases in the southwestern United States, where the military constructed replicas of Afghan and Iraqi towns.
“The US military actually hired people of Arabic descent to populate these cities and simulate the experience of being immersed in a townscape full of civilians,” says Adam Longenbach, a PhD student in architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning at Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS). “They had them working in markets, driving their cars, simulating everyday lives. And some of them also played the parts of insurgents and terrorists.”
The normalization of military violence in civilian spaces—and the role that architecture plays in that process—is the focus of Adam Longenbach’s 2023 Harvard Horizons project, “Stagecraft/Warcraft: The Rise of the Military Mock Village in the American West, 1942–1953.” In it, Longenbach traces the trend back to its beginnings in World War II to show how the built environment, augmented by Hollywood stagecraft, has been used to turn city streets and urban neighborhoods into battle zones.
Longenbach’s Horizons project begins with the year 1942. At that time, he says, there were four distinct ways that the US military appropriated buildings and cities for wartime purposes: for deception and camouflage, for public propaganda, for military-scientific study, and for the physical and psychological conditioning of troops. In his research, Longenbach investigates how the military enlisted the expertise of architects, engineers, landscape architects, and Hollywood scenographers to design and construct the mock villages that fulfilled each of these functions.
“If you’re an architect or engineer who knows how certain buildings or cities are made, then it stands to reason that you also know how they can be unmade,” Longenbach says. “It was a case of construction begetting destruction.”
In 1943, the US military took this thinking to the next level—a story first told by the architectural historian Enriquez Ramirez. To learn how to use its newest weapon, napalm, to its most devastating effect, the army decided to build model German and Japanese villages—accurate to the last detail—and destroy them.
“We're seeing with the 1943 tests in the American West the beginnings of a kind of normalization of violence against domestic spaces,” says Longenbach. “Not that these things weren't already happening during the First World War or even the Spanish Civil War, but they really came into their own during the early years of the Second World War.”
The military and their architects were aided in their efforts by some of Hollywood’s most talented scenographers—experts at designing sets for films. When the military constructed mock German towns in the Utah desert, the Standard Oil Development Company, which was involved in the production of napalm, hired RKO Studios to help with the project. RKO’s designers reconstructed the furnishings, furniture, and wall coverings that were found in German homes in preparation for bombings like the one in Dresden that killed between 25,000 and 35,000 people, mostly civilians.
The use of mock villages extended well beyond simulations for more effective air raids. During the Korean War in the early 1950s, the Army Corps of Engineers, again with assistance from Hollywood scenographers, painstakingly constructed sets where actors actually cooked kimchi, a traditional Korean side dish of fermented vegetables, to acclimate soldiers to civilian settings. The training methods were also used in the 1960s during the conflict in Vietnam when, Longenbach says, the war came home.
“With the protests against US involvement in Vietnam and the so-called ‘race riots’ of the 1960s, the military collaborated with police departments,” he says. “Law enforcement starts to construct its own mock villages to practice anti-riot operations. The idea that the built environment can be weaponized to combat civil unrest becomes normal.”
Today, the use of mock villages for the training of soldiers and police is widespread, according to Longenbach. Like their American cousins, British law enforcement in the second half of the 20th century created model towns for better quelling civil disorder. In addition to preparing troops for Iraq and Afghanistan, the US collaborated with Israel to construct a mock Palestinian village, Baladia City, where soldiers from both countries could train together. (The site is still in use today.) Satellite imagery suggests that China is constructing replicas of US military bases, warships, aircraft, and more. Longenbach’s hope for his research—and his Harvard Horizons project—is to draw attention to these hidden spaces, and the way scholars think about the built environment there.
“At this early stage of my project, what I hope to show is how, in the 1940s, mock villages demanded novel ways of seeing, using, and constructing architecture that coincided with the production of new forms of violence and destruction,” he says. “But, as we’re seeing today, what began as a US military technology has since become a global instrument of war and policing. At stake in the research, then, is a broader understanding of how any form of architecture risks being replicated for the purpose of enacting violence in and against it.”