Post-Militar Landscape patrimony as a climate emergency escape to waterfront resilience

Coastal Artillery Regiment (RAC) is a unit of the Portuguese Army with the mission of guaranteeing the coastal defence of the ports of Lisbon and Setúbal. The set consists of fixed, secret, camouflaged and fortified batteries, installed along the entrance to the Sado and Tejo rivers. The structures are equipped with heavy artillery pieces. RAC was deactivated in 1998 and its archive was recently declassified. Abandoned on the coast as a skeleton, the bunker is the last theatrical gesture in the history of Western military architecture. Paul Virilio compares bunkers to seaside houses and asks why these mysterious structures cannot be perceived or recognised? This example of military architecture represents the exception that reveals total war in a mythical dimension. The mid-20th century bunker represents the climax of thousands of years of military architecture, from the Roman wall to the great wall and the fort. Its horizontality, strange underground configuration and rudeness material hide a high pragmatism and the brutalism reminds us that it is done on a war scale. The military field is a territorial field of action, but the cybernetization of systems allows the construction of this miniature scale with cyclothymic activity: hibernating during peacetime and awakening to war. Unlike previous forts, coast batteries were designed to be invisible. A new geography was created facing the coast of Western Europe, with several independent surveillance poles for territorial control (Bentham, 1791; Keith and Ottar, 1973; Foucault, 1975). Portuguese military architecture, in the period between Great World Wars, presents strategic changes of great impact on the morphological structure. Such adaptations follow the political and warlike developments of each of the international allied groups. With the disappearance of the alliance with Germany after the First War, Portugal establishes military relations with England, allowing the realisation of Plan B for the Defence of the Ports of Lisbon and Setúbal. Recently declassified, secret archives can now be studied and organised for the first time. Originally made by General Barron, from the UK War Office, was adapted to specific Portuguese conditions by national authorities and armed forces. The English plan establishes great intercontinental control, bringing together all its allies in the Atlantic, Mediterranean and Indian Sea. In times of technological advances, there is an inevitable change in the paradigm of military architecture. Technically obsolete structures have fallen into extinction. These territorial voids must be discussed in the inevitable territory reorganisation. Should they display archeology or just be absorbed in the surroundings? How to deal with post-military heritage? And lastly, how can we deal and operate in such a territorial resilience example, in a way to take profit from this particular long extension of waterfront regarding Climate Emergency.