If it were not for the incredible foresight of the firm hired to design Bermuda's airfield, the East End would be a different place today.

The whole of St. David's -- including the lighthouse -- could have been flattened and covered in runways. And the peaceful waters of Dolly's Bay and scenic Ferry Reach dredged and turned into land.

But thankfully the prestigious consortium of Shaw Naess & Murphy, Metcalf & Eddy and Ford, Bacon & Davis recognised the importance of land and beauty to Bermuda.

The US consortium's first project was designing an air field for the US Army base in Bermuda.

And according to one of the designers and the man left in charge of the massive project, Mr. Ivar Viehe-Naess, "It turned out beautifully.'' "It was built for the future,'' he said. "It was more than just an airfield for the war.'' Mr. Viehe-Naess and his wife Violet, who now live in Philadelphia, were in Bermuda this week to visit her mother at Westmeath home.

Gazing at a map of the Island, the retiree said he did not think there was anything he would have done differently.

He recalled how in his mid-20s he received a sudden phone call from Shaw, Naess & Murphy while in his dorm at MIT.

He was invited to come to Bermuda on the next ship to help the firm design an airfield for the Island.

Mr. Viehe-Naess jumped at the chance and with the help of his roommate arrived in the Big Apple in time to board the Santa Rosa .

When he and officials from the consortium arrived, they were given only preliminary charts by US Army surveyors.

They got to work immediately, taking over the old St. George's Hotel for their offices, which is where Mr. Viehe-Naess met his wife.

Mr. Viehe-Naess said there were three things the architects did not want to do: Take over all of "historic'' St. David's; Deny access to -- if not bulldoze -- the lighthouse, and Infringe on the railway and causeway linking the East End to the rest of Bermuda.

He added he would never have believed the railway would eventually be scrapped.

"We didn't want to use more land than necessary. Bermuda had so little as it was,'' he said.

Instead, the three firms came up with the idea of dredging a strip of Castle Harbour and using just half of St. David's.

The largest dredgers in the world were used for the project, which was the first of its kind at the time.

Rather than destroy land, they created it.

And the airfield they designed did not require airplanes to fly over densely populated areas to land at it.

"It would have been much easier to flatten the whole of St. David's, destroy land up to Town Cut and fill in Dolly's Bay and Ferry Reach,'' he noted.

The airfield the consortium created, known as Kindley Field today and run by the US Naval Air Station, was the largest in the world at the time.

A graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, Mr. Viehe-Naess joined the US Navy after Kindley Field was completed.

From 1942-1946 he served the US Navy Bureau of Aeronautics and the Bombing Squadron 74 aboard the USS Midway .

But he eventually returned to his family firm, and other private firms, as a project planner for hotels, industrial and institutional buildings, housing projects, highways and numerous air fields, including the Arctic air bases in Greenland and US Navy and Air Force bases in Spain.

He was also chief architect at Anchorage, Alaska in connection with earthquake rehabilitation work.

ARCHITECT WITH A CONSCIENCE -- Mr. Ivar Viehe-Naess, Jr., relaxes with his wife Violet in Bermuda, which was his home in the 1940s. The retiree is one of the designers of Bermuda's airfield and supervised its development.