ABSTRACT
On the eve of May 8, 1953, Robert Cutler, the National Security Advisor to President Eisenhower, walked up to an unknown room on the roof of the president’s home - the White House Solarium. There, a secret meeting was held, giving birth to Project Solarium: a month-long war-game that shaped US policy toward the Soviet Union until its collapse. This chapter takes the Solarium meeting and the history of the room in which it was held as an entry point to discuss the role played by architectural space in the construction of Cold War strategies. Situated against the geo-political history of Cold War policies and propaganda, this chapter presents the architecture of the Solarium as a physical and symbolic representation of the culture of images and the politics of latency characteristic of the Cold War. This examination highlights how the garden-like Solarium emerged as an ambiguous interior, accommodating the private lives of the First Family on the one hand and undisclosed meetings on the other. Architecture not only participated in the decision-making process but also became an instrument of vision: a hidden yet visible space from which the future of the Cold War was constructed right under the American public’s nose.
