Tiered rows of workstations all face a large wall, much like a movie theater. Men—the space is conspicuously absent of women—look to the various screens on the wall for information while communicating via headsets and crunching numbers on ancient computing devices. They are coordinating a highly technological mission. This scene describes any number of American Cold War command centers, such as NASA’s Mission Control, the US Air Force’s Strategic Air Command, or the North American Aerospace Defense Command. I explore the design of spaces of control such as these, asking how these massive central sites coexisted with civil defense strategies such as dispersal, and what these hubs can teach us about the effects of capitalism, efficiency, and bureaucracy in postwar America. I also question why the composition of these centers has persisted into the present. Certainly, knowledge is at work in these stations, both between the commanders and the recipients of their orders, as well as how the spaces were designed with power schemes in mind.