“...The first American nuclear reactors operate as a specific sort of collection, a new typology.  They constitute a failed project, one assembled entirely outside the realm of architects, which in its anxious assemblage of complex agendas and diverse meanings, offers a critical contribution to a discourse of architectural design that too often turns to its canonical monuments for its sustenance.

In the short course of their existence, these early nuclear reactors have maintained a conspicuous significance within popular American culture.  Yet the character of this visibility has continued to shift at a rapid pace, where an unassuming architecture of American technological pragmatism has been able to contain an expansive, ever-shifting catalog of meanings: man's Faustian purchase of science at the cost of self-destruction, burned into collective consciousness by Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the utopian dreams of Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace campaign; the dissident environmental movements of the late nineteen sixties; the promise of a “clean” alternative fuel; and the contemporary resurgent interest in pursuit of assuaging an inevitable energy crisis.  Intertwined within these immediate, popular meanings, these buildings also resonate with political and aesthetic agendas that span a much larger period of cultural history than that of their brief operative existence:, ranging from urban planning and landscape to monumentality, modernism, semiology, pragmatism, transparency, sterotonomy, and the sublime.

These few buildings are a crucial resource for the future of a theory and a discourse of architecture.   They possess a peculiar potential to address the problem of architectural autonomy and the difficult task of evaluating the efficacy of buildings as relevant cultural agents.  They offer a rich case study for thinking through the vexing problem of what architecture can mean to a human subject and to what degree architecture can be effective in shaping this subjectivity.  In its constant dialog with the extremely loaded discipline of nuclear science, the reactor offers a complexity and cultural immediacy that is arguably unmatched in any recent building...”