Deep in a desiccated, Utah desert, surrounded by mountains and
fringed with scorched sage and saltbush, stand the surreal
remains of German Village. Out of bounds, out of place, out of
time and 90 miles from Salt Lake City, it is surely the most
bizarre feature of Dugway Proving Ground, a test site created by
the Allied military during the second world war to develop
weapons of mass destruction for use against civilian targets in
Germany and Japan. All that survives of German Village is a
single block of high-gabled, prewar Berlin working-class
housing. It is accurate in every respect. And it should be:
commissioned by the chemical warfare corps of the US army, it
was designed by Erich Mendelsohn (1887-1953), the German
architect who settled in the US in 1941 after a spell in
England. I was alerted to the story of German Village by Mike
Davis, who features it in his provocative book Dead Cities: A
Natural History, a study of the vulnerability of modern cities
from New York to Tokyo to destruction by man and n