Secret Cities: The Architecture and Planning of the Manhattan Project exhibition at the National Building Museum explored the vast, highly classified effort to produce the atomic bomb, with an emphasis on the three new “secret cities” that were built to accommodate the tens of thousands of people who worked on the project.
May 3, 2018–July 28, 2019
National Building Museum
401 F St. NW, Washington, DC 20001
Secret Cities opening reception. Photo by Yassine el Mansouri.
The development of the atomic bomb—the result of a military initiative known as the Manhattan Project—is one of the most consequential milestones in the history of science. The project laid the foundation not only for the Cold War, which raised the specter of global annihilation, but also nuclear power, as well as radiological medical applications that have saved countless lives.
The Manhattan Project owed its success not only to brilliant scientific work, but also to significant achievements in architecture, engineering, planning, and construction. The effort to produce the world’s first nuclear weapon would ultimately involve hundreds of thousands of people and require large-scale, highly secure facilities. In order to accommodate this vast enterprise, the US government built three new cities from scratch: Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Hanford/Richland, Washington; and Los Alamos, New Mexico.
The speed and scale of construction of these cities were in many ways unprecedented. Influenced by the planned community movement and heavily reliant on prefabricated construction, these cities were in many ways proving grounds for emerging ideas about design and planning. Begun in late 1942, they collectively housed a total of more than 125,000 people by the end of the war in August 1945. Yet these cities appeared on no maps, and their existence was a remarkably well-maintained secret until the bombing of Hiroshima.
Secret Cities touched on difficult topics such as the use of nuclear weapons in combat, but the focus was on the communities that the government built to support the Manhattan Project. It examined the cities as case studies in modern urban planning and building technology, while revealing the distinct way of life that emerged at each site. The exhibition also explored the architectural and planning legacy of the Manhattan Project, including its role in the emergence of multidisciplinary corporate architecture and engineering firms, as exemplified by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), which oversaw the design of Oak Ridge. The exhibition also explored the postwar development of the three cities, which remain important centers of scientific research today.
The exhibition was curated by G. Martin Moeller, Jr., senior curator at the National Building Museum.
Secret Cities opening reception. Photograph by Yassine el Mansouri, Courtesy of the National Building Museum.
Secret Cities. Photograph by Yassine el Mansouri, Courtesy of the National Building Museum.
This exhibition was supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. The National Building Museum also gratefully acknowledged Nancy Voorhees; Turner Construction Company; Skidmore, Owings, & Merrill and the SOM Foundation; STUDIOS Architecture; Bechtel; the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts; HDR, Inc.; and ORAU for their generous contributions.
Trailer with decorative trellis, Oak Ridge, 1944. Residents of the Manhattan Project sites worked hard to make their dwellings as attractive and pleasant as possible, even when those dwellings were crude, government-issued trailers. Note the identifying numbers stamped and written on the side of the trailer. Photograph by Edward Westcott, Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration.
African American women hanging laundry in a hutment area, Oak Ridge, 1945. Despite their often forward-looking design and planning, the three Secret Cities of the Manhattan Project treated racial segregation as a given. In Oak Ridge, many African American workers lived in plywood “hutments.” The contrast between these crude, ill-heated huts and the comfortable housing built for most white workers was stark. Photograph by Edward Westcott, Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration.
Road to Los Alamos, ca. 1943–45. The sites selected for the three Secret Cities all took advantage of natural barriers to enhance security and secrecy. Los Alamos, for instance, was sited at the top of an isolated plateau. The steep, curving road leading to the city was a nerve-wracking experience for drivers. Courtesy of the Los Alamos National Laboratory Archives.
